Miranda Featherstone on Cancer and Grieving the Loss of Her ‘Fancy Self’
‘That best, beautiful, done-up self felt dead and gone.’
The Princess of Wales took her seat at Wimbledon on Sunday to a thunderous standing ovation and the sweetest smile from her daughter, Princess Charlotte. It was the second public appearance of the year for Catherine, who announced in March she had been diagnosed with an undisclosed form of cancer. Radiant in a purple dress by Safiyaa, the princess looked — as she did at Trooping the Colour — remarkably like “Kate,” the public figure so many of us have followed for more than a decade.
Cancer, the effects on one’s physical appearance, and the idea of “looking sick” is a complicated conversation — and one I am grateful we have been able to have here at So Many Thoughts. In June, cancer patients generously offered their experiences; click below for these important takes.
Today I want to continue that discussion, and explore the role of fashion, with a moving guest essay by Miranda Featherstone. A writer and social worker who lives in Rhode Island, Miranda’s essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Yale Review and Emily Oster’s ParentData.
Miranda was diagnosed with an aggressive form of stage 3 breast cancer last year; she penned two essays about her illness for the Atlantic, including what it meant for her two children, now ages 6 and 11, as well as the loss of her hair. “I was not prepared for what I saw in the mirror once my remaining hair was strewn over the bathroom floor,” she wrote. “I looked grotesque.”
Miranda and I had been in touch and connected again following Catherine’s appearance in June. As we traded emails, and then spoke on the phone, I was struck by her comments on what it meant to get dressed as a cancer patient. Her essay dives into this further, weaving her own style journey with reflections on watching Kate these last few months. This piece had me in tears, particularly how she grieved the loss of her “fancy self.” I am so grateful for Miranda’s willingness to share.
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Miranda Featherstone on Cancer and Grieving the Loss of Her ‘Fancy Self’
Three weeks after I was diagnosed with an aggressive form of stage 3 breast cancer, my childhood babysitter died. Of cancer.
I hadn’t seen Patty in a couple of years — she’d been sick for a while — but she sent my family a beautiful catered dinner when my mom had died (of cancer) two years prior. She had spoken at my mom’s funeral: I laughed and cried at her memory of my mother teaching her how to be pushy. She died at 60, neither startlingly young, nor old enough.
Patty had worn my mother’s wedding veil from 1966 at her own wedding two decades later. I was a flower girl. The whole bridal party wore matching green velvet Laura Ashley dresses. Patty had been a fabulous 80s bride, all big brown curls and yards of satin and lace. I saved that flower girl dress for decades — it was one of a very few pieces of clothing, tiny and elegant and emblematic of looking one’s best, that never made it to a donation pile. My daughter’s 21st century childhood provided disappointingly few opportunities for winter formal attire, but nevertheless the dress made its way into her closet, where it hung for years: soft and lush, a deep billiard-table green.
I wasn’t shocked by Patty’s death. My sisters and I sent an orchid plant when her cancer took a turn for the worse nearly three months prior, and the thank you text had come from her brother, which seemed out of character and worrying. But even without shock, I experienced horror. I had just turned 40, and I felt like the universe was hell-bent on telling me that adult womanhood was hard. I lost my wonderful mother after a short and unexpected illness. We had moved for my husband’s work and I grieved the loss of our old neighborhood, my old job. Friends’ marriages were beginning to crumble around me. I had been diagnosed with my own cancer and begun a treatment that promised to be harrowing. And now Patty was gone.
I ordered a new dress for the funeral. This was a questionable choice, as I had just taken a long-term leave from my job. The dress, from Sézane, was not cheap. But I felt like Patty would want me to show up looking like a million bucks. This would be hard; I had begun chemo and I already felt like shit. But the new dress would help, I told myself.
My hair began to fall out that very morning, as I styled it and did my makeup carefully. I put on the long dress, somber black interrupted by a riot of flowers. I took a picture in front of my garage — a thirst trap, but when a straight, middle-aged woman wants adulation from her same-sex peers — knowing that this would be the last time my appearance would meet my own capricious standards.
I met my sister at a big Catholic church just outside of Boston, the very same church to which I’d worn the green velvet dress alongside Patty, my mother’s veil fetchingly balanced on her curls. I felt despairing. But I looked good, in the Sézane dress.
Shortly after the funeral, I buzzed my hair. For the next seven months, I alternated between an uncomfortable array of hats and wigs and chilly, naked baldness. The horror over my own reflection lasted nearly a year. I felt ashamed, and ugly, and as if nothing I wore could ever matter, could ever make me feel like myself. The feeling began to recede as my hair re-emerged and I healed from chemo and surgery and it became possible to leave the house for hours at a time.
My hair was a cropped pixie just as the internet was whipping itself into a frenzy over a disappeared British princess. I watched as she tried at first to share a better-than-average casual family photo to quiet the furor. But it soon emerged that it had been shoddily edited, that the normalcy that she hoped to project was artifice.
And so, one morning as I sat down to work in the former closet, now painted pink, that my children generously refer to as “Mama’s study,” the princess appeared in my phone in video form, to explain herself, to assuage our worries, and to stuff a sock in the gaping maw of social media and journalistic clickbait. She too, she said, had cancer. She was somber and spoke to the world wearily. Who could blame her? She looked more casual than in her usual public appearances, and of course this sent a message: This is personal news, coming from a person with a private life.
I closed my laptop, and texted three different group chats: “I am very bummed about Kate Middleton.” I follow the royals with a mix of irony and embarrassment and curiosity, but I have an affinity for Kate, my peer. Over the years we have gotten married and had children — and now fallen ill — within months of each other; her, in public, and me, in the quiet privacy of my regular life. I did not do any work that morning. I remembered, instead, the nakedness I’d felt in those early weeks of diagnosis, when I explained to my employer, my friends, my extended family that I was sick. That my body, once an ally, had betrayed me in the most egregious way.
Catherine, the Princess of Wales, is a public figure whose job it is to look put together. She wears the costumes of the person who is trying: suits, tailored skirts and dresses, high heels, hats, blowouts and up-dos. With a few sporty or casual exceptions — often offered up in the context of her mothering role — there is seldom the pretense of effortlessness that other celebrities project, honestly or not. Effort, artifice, and care are the name of the game.
I don’t have Catherine’s kind of job. I work as a school counselor, and I write from a tiny room in my house. I often sit on the floor with six year olds; I own precisely zero suits. But I try to look, in chunky sweaters and midi-skirts and linen dresses and woven white tops, as if I have made an effort. I try to project to the world that I have tried, that I want the aesthetic of my appearance to add something to other people’s environment.
After I’d lost my hair, and all of my energy and the ability to digest food properly, I grieved the everyday self that I achieve with a few swipes of makeup and 501’s. But as I lay in bed, chemo cycle after chemo cycle, a rip tide of side effects and fatigue rolling over one another, I mourned a different self.
“Putting together my everyday self has always offered me a sense of satisfaction; donning my best self was, for most of my life, a delight.”
In the weeks before my diagnosis, I bought a bright green slip dress for a friend’s wedding in the fall. I had also picked up a black velvet minidress, with bell sleeves and gold dots, that I planned to wear to my former boss’s 90th birthday. Putting together my everyday self has always offered me a sense of satisfaction; donning my best self was, for most of my life, a delight. Both of these garments had promised joy and celebration and the pleasurable ache that follows hours on heels of the fizz of champagne up your nose and the smell of other people when you press against them in a hug.
Those dresses now hung in my closet, shapeless. I grieved deeply for that occasional self more sharply than I could have possibly imagined. You are alive, these dresses seemed to murmur/say when I had taken them out of their packages, in the wake of an isolating pandemic and my mother’s death, in the midst of the trials of middle age.
Instead I was wearing a different costume: the costume of illness. I ordered athleisure in soft fabrics, a pair of ochre linen pajamas that I convinced myself passed for a “set.” But I tried to maintain arbitrary “standards” all the while, wearing a nautical J.Crew sweatshirt to chemo that allowed access to my implanted port but still looked “nice.” And as the illness receded, the outfits I wore to doctors appointments became increasingly effortful. On my face, I almost always wore at least blush and lipstick.
My hair was approaching a Diana-length shag when Catherine appeared in a knee-length white dress in June, taking my breath away. She looked, with her big striped bow, like a present, wrapped up for the clamoring masses. I felt the heat of jealousy at her success in looking almost entirely herself. She was fancy, ready for the world, done up. It doesn’t matter if my envy is fair or legitimate — it is just a feeling — but I can consider where it comes from. I scanned those pictures of her on my phone the way I scan photos of myself before cancer, hunched over in my longing. Squinting, angry, sad, envious.
I felt the loss of my best self, my fancy self, as a truly enormous one. I am not entirely proud of that: I grieved it more actively than I grieved walking my children to school, attending my daughter’s hockey games. Maybe that’s because I knew I was still their mother, and I knew my children knew it, but that best, beautiful, done-up self felt dead and gone. Whatever else has been taken from her, Catherine can still access her fancy self. It seems terrible that the world expects that best self from her all the time, but I hope this for her: that she can find some pleasure in pulling it out, that she can feel briefly, recognizably, like Catherine.
I look at that garage selfie now, taken before my babysitter’s funeral, with a new scrutiny a year later. My lipstick is so careful, my earrings so shiny, my precarious hair swept over my forehead just so. In the photo I am pulling myself together, getting done up. I wore my black dress and heels to tip my invisible hat to Patty, but also because doing so is effortful. Because I could. I marked myself as a member of the land of the living, neither too ill nor dead for lipstick and heels. Having cancer is not necessarily the same thing as dying, but the two are not as far apart as I would have preferred. I was alive in St. Ignatius Church, in a body that could still be made to show off.
“Am I only worth saving if I look good, presentable, neat?”
In my desire to dress up for my doctors’ appointments, I see something similarly empowering, a defiance of death. But if I lift up that impulse, peek underneath its shiny surface, the ground beneath is dirty and wormy, a tangle of ableism and patriarchy. Am I only worth saving if I look good, presentable, neat? Is being alive contingent on looking ladylike? My life may be private, but a camera lives in my pocket; does living in a relentlessly photographed world chip away at my sense of self? Is my worth measured by my appearance? We may distinguish ourselves from the dead or the ill by being alive, running headlong at pleasures when we can. Sometimes looking our best can be one such joy, but like champagne, or the warm sun, or a cool blue lake, it is a pleasure that carries its own danger.
The pressures women face to look just right are insidious and terrible. My sister tried to visit Patty in the months before she died, but she didn’t want to be seen by people outside of her family. Treatment and illness had altered her appearance too much. This strikes me as unbearably sad — and also, I understand.
Last summer, I was bald and I went to bed right after I ate. Some nights I didn’t eat at all. But this weekend, the night before Kate appeared at Wimbledon, a friend came over for dinner. After we’d eaten, we sat around the table talking, surrounded by dishes and wine glasses and ice cream bar wrappers. I wore white jeans and a navy sweater. My daughter stood behind me, playing with the curls that grew back after chemo. “You’re always beautiful,” she offered, apropos of nothing, “but I think you’re most beautiful with hair.”
“Same, girl. Same,” I told her.
The next day, I checked my phone, only to see Charlotte looking up at her mother’s jaunty — almost playful — purple dress. I cannot know what their lives are like behind closed doors, but I can imagine how Kate felt leaving the house with her daughter: eager to offer the girl a glimpse of the woman who has been hard to find, a woman who is both fancy and familiar.
That self is almost within reach now, I can brush my fingers against her. I have pulled on hot pink silk trousers for a friend’s party and offered my reflection a small nod of approval. But the truth is that without the long hair that has defined me my whole adult life, and accompanied both by new breasts — scarred and high and slightly strange — and an indelible fear of what lurks within my body, she does not feel quite so festive, quite so fun.
A few weeks ago, almost exactly one year after Patty’s death, I went to the cancer center for some follow-up appointments. There was a woman about my age — that is to say, young for the 9th floor of Mass General’s Yawkey Center — with cropped Winona Ryder hair. I spied a chemo grow-out. She was fancy for the hospital. Along with her patient ID bracelet, she wore a crocheted top, wide, striped linen pants, and wedge espadrilles. I was in 501’s, a striped headband, and a button-down tied jauntily at my high waist. Lipstick, of course. The lipstick stands in for that Laura Ashley flower girl dress, that green silk slip, the black Sézane dress with the flowers. (In my mind, Patty wears my mother’s veil. In my mind, she is alive.)
The other patient and I held each other’s eyes, considered speaking, then looked away. Outside, Boston was humid and hot; inside, the air was so cool and refrigerated that I had to push away the image of a morgue. I kept one eye on my phone, and one eye on this woman and her high summer shoes, measuring her wedges, studying her effort. For now, I told myself, the two of us are alive.
My sincere thanks to Miranda. You can find her on Instagram at @MirandaFeathers and read more of her work on her website, including her pieces in the Atlantic (gift links): I Have Cancer. I Can’t Put My Kids First Anymore. and I Miss My Hair.
Oh, I so relate to this. All I can say, a year out, is that your fancy self will come back. I am typing this from my office, in crazily patterned Dries pants with a full face of makeup, back at my normal weight. I have, with a touch of superstitious hesitation, thrown out every pair of sweatpants that I wore for post-surgery and chemo. It takes time. You will get there. Wishing you light and happiness and opportunities to wear your gorgeous clothes.
This took my breath away. Thank you Miranda and Elizabeth for sharing.