“Preserving Herself for Her.”A personal reflection by Kristina Neil

"Preserving Herself for Her" was written and read aloud by Kristina Neil at Rebel Women Lit's Salon on June 7, 2025, in response to Audre Lorde's The Cancer Journals. It is published here with her permission.

Jherane wouldn’t know this, but when she announced the read for this season, my heart dropped: The Cancer Journals.

Cancer. 

I could barely whisper the word; the taste of it like bile in my throat. 

The space between my chest and my pelvis felt as if it were scooped out: hollowed, husked. 

Cancer. 

Before 2024, it had never existed beside me. It never sat with me to drink ginger tea in the morning; never randomly and frequently poked its head through my bedroom door, stared at me for 5 seconds before smiling and saying, “Just checking”. It was a church sister, a distant relative or a celebrity on the news. 

But it was never her. 

Not my beloved. 

Not my mother. 

Cancer?

It took me months to read the 77-page book, if you could even call it that. I figured I might just not be mentally ready, or perhaps executive functioning was especially hard that day. Every time I picked it up, my body rejected it, my mind unsteady and disconnected from the pages. Then I finally succumbed, with intimidation and trepidation in my fingers and belly, my arms and my feet. I met Audre at a time when her body felt distant, strange, and new: a post-body, a body in the after, a body in the wake. She made me think of my mother, who in late 2024 found out that the strange lump on her shin was malignant. Cancerous. 

Cancerous?

The following year she would do radiotherapy and surgery, spending a month in the hospital with a body that had been mediated by cold metal objects siphoning bits and pieces of her. Carving her into something. Something else. I wonder if she ever felt like Audre? In the nights following her surgery, as she lay on the plastic cot, by herself amidst groans and the unfamiliar soundscape of a KPH ward, did she also weep by herself? Did she wonder and worry about her body’s capacity for pleasure? Did she wonder if her foot would still be able to carry her through our garden, as she laments anew how horrible she is at taking care of her plants? Did she think that her lexicon, the one spoken through her feet stepping from stove to sink to counter to island, spoon in hand, dripping sauce or meat or rice on the floor, would catch in her throat? If she did, she never showed me, never told me.

But I noticed her discomfort. Or fear or shame. She changed her wardrobe, opting for longer, looser instead of tighter, shorter. She stayed in, making our home a fortress, maybe a sanctuary. Maybe at home she could manage the unfamiliarity of her new-old body, away from lingering and pitiful stares and unprepared depositions. But when Audre wrote about the projections of the outsider, how they map their expectations onto the bodies of women who’d navigated breast cancer, I reflected on my own with my mother’s. How, even in this moment, I ventriloquise how she felt: that it must have been discomfort with herself and her body. If I’m honest with myself, it’s my own discomfort. Her body feels like my own or mine hers. I have made a bed in her arms and a retreat between her legs, and now her body felt distant from me. Now, it wasn’t mine and hers. It was just hers. And for that reason, maybe it was less fear or shame that I noticed in her and more self-preservation. Maybe it wasn’t a fortress that she built but a cocoon where she could tend to her inside while she tilled a new old-self, a time to feel and relearn what her body could do. For most of her life, she has been mine and my brother’s and my father’s and her friends’, and her church’s and her family’s up until here. 

Maybe for the first time, she was preserving herself, for her.