I love you all and thank you for asking what we need. Here is my response today. I am infinitely grateful to all of you. And also, I’m sad. And mad.

What I need —

Permission to grieve
Encouragement, even
Examples of asymmetrical beauty
Stories of loss
Stories that allow for the wallowing, time for feeling gutted, time for sadness before any pheonix rising
Queer and feminist and disabled people’s brilliant refusal to heed patriarchy and its toxic beauty standards
More asymmetry: a reclaiming of the power and beauty in our asymmetrical bodies.

What I have —

So much support. People who want to do something for me. For us. I sometimes feel a slight accusation that we are being stubborn, refusing help when we actually need it. But really, we have all the support we need right now. Meal delivery indeed makes me feel so loved and cared for, but we can only eat as much as three mouth-eaters can eat. We’re set on food. The other individual/family needs that come up are quickly being met — friends and family getting Ida where she needs to go. Friends calling or stopping by offering healing touch and presence. You all have sent the most beautiful flowers and house plants. And cookies and pastries! I love cookies and pastries, but honestly the best thing for my healing body is probably a break from the sweets, at least for a few days. I am overwhelmed by feeling loved. It is so helpful. It is so helpful to feel wrapped in love as I grieve. I may need a return to the calls/flowers/sweets in a few weeks, when the initial crisis passes. Ask us again and again what we need. Ask each other.

What else we need, a beginning of a most incomplete list —

We need to understand what causes cancer and how to prevent it.
We need to shift how we live on the planet so that we are less toxic to ourselves and other species.
We need to make clothes for an infinite variety of bodies — pants that fit wheelchair users; clothes that fit people with different lengths of limbs; sexy awesome clothes for fat people; racing bathing suits for one-breasted women.
We need an end to health-care for profit.
We need an end to the NRA and all the forces that keep the guns in circulation. Lucas’s school is on lockdown today because there was a gun on campus at another high school yesterday. We need to de-militarize, de-weaponize our whole country. That would help me rest and heal.
We need huge raises for teachers and nurses. Their salaries should be doubled. Burke could only go to the hospital with me because of our home care nurses, and there is a national nursing shortage. Nurses tried to rush me out of bed post-op because hospitals are over working and under paying nurses. I couldn’t think, much less stand, and they wanted to get me dressed for discharge. This at one of our city’s “best” hospitals.
We need the cultural resisters. The facebook groups of badass women from around the world showing their one-breasted fashion creations. The trans folks who blazed the way toward mastectomies being available to all gendered people; the trans men who demanded that removal of breasts not just be about erasing, but also a process of creating of something new. The disabled people, my kids included, who move with so much swagger and style and grace and grit and in the world, who make the world infinitely more beautiful just by being so fully themselves every day.