Walking In As Myself
Part One: Seven Times
“Mom, does my dress look okay?”
“Sweetheart, you’ve asked me six times.”
“Seven,” my sister said.
“Thank you, Claire. Very helpful.”
We were in the bride’s room at St. Andrew’s Methodist Church in Lexington, Kentucky. A small room off the side of the sanctuary with a full-length mirror, a pink velvet loveseat, and a box of tissues on every flat surface. Somebody’s grandmother had cross-stitched Love Is Patientand hung it over the door in 1974.
It was 1:40 in the afternoon. The ceremony started at two.
I stood in front of the mirror and looked at myself.
The dress was simple. Ivory. Fitted at the top with lace sleeves, flowing at the bottom. I’d bought it off the rack at a little bridal shop on Main Street, because I didn’t have the energy for six months of fittings.
My shoes were flat. I couldn’t do heels yet. My feet still went numb sometimes.
And my head was bare.
Part Two: The Year
I lost my hair during treatment the year before.
My name is Molly Graham. I’m twenty-nine years old.
Two years ago, I was a kindergarten teacher at Cassidy Elementary in Lexington. I had a classroom full of five-year-olds and a fiancé named Ben and a wedding date set for the following June.
I also had a lump in my neck that I thought was a swollen gland.
It wasn’t a swollen gland.
Hodgkin lymphoma. Stage three.
My oncologist at the UK Markey Cancer Center was a calm, kind woman named Dr. Reyes. She sat with Ben and me in a small exam room with a box of tissues on the counter and told us everything.
The good news: Hodgkin lymphoma is one of the most curable cancers there is. Especially in young people.
The bad news: the cure would take six months of chemotherapy. And then radiation.
And then a long, slow road back.
We postponed the wedding.
Part Three: The Hair
My hair started falling out three weeks after my first chemo infusion.
I had long hair. Down to the middle of my back. Dark brown and thick and wavy. The kind of hair people stopped me in the grocery store to ask about. My kindergarteners used to braid it during quiet time.
It came out in the shower first.
A handful. Then another. Then a clump so big it clogged the drain.
I stood in the shower and stared at it in my hand.
Ben found me there twenty minutes later. Sitting on the floor of the shower with the water running cold. Holding a fistful of my own hair.
He didn’t say anything.
He turned off the water. He wrapped me in a towel. He sat down on the wet floor and held me while I cried.
That night, my mother came over with her clippers.
My mother, Anne, is fifty-six. She’s a retired nurse. She worked in the emergency room at St. Joseph Hospital for thirty years.
She’s tough and warm and practical. She doesn’t believe in waiting for bad things to get worse.
She sat me down in a kitchen chair in the middle of my little apartment. She put a towel around my shoulders.
“We’re not going to let it fall out in clumps,” she said. “We’re going to take it. On our terms.”
She held up the clippers.
“Ready?” she asked.
I wasn’t.
I nodded anyway.
She shaved my head in fifteen minutes.
Ben held my hand the whole time. Claire sat on the counter and cried. Dad stood in the doorway with his hands in his pockets, looking at the floor.
When it was done, Mom handed me a mirror.
I looked at myself.
A pale, round, unfamiliar head. Big eyes. A face I didn’t recognize.
“Oh,” I said.
Then Ben leaned over and kissed the top of my bare head.
“There you are,” he said.
Part Four: Ben
I need to tell you about Ben.
Ben Whitaker is thirty-one. He’s a high school biology teacher at Henry Clay High School. He coaches the cross-country team. He’s tall and lanky and slightly awkward, with glasses and a laugh like a goose honking.
We met at a teachers’ conference in Louisville four years ago. He sat next to me in a session about classroom management and fell asleep and snored.
I elbowed him. He woke up and apologized. Then he asked me to lunch.
He’s the steadiest person I’ve ever known.
He came to every chemo infusion. Every single one. Twelve of them, every other Tuesday, for six months. He took personal days from school. He sat in a vinyl chair next to me for five hours at a time while the drugs dripped into my port.
He brought crossword puzzles and bad snacks and a portable speaker that played the Hamilton soundtrack on a loop.
He held my hair back when I threw up. Then, when I didn’t have hair anymore, he held my head.
He shaved his own head the week after Mom shaved mine.
He didn’t tell me he was going to do it. He just showed up at my apartment one Saturday morning with a box of donuts and no hair.
I stared at him.
“What did you do?” I said.
“It was getting long,” he said. “It was in my eyes.”
It wasn’t getting long. His hair was always short.
He kept it shaved the whole six months. His students called him Coach Cue Ball.
He didn’t care.
Part Five: Judith
Ben’s mother, Judith, is sixty.
She lives in a big brick house in the Chevy Chase neighborhood of Lexington with Ben’s father, Robert, who’s a cardiologist.
She’s elegant. Tall and slim, with perfect posture and perfect makeup and perfect blonde hair, cut in a sleek bob. She wears pearls to the grocery store. She chairs the garden club and the Junior League alumnae association and the fundraising committee for the Lexington Philharmonic.
She never liked me.
I knew it the first time Ben brought me home for dinner. She looked at my thrift-store dress and my sensible shoes and my kindergarten teacher’s hands with the faint marker stains on the knuckles.
“A kindergarten teacher,” she said. “How sweet.”
She said sweet the way some people say sad.
She was polite. Always. She sent birthday cards. She invited me to Christmas. She asked about my students.
But I always felt like I was being measured. And coming up short.
When I was diagnosed, Judith sent flowers.
A big arrangement of white lilies. With a card that said, Thinking of you. — The Whitakers.
She didn’t call. She didn’t visit.
Then, two months into chemo, she came to my apartment.
I was lying on the couch in sweatpants, bald, gray, exhausted. Ben was at work.
Judith stood in my doorway in her camel coat and her pearls and looked at me for a long time.
“Have you thought about a wig?” she asked.
I blinked at her.
“I’ve looked into it,” I said. “They’re expensive. And itchy. And I’m home most of the time anyway.”
“There’s a woman in Louisville,” Judith said. “She makes custom wigs. Real human hair. You can’t tell the difference.”
She handed me a business card.
“I could take you,” she said. “For a fitting.”
“That’s very kind,” I said. “But I think I’m okay for now.”
Judith looked at my bare head.
“Well,” she said. “Keep the card. In case you change your mind.”
She paused.
“For the wedding,” she said.
Part Six: Postponed Twice
We postponed the wedding twice.
The first time was the original date. June. I was in the middle of chemo. I could barely stand.
We moved it to October.
In September, my scan showed a spot. A small one. In my chest. The doctors weren’t sure if it was cancer or scar tissue.
They wanted to do radiation to be safe. Five days a week for four weeks.
We postponed again.
I cried for a week. Ben didn’t.
“Molly,” he said. Holding my hands at our kitchen table. “I don’t care when we get married. I don’t care if it’s October or next June or ten years from now.”
He squeezed my fingers.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he said. “I’m already married to you. We’re just waiting for the paperwork.”
Radiation ended in November.
In January, Dr. Reyes called me into her office.
She was smiling.
“Your PET scan is clean,” she said. “No evidence of disease.”
She leaned forward.
“You’re in remission, Molly,” she said.
I didn’t say anything for a long time.
Then I put my face in my hands and cried so hard Dr. Reyes had to get a nurse.
We set the date that night.
October 14th. A Saturday. At St. Andrew’s Methodist Church, where I grew up. Where my parents were married in 1990.
Part Seven: Short Hair
By October, my hair had started to grow back.
Barely.
It’s not like it was. It came back different. That happens sometimes after chemo. It was short and soft and fuzzy, about half an inch long. And curly. Tight little curls all over my head, like a baby lamb.
And it wasn’t dark brown anymore. It was lighter. Almost auburn.
I looked like somebody else.
Some days I loved it. Some days I didn’t recognize myself in the mirror.
But it was mine.
And I was alive.
