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By Root 966 0

skin. The doctor had warned of the side effects of burning and blistering, and foolishly I had thought I was finally managing to avoid one. Until the skin on my breast, neck, and underarm started to turn red and blister and pucker. B.A. Farrell, our friend and architect, was driving me back from the beach at night when my first blister broke. In the dark car, I slipped my hand under my shirt and felt the warm liquid. On my fingers was a thin paper of skin. Was that skin? What is the liquid? I couldn’t see in the darkness. As close as I am to B.A., I was not going to unbutton my shirt, even in a darkened car. I found a paper napkin and slipped it in over the wet place, while B.A. talked about the new Sunbrella fabrics. It turned out to be a blister, one of a series, where the skin was like the top piece of wet plywood floating above the other layers and ready to peel off at any time. The radiation oncologist with whom I had had such an awkward start was great, giving me the usual topical cream she gave her patients and then even going shopping for a new one she thought might work better. Even with the creams, it was a nuisance and mighty uncomfortable, but the worst, I figured, was over.

Everything had gone well. But, honestly, I think I was prepared for any result. Even an optimist has trouble finding something good in the death of a child. But Wade’s death had given me a level of protection: words couldn’t hurt, and even the words “You have breast cancer” couldn’t hurt so much. Unlike so many women who had to sit stoically and receive the news that their life would not play out as they had planned, I had already had to make that adjustment. Lump in my breast, bump in the road, just things to be dealt with, and we would. It was hard, of course, not so much for me, as for what it meant for my children. It meant the very real chance that I would not be there for them.

As the treatment drew to a close, I was also closing our life in Washington, packing and labeling and throwing out. I packed away some of the gifts I had gotten from strangers and from friends, from supporters of John and supporters of other candidates, from survivors and from the families of those who had lost their fight. One present—one I wear today—encapsulates all of these people, all that I believe about the innumerable, amorphous, wonderful “us.” It came from Christine Lavin, a singer-songwriter to whom we had listened for years. I heard her once on NPR—it may have been 1992—and I did what we all do, I went to the CD store and I said I think they said Christine Lavin. Lavin, could that be right? Can you help me find something by her? From that point she became one of the constants in our family. She is funny and poignant, and she wasn’t a stranger to finding grace in an unpretentious gift. I remember reading a liner note somewhere about the pleasure she took when Andrea Marcovicci—whose voice I also love—sang one of her songs. I already liked a woman who would take such pleasure in this.

In the package from Christine was a scarf. I’ve gotten lots of beautiful scarves, and this is certainly a beautiful scarf, but more wonderful is the story of this scarf. Christine had taken it with her on tour, and she had asked women in her audiences to work on it, to make a little knot tie or knit a little. John and I had seen her sing at the Cat’s Cradle in Carrboro once, and as I read her letter, I imagined that scarf making its way through an audience like that Carrboro audience. This scarf was everything I believed in. It was a gesture—not a difficult gesture, but a thoughtful one. It was the counterpart to including the bag boy in the conversation. It was remembering to say hello to the child, not just the adult. It was thanking the referee after the game. It was pulling people in because you believe in the grace a community gives each of us. Anyone who thought to do it, to reach out to others and bring them into this gesture, could have done it, but too few know the blessings a simple gesture actually brings. This scarf is Christine’s gift at the same time