Because she might die.
Because she didn't find her lump in 2004 until it was the size of a half dollar.
I hate her because she smiles. She smiles and she is dying, the cancer is in her bones, it is eating in her bones, and though there are drugs that may stop it, that might stop it, the drugs might
not work.
I hate Elizabeth Edwards because her husband is not quitting to take care of her, she doesn't want him to quit, she is in the race for him, for both of them. The campaign is a mom-and-pop affair, according to her. She is not working as a lawyer. She wants to work to help her husband get into the presidency. She wanted many things. She wanted children in her 50s and got them. She got a husband who became a senator. Did she want that? I don't know.
She can have quality of life. She can have a good life, she can take a pill, and another pill, and a treatment, and she could be in the five percent. Or ten percent. She could live more than ten years. She wants a legacy of helping her husband into the White House, not of keeping him from it.
I do not like her husband. I heard him speak the first time he ran and he was vague and said he understood the poor and the workers because his parents had been poor and workers. He wanted us to vote for him because of that. Because of who he had been. Of what he had been born with. Nothing.
Now everyone says he is seasoned, he knows he was wrong about the war. He is for universal health care. See, his wife is so sick and he wants everyone to have the health care she can have. This is his bully pulpit. She says, he says, they want to perform service, that's the reason for the campaign. He is not blindly ambitious, he wants to help, and he can help the best by becoming the most powerful person in the world. On earth.
They do not talk about the possible causes of breast cancer. About pesticides and pollution and the company that created tamoxifen, the one that makes pesticides, that might be connected to cancer. The name is AstraZeneca and it was part of Imperial Chemical, which produces carcinogens that have been linked to cancer. And because AstroZeneca sponsors Breast Cancer Awareness Month and supervises and must approve all its brochures and public relations because who knows what might come out otherwise. Words like that of Rachel Carson might, for example, who warned us in the 1960s about the environment failing us and moreover us failing the environment, and she was scorned and is now a secular saint.
I hate her because she didn't get a mammogram for the four years before she felt the lump. Hers came back after chemo and radiation, and I just had my second chemo treatment. The chemo is supposed to kill any errant cancer cells swimming around in my bloodstream. The odds are good. Elizabeth Edwards says, we are all going to die, I just know what it is that will kill me.
Elizabeth Edwards had stage 3 cancer, a lump and malignant lymph nodes. My nodes are clear. They are shiny and perfect, doing their job, lymphing and sieving. They are like blood but without color, they are clear and not red.. I am proud of my lymph nodes. Which, by chance, are not cancerous.
I am a better person because I am only stage 2a, because mine was caught earlier. I am on track. I am prompt. Though she found hers on her own, and I found mine through a mammogram. We should have joined forces; I would have urged her to get annual mammograms and she would have persuaded me to do a breast self exam each month. We could have been bosom buddies.
She is going to die and she is not raging. I am not raging. Because my cancer hasn't come back. Because it hasn't had time to come back. It was just removed two months ago. I am not raging, people notice that. I am not angry. I feel I deserve this. Because? Because I am fundamentally flawed. The breast cancer attached its crabby legs around me, it caught me living an imperfect life. It caught me drinking milk with bovine growth hormones. It caught me eating cheese. It caught me drinking tap water in the farm belt. It caught me because it catches one out of every seven or eight of us, women. Because that is the luck of the draw. Because that is the price we pay for modernity. For post-modernity. For the mosquito fogging trucks. Fogging, that was the term. For not being the perfect athlete, the perfect vegan, the perfect organic-eater. For not being even a good athlete or good exerciser or proper vegan.
I know that hate is fear. I hate this cancer, this strange overgrowth inside me that is against my own interests. The cancer is in her rib and her hip, breast cancer has migrated there. You can't hate cancer, it's just cells that took the wrong message, answered the wrong phone, opened the wrong letter. Cells that did not know you could return to sender.
I have to hate something out there. I hate Elizabeth Edwards because she is not screaming, screaming: This is unfair. I didn't want this. I don't deserve this. We don't deserve this.