After the Tears

Photographer Christine Benjamin, also a breast cancer survivor, is doing a book called "I of the Beholder." It will include nude portraits of young women in various stages of breast reconstruction.

There was a photo shoot in her hotel room with about eight women.

At first, it sounded like a somber event. But when I arrived at the room, armed with my reporter's notebook, the young women were laughing hard as they undressed.

Some shed Cancer Vixen T-shirts, based on the graphic memoir of a young New York-based cartoonist who kicks breast cancer's ass in stilettos. Others showed tattoos they decided to get after their surgeries. Fate had given them red scars. They had given themselves their own emblems of survival, their own scarring to show a rite of passage.

They joked about Britney Spears shaving her head. She was undermining the movement for women, like men, to be accepted bald!

"Girlfriend's not only giving a bad name to cancer patients, but also has some cheap, synthetic-looking wigs," said Beth Silverman, from New York, who received her diagnosis at 26. Now 29, she has recently started a Web site explaining breast reconstruction.

She tore off her shirt and modeled her svelte body with pride.

"Your stomach is so flat, you bitch," another woman joked with Silverman, who had a kind of reconstruction that uses a tummy tuck to create new breasts.

As I watched them, it occurred to me how beautiful and sexy they looked, even with the scars, even with tattoos of fake nipples. And it occurred to me, that for the same reasons that getting cancer at a young age may seem more tragic, it also can make the funny moments funnier. Humor is its own medicine, I suppose. Life doesn't segregate pain from laughter.

So after the surgery, after the chemotherapy and radiation -- my last one was yesterday-- and just two months before my husband and I are about to leave to take up the posting in India, it was in that room with those women that I felt really happy. I am still alive and I am still young.

I laughed along with these women, long and hard. As the camera's flash popped they mimed "Saturday Night Fever's" disco posture. They did jazz hands. They hugged.

Then some realized they were laughing too much, like breast cancer should have a pose.

"Come on girls, it's breast cancer," one woman panted through her laughter. "Look serious."