the pink

Three years ago my friend brought me upstairs into her extra bedroom and asked me to pick out something for myself.   The room was filled with pink objects—picture frames, t-shirts, plaques with snappy sayings.  She had been fighting stage-four breast cancer for five years.  The disease had stopped progressing, and she was hopeful.  The whole thing was uncomfortable.  I had already decided what I’d thought about these objects that had sprung up out of the ether around 2005 promising to “find a cure” in the most unlikely of places: through the pink Kitchen Aid mixer (only $300, 10% to the Kommen foundation!!), the ribboned box of Special K, and the ubiquitous bumper stickers, fridge magnets, and coffee mugs screaming pink.  All of it was all relentlessly positive, none of it did much to cure cancer, and it conflated shoppers with those fighting a debilitating, painful, and frightening disease.  People who had cancer were fighting cancer.  People making banana bread with a pink mixer were making banana bread.  That day in the spare room I quickly picked out a silver keychain, the smallest thing I could find.

She died August 10th.  On August 13th I went to my office, took the silver key chain off the bulletin board, and spent two hours in my garage digging through old photos in frantic search for a tiny version of her that I could put inside.   I put my keys on the keychain and often took the locket out to look at it at odd moments during the day.  Sometimes I reached into my bag and traced the ribbon design.  It now hangs on a hook by my front door.

This past weekend her partner came to visit me for the first time and when I asked her if she ever got angry she said only once, when she found a plaque someone had gifted that had a list of things “breast cancer can’t take from you.”  Answer: “your smile,” “your love,” “your courage.”  It turns out, she said, in the end when you die of cancer it can and does take all of those things and more.

And yet the next day when we went to Target, as my kids were wreaking havoc on the toy aisle, I turned around to find her off to the side, transfixed by a display of Pink Ribbon objects.  She picked up the pins and held the cups and read the plaques.

She had seen each of these things a million times and probably had many of them in her house (breast cancer “survivors” acquire archives of pink, for all occasions).  Yet she had to touch them, as if lighting candles at a shrine.

I still resent corporations that convert individual suffering into brand enhancements.  I suspect that all of the pink ribbons (or pink key chains) I see don’t flow into dollars donated to cancer research.  And, in spite of that, I see the value of pink.  In the most unlikely of places (in the baking aisle, while buying tennis balls, when opening the door to the house) via that pink we are reminded of those who are gone.  In a culture where we spend as much time consuming as ours, opportunities for material memorialization like this are important, maybe more than we imagine.  Sure, these objects represent a whole lot of corporate crap and marketing mania.  But that doesn’t change the fact that they seem—every now and then—able to transform an everyday moment into something else entirely.

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