Image courtesy of Mouth of the Wolf
This morning, I was standing before the bathroom mirror, hastily penciling in my eyebrows before I needed to leave to meet a friend for tea when a few words floated over the OPB airwaves: “Gretchen Icenogle…essay about cancer…and also Pete Rose…picture of her as a kid, wearing a Cincinnati Reds t-shirt with a number 14 on it…” The words became puzzle pieces snapping into place. “This young Icenogle is laughing, with the type of smile suggesting that she’s on the other side of whatever trouble she’d just gotten into…She writes about the shades of death’s shadow…She details losing her breasts…”
It was a few weeks after her double mastectomy that I met Gretchen at a weekend writing workshop in February of last year. It was a memoir workshop sponsored by Literary Arts, and each participant had brought copies of an excerpt of his or her work to give to the others to mark up and discuss. Gretchen’s piece was about her mother and sister and father, and it was one that I wished I could have kept a copy of for myself, its images so rich and its voice drily witty and wise, probing yet vulnerable. I remember her narrative being something about California and sunshine and the ocean. (I must insert a sort of reverse-Proustian disclaimer here, as the concrete details of her piece are lost to time, but I can still sense the energy it radiated, the boldness of her intelligence infused with grace and sensuality.)
There were about 12 of us in the workshop, and we sat around a long conference table that must have been built from repurposed old bleachers because its surface was stenciled with rows of numbers. We learned about each other from our introductions on Friday night, the breaks between exercises, and before and after each writer discussed feedback on her piece. At some point, Gretchen explained that her mother had died of breast cancer, and now Gretchen herself had been identified as a carrier of the BRCA gene mutation. As she explained, it is “the same one Angelina Jolie has,” and the first part of Gretchen’s treatment plan, a double mastectomy, was also the same as Jolie’s.
She would be starting chemo the following week, and she was worried about her hair. In my casting about for advice that I hoped would be received as helpful and not patronizing, I offered, “I read about an actress with a really close-cropped pixie cut who said she had enough confidence that she didn’t need to hide behind long hair.” My direct experience with cancer up to this point was limited to distant relatives, acquaintances, a colleague who’d survived a Stage III diagnosis through a double mastectomy and treatment a few years prior, and a long-lost friend who’d died of a brain astrocytoma. I had fumbled my way through some of these earlier navigations, and worried about saying the wrong thing now to Gretchen. But whatever she truly thought of my contribution, she accepted it with one of her warm, disarming smiles and thanked me.
Back in my bathroom this morning, my hand wielding the eyebrow pencil froze in the air as the telling verb came over the radio: “By all accounts, Gretchen Icenogle lived large.” Lived. I held my breath as I waited for the next line. “…She died last week, of complications from cancer.”
I was, as in Gretchen’s own words about her reaction to her initial diagnosis, shocked but not surprised. That workshop weekend was the only time I was physically in Gretchen’s presence, but in the following months, scraps of her life drifted into my orbit. One night in bed, I picked up a copy of the Oregon Humanities Magazine that had been lying in a growing pile of backlogged newspapers and books next to the nightstand, opened it, and saw her name. In her brief piece, she characterizes her surgery and chemo treatment as an ironic fulfillment of the female transformation fantasy, closing with, “My breasts and hair are gone, but they weren’t the best I possess. As long as I keep a tongue in my mouth, I’ll count my bargain a good one.” It was a cancer synopsis only she could have penned.
I picked up the thread between us and tugged on it, sending her an email a few days later. She responded, and thus began an intermittent correspondence, most of which consisted of her updates in the form of group emails to family and friends.
For the next few months, I kept up with her life, and her shadows of death, that she wrote so eloquently about on her blog and in those emails. Her writing was as I remembered it from the workshop, dazzlingly labyrinthine in its ideas, virtually every line a portmanteau of meaning. She injected vibrancy and humor into details that might be macabre, or in other cases mundane, in anyone else’s hands. In her initial message sent to notify her email recipients of the “proverbial six months” given her by her oncologist, she proclaims, “If I realize any of my promise, you are partly to credit or blame. You may not remember me, but you have mattered to me, and I want you to know it.”
My thoughts return to the writing workshop often, especially on days when the act of continuing my memoir just seems too much to bear. Most claims to the wishes of the dead are presumptuous at best, but that won’t stop me from saying that today I believe Gretchen would want me to keep writing, no matter the final result. When I started working on a memoir, my first project longer than an essay or article or blog post, I told myself that it would be done in two years. Now it’s almost four years later, and I’m halfway done, if I’m being generous and counting material that I’m pretty sure is too flimsy for publication. But even when I’ve tried to quit writing, I can’t stay away from it for long.
Writing is about living large. It’s about not only choosing to walk into darkness, but sit down in it and describe it. It’s about bearing the unbearable. Speaking the (previously) unspeakable. Unraveling the knots in our heads, hearts, and bellies, and weaving them into a new story. Letting ourselves be transformed in ways we did not know were possible. Running away from all the pain and fear we must confront to do this would be choosing to live small. But I want to be like Gretchen. I choose to live large.
I did not know Gretchen well. But in the short time our paths crossed, virtual or otherwise, she changed me. In subtle ways and in ways I probably won’t understand for some time. She mattered to me, and I want you to know it.
Thanks to OPB’s John Sepulvedo for Gretchen’s remembrance. Read Gretchen’s blog here.
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