Some Love for the Bald Women Going Through Hell

When I saw the subject line “Haircut” my lips and eyes did that thing when they tighten to try and keep the feelings from just pouring out. I clicked on the email from my one-year-older sister Betsy, and it was all over. Feelings everywhere.

One and a half years ago Betsy got a diagnosis of ovarian cancer. Stage III. Not good.

She was scared, more scared than any 52-year-old woman with two young kids should have to be. It was that scared that hunts you down at 3am on a continent far away, in a foreign country that isn’t your own, no matter how hard you try to make it so. The kind of scared that pokes its sharp finger at your chest and says, Hmm. I haven’t decided what I’m going to do with you yet.

2016 was a long year, a crappy year as Betsy slogged through two brutal surgeries and twelve rounds of chemo in a barracks-style hospital in Munich Germany, where she has lived for eighteen years with her husband Robert. In the course of one month cancer took her uterus, her ovaries, her energy, her lust, and her spirited belief that eating like a rabbit and exercising vigorously can immunize a person against dreadful illnesses.

When all of that was gone, cancer came for her thick wavy hair.

I remember the spring afternoon that she face-timed me, bravely modeling her new wig that she’d bought in anticipation of impending baldness. “I feel like I’m wearing a dead squirrel,” she moaned.

We laughed, as we do when our hearts are breaking.

“It looks great,” I promised. “I swear.” But it didn’t. It made her look like our Midge doll from the 70’s with stiff, pop-off interchangeable wigs in odd shades of auburn. It made my sister, the most natural person I know, look disturbingly unnatural.

Betsy hates shopping, make-up, trimmings. She’s never had a pedicure, dyed her hair, or sprayed perfume behind her ears. She hyperventilates in malls. “I can’t stand this place,” she says, and we’re not even halfway across the first floor of Macy’s.

A month before her wedding to Robert in a no-frills lodge on a New Hampshire lake, I told Betsy she had to buy a dress. She tried on two and picked the less expensive one. “It’s fine,” she said, like we were choosing a leg of lamb for dinner, but not even Easter dinner.

On her actual wedding day, I ambushed her with my old veil and some lipstick. “Please don’t make me look fake!” she begged.

“With blush freakin’ rose?” I shouted, as I pinned her in a chair and swiped some color across her protesting mouth.

Except for a few Dr. Seuss-like strands in the front that mysteriously never left, Betsy’s hair fell out completely the week after she bought the wig. But baldness, as she explained it, was the least of her problems. With toxic chemicals coursing through her veins, she was really just trying not to die. At which point the baldness became something else: a reminder whenever she looked in the mirror that she was really really sick.

“It’s not even vanity,” she said, biting her lip and squeezing her eyes shut. “In cancer movies, people are always bald right before they die.”

Through the cold, wet Munich spring Betsy covered her head with colorful knit caps that our friend, Diana sent from the States. On her June wedding anniversary, she wore her wig out to dinner, in an effort to embrace life, to feel pretty. It mostly worked, except for the part where it itched and made her feel like someone else.

Betsy and I face-timed every day, and I followed the evolution of her hair situation, especially the meager, albeit hugely meaningful, regrowth between chemo treatments.

“Look!” she’d say putting her scalp right up to the computer camera and brushing her hand across her head. “Fuzz!”

“You’re practically ready for a ponytail,” I’d tell her, and shift my eyes to the small corner screen, where I could check in on my own wavy, light brown locks, always a point of pride for me.

If pressed, even Betsy would have to admit that she had loved her hair and missed it something fierce. It required next to no styling, and certainly no products. Except in middle school when she curled it under like Joanie from Eight is Enough, Betsy had always rocked the wash and wear look.

But, with the help of dark glasses that stood in for eyebrows, she also pulled off bald.

And when her kids wanted to paint her scalp, she threw on an old smock and let them have at her blank canvas of a head with brushes and watercolors.

I visited Munich in August, when the diabolical chemo treatments were over. Betsy looked gaunt and tired, a shell of her once vigorous self. But, dammit, she still had her fighting spirit as we kicked around Munich, sometimes biking for 30 minutes to a doctor’s appointment or the English garden for dinner, because—even when she felt like shit—she still never wanted to drive anywhere.

As for her bald head, the wig had migrated to a dusty corner of her bedroom, and she sometimes wore a black cotton cap. But it was hot in the city that summer, and more often than not, she’d yank that cap off of her sweaty head and stuff it in her backpack, not caring that adults stole glances and kids just plain stared.

“Do you feel weird?” I asked her one day on the train, as she sat there not caring a lick about how her head looked.

“It’s who I am right now,” she told me, shrugging. “I feel more like myself this way”

Women are supposed to have hair, or cover up when they don’t, but Betsy wasn’t playing. She wasn’t going to pretend to be anybody but herself.

She also couldn’t pretend away her illness. She had to go through it. And she did, for 18 awful months, but that, too, was coming to an end.

Which is why I did that snorting, laughing, crying thing as I read her “Haircut” email.

On July 14, 2016 I had my last chemo. On July 14, 2017 I made an appointment for a haircut, and today I got it trimmed.

I could remember a lot of huge haircut moments. In 7th grade when I went pixie; in 8th grade when I—disastrously—went perm; my son at two years old dodging the scissors at Super Cuts; my daughter at four strutting out of “John Does Hair” in East Arlington looking like a drunk person had cut a staircase into her blonde bob.

But this one was big. The biggest. Betsy’s hair was back. And, way better than that, so was Betsy.