A Picture is Worth Ten Thousand Words When it Comes to Cancer

Felicia Mitchell is a survivor of stage 2b HER2-positive breast cancer diagnosed in 2010. Catch up on all of Felicia's blogs here!

An image that comes to mind when I think of my brother, John Henry, in his last days with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, is of him in his baseball cap; his hair was mostly gone, and his face and lips were swollen. There is no photograph, but the mind records what it records. This image has competed with childhood memories and photos taken before cancer ravaged his body. Now, since seeing a Polaroid taken not quite five months before he passed away, I have a new image residing in my head.

I wish I could say that this is a photo of him celebrating his last Christmas with us on a day that was one of the best holidays my parents orchestrated for their four children. I wish it were a photograph of him with classmates when he went camping on the South Carolina coast for the first and last time, loving his field trip with a biology class while recognizing he was not on this earth for long. I wish I could say it was taken by a friend one night when he went out to the movies for the last time. But there are no photos of these occasions.

John Henry lived a long time ago, before cell phones could easily document every move for a photo app or Facebook. Whereas I documented my cancer journey with photographs pre- and post-mastectomy, photographs of hair lost and hair found, and even photographs of pink socks on feet peeking out of a warm blanket given to me in the chemo infusion chair, John Henry did not document his journey, though we had cameras in the house. (We had tape recorders! Why did I not sit down and record him speaking some of his old-soul wisdom?)

Even when his face was swollen almost past recognition, John Henry went to class at the University of South Carolina. That biology class was his one last thread attaching him to the normalcy he sought when he was given a terminal diagnosis at 19 years old while serving in the Navy. I understand his lack of vanity, his zest for life. I still wonder about who was in that class and what lessons they all learned about resilience and hope from my brother. Did at least one of the students go on to medical school and study how to treat (or cure) cancer?

But before John Henry lost his hair, before his disease almost completely ravaged his body, he was what we would recognize as a handsome young man. His hair was jet black, like our father’s before he was bald. He had bushy eyebrows — a family feature. He came into his prime as a young adult in the 1970s, growing his hair out before it fell out because he had always wanted to. It never got a chance to get long, but it got shaggy. And he wore a mustache and beard.

The Polaroid another brother recently shared with me is a candid shot of John Henry with the ambience of a painting by Lucien Freud. He is reclining against our yellow hand-me-down couch, a red throw of patchwork plaids behind his back where he spent so much time, resting there. The curtains are drawn on the picture window, the outside world obscured. Wearing a blue checked flannel shirt and jeans, clothes that are by now a little loose on him, John Henry sits, sunglasses on his lap as if he just came in from outside.

And his hands. You can see both hands well, including the right hand that fed me my bottle years before, held tools for tinkering on his car, and later held our mother’s hand as he died. Strapped to his left wrist is a watch he bought when he joined the Navy, a diver’s watch my son refurbished and wears on special occasions. You can see his neck, which is a little swollen. You see his pallor. Most of all, though, you see those hazel eyes staring out at you above a patrician nose, just looking at you across the decades from a deep mortal space.

John Henry is not smiling, but he is not frowning, and these hazel eyes do everything to illustrate the notion that eyes are the window to the soul. I know I can see right into John Henry’s soul with this Polaroid, everything I never learned about what cancer meant to him revealed in this moment in time on a Polaroid on which our father wrote on the back, “John H., Dec. 11, 1975.”

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