Always on view, breasts allude to a woman’s naked body. They evoke in others thoughts and feelings about her femininity, her sexual availability, her age, her weight, her attractiveness, her maternal role.
– Lisa Miller, “The Power of a Smaller Breast,” The New York Times

The other day, I looked up pictures of what it looks like to have only one breast. I had been too scared to google something like that, but I spoke with a woman who had decided not to reconstruct after a unilateral mastectomy, and she gently said that I should, because in the end it’s an emotional and mental decision. I should look, and ask myself whether I could see myself like that, and ask my husband to look too.

So I looked. And I didn’t immediately burst into tears. It looked, I suppose, like what I would have imagined. But it was also something heavy to see; something I wanted to unsee but couldn’t, for more reasons than one. Where is the line, I wonder, between disfigurement and some badge of honor? Between something which makes you alien and ugly to the world, and something which merely points to the beauty of your bravery? Is it in the eye of the beholder? Or is it always something of both?

This would be much easier, I tell myself, if breasts were medically necessary. Then I wouldn’t have a choice: I’d have to let them harvest the fat and vessels around my intestines and put them in a bag to sew to the front of my chest. In a way, I feel less burdened by whatever other treatments are in store, because the doctors will simply tell me I need to do them: no one can tell me what to do about this. The most invasive and experimental option on the table has nothing to do with medical necessity.

Our younger boy said to me the other day with an air so practical it seemed profound, “Mom, you should just leave it flat afterwards. None of us care what it looks like” (it should probably be noted that this is the same person who thinks makeup makes me look “creepy”). One of the other kids asked if someone else could donate fat to make me a breast (“sadly, no,” my husband replied).

What feels so heavy at the moment is this sense that I’m choosing between two equally nightmarish options (is it mere coincidence that I’m meeting with the reconstructive surgeon on Halloween?). I don’t want to feel like that. I don’t want to be driven by fear or resignation into some corner or other. Whatever I choose, I want to feel compelled by purpose and some measure of peace, even if it seems absurd in the face of a choice like this. That’s what I’m praying for.

The same day I’m thinking all this, I came across Paul’s prayer in Ephesians: “that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge.” How oxymoronic. What does it mean, to know something which surpasses knowledge? To consider the dimensions of something which cannot be captured in space? —and yet, have I not known this love? Has it not been when I’m caught in something beyond myself—in a fear, or pain, or joy so much greater than my sense of my own capabilities that I could do nothing but feel the love of God break through? It is a love which does not transcend that moment as much as find me in it in a way that takes me beyond it. It is a particular love, particular to the dimensions of the moment, rooted in gristle and grit, which finds me in the confines of my situation, only to surpass it. Maybe it’s because this awareness comes so often during difficult moments that it takes strength to comprehend. It must, I think, become a root-like strength, that reaches invisibly down past sight or smell, down to what matters when the gales come. That’s where I want to operate from: not from the desperation of fear or dread, but from a subterranean surety born of the mystery that is the particular yet limitless love of God.