This series explores cancer; it invites emotions, sensations and the turbulent nature that cancer creates, the way it resonates through families. It is an exploration into identity, living with a hereditary gene, BRCA. The gene significantly increases your likelihood of having breast and ovarian cancer. It speaks to the people who don’t have cancer but are impacted by it. With cancer comes loss; the loss of loved ones, loss of parts of yourself, loss is also change. The evolution of how your life looks with cancer being a character in it, how it holds you captive.
For generations women have sought the sea for health reasons, physical and mental health having deep connections to the ocean and its healing capacities. As a place for healing, we find momentary peace, make attempts to escape reality and even use it as an agent to feel.
I felt a small, a really small lump on top of
my breast.
That’s cancer.
It shook my world so much.
That the normal me had gone.
And at the time, that felt like a massive, massive loss.
I hope it’s gone.
- Amanda
If I want to feel calm, I go to the sea,
Since my cancer treatment, it’s been much more
important in my life than it was before.
My memories and some of the things that happened are very different to my partner’s because he was witnessing it and I was experiencing it.
And I think that’s much worse than things
happening to you.
- Jo
My biggest fear was that my twin sister would die.
I didn’t know that I would be able to survive her dying,
And then my other two sisters both had breast cancer. By that point we knew all four of us had the BRCA2 anomaly.
My biggest fear was that I would have breast cancer, and die.
And I have had seven years of terror.
I’ve just had a bilateral mastectomy, and I’ve had tubes and ovaries out. So I have done as much as I possibly can do to reduce my risk of ever being ill because of BRCA.
My worst fear happened and that was that Hanni died, and I survived it, in a different way.
My big fear now is that my two daughters and my two nieces will have BRCA. And I don’t want any of them to have the gene.
We’ve been so devastated by it that I need none of them to ever experience this.
They need to explore their lives.
They need they need their life.
I have hope every day, living in the moment and enjoying it for what it is.
I am surrounded by a most extraordinary group of women, but it is this unspoken understanding of womanhood. It’s sisterhood.
Which I find the most hopeful thing.
- Mum
sound design by Finlay Mowat.
