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Art, Belfast, Breast Cancer Treatment, Cancer Language, Culture of breast cancer, Damian Gorman, Damian Gorman, Memoir, Poetry, Seamus Heaney, Seamus Heaney, Survivorship, The Troubles, The Troubles, Themes of childhood, Writing
Please don’t call me a cancer survivor . . .
“He not being busy born, is busy dying.” ~ Bob Dylan it is the first Sunday in June, a day set aside to celebrate cancer survivorship. Did you know this “treasured worldwide celebration of life” has been on the calendar for twenty-six years? I wonder would I have been any the wiser had I not been diagnosed myself. So who is a survivor, and who do I think I am? At best, I am ambivalent. According to the National Cancer Survivors Day website: … a ‘survivor’ as anyone living with a history of cancer – from the moment of diagnosis through the remainder of life. National Cancer Survivors Day affords…
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Art, Artisans, Awesome Women, Cat Stevens, Crafts, Educating Rita, Field of Dreams, Fiftieth Birthday, Memoir, Mother's Day, Ordinary Things, Seamus Heaney, Willy Russell
if my books could talk to you …
While I have moved past the demise of the typewriter and the tape deck, the resurgence of the turntable reassures me that we will ever be entirely without our books. I love books. I love how they look, the way they feel and smell, and how it was that they came to be permanent fixtures on someone’s bookshelf. A minute or two spent scanning the contents of a bookcase can tell you much of what you need to know about the owner’s personality, pastimes, and passions. Sometimes, you’ll learn more than you intended, especially from those volumes bearing the tell-tale signs of wear, with dog-eared pages and chunks of underlined text…
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BRCA genes, Breast Cancer Treatment, Diagnosis, Gene Patenting, Mastectomy, Myriad Genetics, preventive mastectomy
so who owns your genes, Angelina?
Actress Angelina Jolie has made very public her personal and medical choice to undergo a preventive double mastectomy. Untold millions now know about her family history of breast cancer that robbed her of her mother, young at 56, and the mutation of the BRCA1 gene that led her to choose preventive mastectomies. Doing so reduced her risk of developing breast cancer from 87% to under 5%. All told, Jolie is happy with her decision and offers a positive account of a major surgical procedure – an amputation – that she describes as relatively simple with normal life resuming after only a few days. Her scars are minimal, the results “beautiful,” and her femininity…
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Memoir, Mother Daughter Relationship, Mother's Day, Ordinary Things, Poetry, Seamus Heaney, Themes of Childhood
seamus heaney & a dance for mother’s day
This Mother’s Day in America finds me thinking about my mother back in Castledawson, County Derry, a great armful of sheets rescued from the clothes-line before the rain begins to fall. Then, the folding, a precise ritual, my father her partner in a dance handed down from one generation to the next. My daughter learned those same moves not by the ironing board in my mother’s kitchen, but before the fog rolled in on the end of a windy afternoon on the sandy edges of California. Folding our beach blanket, edge to edge, while unbeknownst to us, my husband took photographs and wrote our names in the sand . . . …
