Intimate Moments

June 24, 2026

Last November I kind of blew through the 20^th anniversary of my diagnosis with stage III breast cancer.   Today is your birthday and as I counted decades on my fingers to figure out how old you are, saying 2006 out loud brought up memories of where we were twenty years ago.   A family trip to Montana, then off to CTCA near Chicago for bilateral mastectomies.   Two things popped into my mind, one of which was this post about intimacy from twenty years ago.   I kept a blog through my treatment and into the early years of your illness — before the weight of it all made writing impossible.

July 2006

The topic at the first Al-Anon meeting I attended after returning home was intimacy and sexuality. When the topic was introduced my heart fell-what a topic to tackle four days after losing my breasts. Of course, Higher Power knows just what I need; it turned out to be so healing and nurturing for me to hear everyone’s sharing. It also planted a seed for me to come to the realization that this disease has given me many intimate moments that I never would have experienced.

On the Saturday before I flew to the hospital, a group of Bahai women came to my house to help prepare me for what lay ahead. We didn’t have a specific plan, just showed up with ideas and openness to whatever happened. It was precious to me that children and babies were with us. We smudged and prayed and wept and laughed. I cannot begin to describe the feeling of lying down, surrounded by my sisters as they touched me and held me and massaged me. They used makeup pencils to write on my body and then shared about what they had written. The intimacy we felt melted all boundaries and transcended all words. In the 11th step of Al-Anon it says we “Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, as we understood Him.”  I definitely felt conscious contact during that afternoon together as we were immersed in our love for one another and so focused on healing and comfort for one another.

Part of what I have learned about intimacy is there has to be trust and a feeling of safety before one can risk being vulnerable enough to be intimate. Intimacy requires us to reveal our feelings and our spirit so that others may come in and connect with us. These are distrusting and tenuous times when our society fears immigrants,terrorists, globalization, and pandemic disease. What a blessing that I have had so many opportunities to experience trust, safety and intimacy.

Reflecting on the surgical experience I now see it as a succession of intimate moments. The nurse who prepped me hugged me and shared her strength and hope with me; the chaplain who prayed with us before surgery was so vulnerable and open with his faith and his emotions; the nurse as they rolled me into surgery immediately sensed my fear and comforted me with his touch. It was such a tender moment when Dr. Ray cupped my face in his hands and offered his reassurance. Jose Duviel felt so connected to the nurse who gave him hourly updates during surgery, and the next day, the social worker at my bedside, so genuine and so skilled in her ability to walk beside me as I grieved.

My body has changed so much through chemotherapy that it still takes me a split-second to recognize myself in pictures; now I wonder how losing my breasts would affect us sexually. After the first dressing change I asked Jose Duviel what he felt. He said, “Like you I feel sadness, but it was a little feeling next to my big feeling of happiness that you are on your way to recovery”. I wondered if my body would repulse him―yet he was seeing with spiritual eyes and focusing on preserving the gift of life. That moment will always be with me. This experience has given us intimate times we would have never known otherwise–dancing together in the hotel room, his tenderness while changing my dressings and the feelings that welled up in me when I saw him exhausted and sleeping in the chair at the hospital.

The first morning I woke up at home, my daughter Laura brought me breakfast in bed, gave me massages and painted my fingernails. After my breakfast we lay in bed and chatted and petted each other and speculated on where my breast spirits had found a new home. This is so different from our usual routine and created an intimate connection that carried over throughout the day.

My hope is that I will pay attention to creating intimate moments more frequently and more consciously than I have in the past. Not just with my family and friends, but throughout my days and in unexpected ways.

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Remembering this post, I immediately chastised myself for losing that focus on intimacy. Then I countered that judgment by honoring the reality: I was drowning in the demands of working, caregiving, and navigating our lamentably defective and dehumanizing healthcare system.  Third thought was a wellspring of our intimate moments despite the hellscape we found ourselves in.  Laughing, dancing, water exercise at the Y, moments of humility and surrender but especially lots of laughing and dancing.

Two decades ago we sang the Red Grammer birthday song, but like many of our beloved family rituals, they were eventually crushed into oblivion by the burdens of surviving illness in the United States.   So I will sing that to you today and I will sing it to Laura on her birthday – I wonder how old she was when I last sang that to her. Then we will have to introduce it to Natty at her next birthday.

On the day that Natty was born

On the day that Natty was born

On the day that Natty was born

The angels sang and blew on their horns

And they danced, they danced

They smiled and raised up their hands

On the day, on the day that Natty was born

I am grateful that intimacy and joy did happen during the brain tumor years.
I grieve that I often lacked the capacity to recognize them while we were living them.
I am grateful for this ongoing conversation with you, which allows me to reclaim what felt lost.

And perhaps, to offer myself more mercy.

Overcome any bitterness that may have come because you were not up to the magnitude of pain that was entrusted to you. Like the mother of the world who carries the pain of the world in her heart, each one of us is part of her heart, and therefore endowed with a certain measure of cosmic pain. You are sharing in the totality of that pain. You are called upon to meet it in joy instead of self-pity.

―Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan