Last Sunday, February 5, was the Catholic feast day of St. Agatha, the patron saint of breast cancer patients and victims of sexual assault, as well as a host of other interest groups including wet nurses and bakers. Her protection is also often invoked to guard against suffering by fire, earthquakes, and explosions of Mount Etna.
Agatha, a Sicilian teenager in the third century AD, is venerated for her virgin martyrdom at the age of 15 after suffering a battery of tortures at the direction, if not the hand, of Quintianus, a Roman prefect who wanted her for his wife. Agatha, however, had wedded herself to Jesus and thus refused him, so he had her whipped, burned, stretched on a rack, and then had her breasts torn from her chest with tongs. Nevertheless, she persisted – and just as she was to be burned at the stake an earthquake struck, and St. Peter appeared out of nowhere to heal her wounds. She still died, imprisoned, but on her own terms (this part is a bit confusing) and is often depicted in the iconography carrying her severed breasts on a platter, smiling beatifically.
Sicilians celebrate her fortitude every February by baking (and eating) breast-shaped pastries called Minne de Sant’Agata. They sound delicious: half-globes of marzipan and sponge cake stuffed with ricotta, chocolate, and candied fruit, then covered with white icing and topped with a red nipple of candied cherry.
I long to try these delicacies, but I’m not sure where to get them in Chicago. Honestly, I’d never even heard of St. Agatha until last week, when my friend and teammate Jacqui posted a photo of the bosomy sweets to the crew team group chat. I was raised in the Episcopal, not Catholic, church and the Episcopalians keep their saints on the down low – her feast day was only formally incorporated into the liturgical calendar last year. If I’d known about her last fall, I would definitely have tried to score some minne to eat before surgery, while listening to Lily’s song.
A recipe I found online honors Agatha as a woman who “decides her own life with incredible strength and modernity. A woman who says no, even at the risk of her life.” Full stop.
I’m on vacation in Puerto Rico right now, and on the flight on the way down I devoured a book I’ve been meaning to read for a while, one that ostensibly has nothing to do with breast cancer. Kathryn Miles’s Trailed: One Woman’s Quest to Solve the Shenandoah Murders details, well, that: the 1996 murder of two young women while camping in Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park. Lollie Winans and Julie Williams were skilled backcountry hikers and emerging wilderness leaders, full of love for life, nature, and each other. The mystery of their deaths have never been officially solved, and the investigation of it has been by Miles’s account a mess of mishandled evidence, obfuscation, and jurisdictional confusion, and tainted with a whiff of homophobic misogyny.
I’m not really a true-crime person, but I met Miles once years ago at a conference, while she was in the thick of reporting for this book, and the story has stuck with me. The violent tragedy of Winans and Wiliams’s deaths resonated throughout the community of Appalachian Trail hikers and of backcountry campers nationwide, and left a long tail of fear and trauma. Many women told Miles they became afraid to hike alone, or in pairs of women, and this context informs Miles’s investigation. What does it mean when adventurous women who decide their lives with strength and modernity are forced back into the prison of civilization? How do you make sense of the brutality of crimes of men in an environment where bears should pose the greatest threat?*
Miles makes a strong case that a known, now-deceased serial killer was the murderer – not just of Winans and Williams but of a half-dozen other women and teenage girls in the area around the park over a span of some years. And, inevitably, she connects her obsession (her term) with the case back to her own experience of sexual assault as a teenager. “Regardless of whether or not people have been crime victims,” she writes, “so very many of us experience dislocation and fear when we learn about harm befalling other people like us. We want to know that order can be restored after something terrible happens. We want to understand why these things continue to occur and how to keep them from happening to us. We want certainty, which of course is impossible.”
As I sit here in San Juan these two stories bounce around my sun-baked brain, ringing bells of connection to each other, to the narratives of breast cancer that I consume in search of understanding, to the lessons of gruesome fairy tales in which girls are silenced and abused, to disturbing teenage encounters with men that I still struggle to accurately name, to the costs of living with strength and modernity in a world that may well kill you by intent or neglect.
Grim stuff for the tropics, I’m sorry! I’m not feeling particularly sad or morbid, honest, just making connections of coincidence. I’m also going up into the mountains shortly and don’t know that I have the chops to fully rope these bouncing balls together right now, so instead I’ll reach for another story in play. I’ve also been reading Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals (terribly belated) and it is very beautiful, as promised – an eloquent and furious effort to make sense of the willing violence of surgery. It’s 40 years old but Lorde’s exploration of the cost of women’s silence around breast cancer, pain, disfigurement, and marginalization is blazingly current. I continue to hear stories of women afraid to tell their partners or their children or their employers the full scope of what they are enduring – whether to spare them the knowledge of their loved ones’ suffering or for fear of appearing vulnerable and inadequate.
Lorde herself famously refused to wear a prostheses after having her right breast removed in 1978. “Women with breast cancer are warriors,” she writes. “For me, my scars are an honorable reminder that I may be a casualty in the cosmic war against radiation, animal fat, air pollution, McDonald’s hamburgers and Red Dye No. 2, but the fight is still going on and I am still a part of it. … I refuse to hide my body simply because it might make a woman-phobic world more comfortable.”
I mark her now-controversial use of the language of warfare here. But, near the end of the book she engages a different battle analogy that speaks obliquely to another question close to my heart – namely, how to fit this experience of cancer into some sort of belief system, when I have none close to hand, have no relationship with St. Agatha from which to draw solace. Posing the question in her journal of what she would give to not have cancer, to not have lost her breast, she realizes that the answer is, actually, not much: Not her children or her partner or her poetry or her eyes or her friends. She writes:
“Sometimes I feel like I’m the spoils in a battle between good and evil, right now, or that I’m both sides doing the fighting and I’m not even sure of the outcome nor the terms. But sometimes it comes into my head, like right now, what would you really give? … It’s as if the devil is really trying to buy my soul, and pretending that it doesn’t matter if I say yes because everybody knows he’s not for real anyway. But I don’t know that. And I don’t think this is all a dream at all, and no, I would not give up love.”
In the endless impossible quest for certainty and understanding, I’m grateful for this small, hopeful, ambiguous place to land. It feels soft and sweet, like marzipan and sponge cake topped with a cherry.
*If you want a book about bears, I strongly recommend Nastassja Martin’s memoir of enduring and surviving a bear attack, In the Eye of the Wild. It is a rigorous examination of the line between civilization and wilderness, and an unsentimental, transcendent manifestation of resilience that defies any pat understanding of the term.
I appreciate the line thinking on what I might be willing to give up instead of breasts. Not long after diagnosis I concluded that my breasts at this point in my life are mostly decorative and that I’d be okay if the final recommendation was that they had to go.
I do realize this is not exactly to your point, and yet: I wanted to thank you and note the strangely felicitous timing. I’m in Messina, Sicily, this month. I’ll have to keep an eye out for any straggling pastries. (I know the feast day was last weekend, but sometimes pastries spill over.)