Kissing Her Coffin Sarah O’Connor
M
y first thought when kissing my mom’s coffin was how many other people had kissed it before me. It was a rental coffin. Don’t start thinking that means my family is cheap when it comes to our loved ones: it just made logical sense. She was being cremated; the coffin was needed strictly for the visitation and funeral mass. There was no point paying for a new coffin that would barely be used. So we got a rented coffin, and when I kissed its smooth brown surface, my lips left an imprint that stayed for a few seconds before disappearing, and I wondered how many other times this coffin had been kissed and for whom. Was it a husband saying goodbye to his wife, like my dad? Was it a brother saying goodbye to his sister, or vice versa? It was probably a grandparent, since coffins and death should be reserved for the elderly, but the world just doesn’t work like that. Or maybe it was daughter saying goodbye to her mother, like my sister and I. On January 4, 2015 my mom died: Happy New Year to me. It was inflammatory breast cancer, which is a rare and torturous form of cancer that appears on the outside of the breast, at first looking like a dainty pink rash before it explodes, turning red and inverting the nipples, eating away at the breast until there are holes, and blood and puss are leaking out. You can actually see what the cancer’s doing, and when you see the horror it’s causing on the outside of the breast, you can easily imagine what it’s doing on the inside. My mom was first diagnosed with plain old ordinary breast cancer ten years ago,
and we thought it was simple. Just a tiny little tumour that didn’t even need chemo, just surgery and a few radiation treatments, and, voilà, cured, or so we hoped. She was in remission for eight years and was diagnosed again when I started university. That second cancer was really a few cells from the first cancer, like an assassin waiting to strike. It gave her three more tumours, and she was forced to take chemo, radiation, and another surgery. She was given a few months of remission, of peace, until February 2014, when the cancer turned
important? Just chop off my breasts and scoop out my uterus. There, one less thing to worry about. But I’m a coward. It isn’t the whole “not being able to have children” thing. Or maybe it is. I don’t know. More so, I think about how, without these organs, I wouldn’t even be a woman because what is a woman without breasts and a uterus? From the childhood gifts of baby dolls to the never-ending questions of baby names and how many future children I want, I have been conditioned to motherhood. I have been taught that to be a woman is to be a mother, but I don’t even know if I want to be a mother. Will being a mother kill me? Without my lady parts, I would be this thing mimicking womanhood, mocking womanhood. It wouldn’t matter that I would still call myself a woman; it would be a lie. Those parts that are so valued by society that some women would kill to have a child, and I am willing to give them up to save myself. These are not life-giving organs as society dictates. They are a threat, and they are a death trap, at least to me. I am too young to be thinking this way. But the longer I wait, the more of a threat my body becomes. Tick tock, tick tock, not a biological countdown, but a biological explosion. What to do, what to do. I don’t know. I thought all this while kissing my mom’s coffin, and I think it now. I wonder what the other people whose lips have touched this coffin were thinking. I wonder about the future kissers and what their thoughts will be. Did another girl kissing this coffin, kissing her mother goodbye, think these very same thoughts? Did she think of me?
I wondered how many other times this coffin had been kissed and for whom.
16
into inflammatory breast cancer. I’ve already told you what that was like. I’ve been thinking a lot about my breasts lately. Many months before my mom died, she advised my sister and I that, after we had our children (however many years that was into the future), we should get a mastectomy and a hysterectomy because the women in her family produced a lot of estrogen, and that was how she had gotten the cancer and etc. and etc. Mother-daughter conversations. I’d rather just get it done and over with now though. There are other ways to have children, and is breast feeding really that
INCITE MAGAZINE, FEBRUARY 2015