Death Becomes Her

A few months after her partner Deena Chafetz died, We Were Witches author Ariel Gore penned a piece for SFR about living with a dying loved one. 

“I didn’t want any advice,” Gore wrote in the 2024 Love & Sex issue of our little paper, signaling a time when Chafetz, who received a metastatic breast cancer diagnosis in 2019 and who died in November of 2023, was still alive. “I didn’t want to know how one could meditate out of cancer. I didn’t want to hear about the miracle that usually turned out to be a reversal of a misdiagnosis.”

Gore’s piece, Love & Death, was a refreshing take on the death and dying lit subgenre, and one that eschewed the “you’re a warrior!” speak of so many books and essays that emerge from the universal yet impossibly painful experience surrounding the deaths of those we love. This was no self-help piece in the usual sense, but rather an honest and autobiographical—and artful—portrayal of a woman and her partner making their way through the challenges of illness. 

Now, with a little space between her and the quagmire, Gore is poised to publish her next book. Rehearsals for Dying: Digressions on Love and Cancer (March 11, Feminist Press) is part memoir, part humor and a whole lot of vulnerable. Written partly in real time during Chafetz’s trials and tribulations within the healthcare industry, Gore weaves a relatable yet poetic tale of love, loss, grief and, ultimately, acceptance. With a launch and reading slated for Collected Works on Tuesday, Gore spoke with SFR about her experience. We are also proud to present an excerpt from the book. This interview has been edited for clarity and concision. 

SFR: So sorry to ask this, but how long has Deena been gone at this point? And actually, how did you meet?

Ariel Gore: It’s not quite a year-and-a-half. Deena died mid-November, 2023. And we met in the beginning of 2012—our friend…set us up and Deena didn’t show up. But her dad had just died, and then, weirdly, my mom started hospice the day we were supposed to meet. So we had this death connection already. We got married in 2013. Unless it was 2014; it was right when [queer couples] could get married in Santa Fe, and it was kind of, ‘Let’s get married; I need health insurance.’ But they still wouldn’t give it to me. It wasn’t until it was federal, and when it did become federally legal, it was like, ‘Oh, shit. We’re married.’

We fell into the relationship pretty fast. When we first met, she was like, ‘I’m poly,’ and I was like, “Fine,’ and then after the first night we spent together, she was like, ‘I don’t want you seeing anyone else.’ It was pretty classically and specifically lesbian-fast. A few months after my mom died, I bought a tiny house and asked if I could put it in her backyard, and I guess that’s not exactly moving in, but…

I’d moved down from Portland, Oregon, in 2009 to take care of my mom (she had cancer), and I’d been there a few years and was writing The End of Eve about my mom dying and meeting Deena. I was in memoir-writing land, and that’s certainly one of those things you have to get used to about me. Deena was a pretty private person. She had to trust I had good judgment about what’s appropriate to put in a memoir and what’s off the record.

As far as Rehearsals for Dying goes, did you plan any of it out, or is it more just like the words that emerged as you were going along?

I do a lot of reading when I’m trying to process something, and I talk to people and I get it’s just…the stuff that’s either taboo or you haven’t read about it? That was important to me, and it was important to Deena to show that we were feeling ways you don’t see in the movies. I mean, we felt some ways you see in movies, but that was less interesting. What was more interesting was the ways we felt, and that’s usually something I try to delve into in my writing, especially when it’s experiences like cancer, death, parenting—things millions of people deal with, yet you’re so like, ‘Surely not everyone feels twee-cancer about it.’ You know, oh, there will be lessons learned; this is completely unspeakable; there have to be feelings in-between. And mixed feelings. We knew she had breast cancer, but a few months later it was metastatic, and in her case had spread to her hip bone, which meant it was stage 4 and universally terminal. We know the stages of grief, and you expect to go from denial to acceptance. I immediately was like, ‘OK. She’s going to die,’ but Deena’s process was really surprising to me, and I bet not uncommon. She was initially in acceptance, yet as the years went on, she went more into denial, which was pretty hard for me [and our son]. But it was something that the whole cancer culture encouraged, presumably because that’s how you sell drugs. They don’t want to lie, exactly, but want to suggest that maybe on the horizon there’s some magic discovery, and if you can just stay alive until…the system very much encouraged getting more and more into denial. 

We got this book deal before she died, and it was very much something I was working on in real time over the years as Deena was dealing with cancer and ultimately dying of it. It became a place to ask unspeakable questions. It became the only place I could process what was going on. The majority of the book was in a document Deena could access, though after she died I put in more of the stuff that was in my journals I wouldn’t have shared with her—what’s it going to be like when I’m a widow? We had very different ideas about the afterlife and meaning of life. She was doubtful there was an afterlife, and for her, the meaning of life was service. 

Would you consider Rehearsals for Dying a service?

I hope so. In my lifetime, billions of dollars have been spent on so-called breast cancer awareness, so how come when Deena got diagnosed I knew almost nothing? I knew the pink ribbon was a symbol of breast cancer, that it was treatable in earlier stages—but I knew almost nothing about what we could expect. Why is that? 

I thought maybe I wasn’t paying attention. We were only in our 40s, we tried not to think about stuff like that. The real reason is that all those awareness campaigns are not designed to benefit people, they’re designed to benefit drug companies and fundraisers. There was a complete systemic reason why I didn’t know what to expect. Obviously it’s not going to be everyone’s experience, so I did interview many people for the book, including people in earlier stages of breast cancer who aren’t going to die of breast cancer, most likely. And we have this cohort of people who are kind of separated by…like, Deena would get invited to these spaces, like free breast cancer retreats. And when they learned, ‘Oh, you have metastatic cancer?’ the options would change to, like, one night only. 

Of course people don’t want to think about their own death every day, but people know it could metastasize, they could die of it. I wanted to shine a light on what really happened, what roles you can expect and what the system has to offer. I wanted to lay out more information. When Deena was first diagnosed, for example, it was assumed she’d get a double mastectomy. Her oncologist expected that, the surgeons we saw

expected that, and her question was that if it had already metastasized, why? She was like, ‘Show us some evidence that would prolong my life or do anything but give you another day’s work.’ We were never given options or information, it was just, ‘You’re going to do this, you’re going to do that.’ As a feminist service, it’s important to keep coming back to that. And not to the point of magical thinking, unless that’s your thing, but critical thinking and being aware that when you walk into a cancer center, they have an agenda, and it is not, in my experience, patient-centered. It was already so complicated, and it’s a hard time to stand up for yourself when you’re having a health crisis. 

The title of the book comes from this Seneca quote about how you have to rehearse death, because you only get one chance at it. It’s an interesting thought experiment to kind of rehearse it in your mind’s eye.

Do you think we unfairly expect bravery from people with cancer?

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. That is the thing. And not only is it kind of mean to force bravery on people, people aren’t brave so much as they have to be. They have no choice. There’s a tendency to put as much space as possible between ourselves and someone dealing with something we hope not to deal with. A lot of people would say, ‘You’re the strongest person I know.’ It was like, OK, that’s not a horrible thing to say to someone like ‘You’re the ugliest person I know,’ would be, but it puts space between you. You become more alienated from everyone else. 

Deena made this ‘zine when she was sick called Kittens, Blunts and Metastatic Breast Cancer, and it was kind of this collection of her social media posts about it. One of the things she says was ‘I’m not the strongest person you know, we’re all the strongest person we know.’ If you’re not dealing with anything hard…when you do, whatever that hard thing is, you’re also going to be the strongest person you know.

Maybe it’s an obvious question, but was there catharsis or relief in getting the words out? Does writing come easier when it’s coming from something so sad?

I don’t know about easy or hard, but I think about writing as something where the goal is to put you in touch with the universal spirit and break that barrier between you and I. You try to interrogate—what am I feeling? What is this feeling in my body? How can I translate that into something that is the universal spirit? You never really get there, but grief is the thing that puts you in touch with the universal spirit, because everyone knows about it. It’s completely confounding that the culture is so weird about talking about death and grief. It’s the one thing we all know about and have in common, even if your only experience is that your goldfish died when you were 5. It’s stop-the-clocks-the-world-cannot-go-on, yet you know everyone’s goldfish has always died, so you feel like maybe you’re making too big a deal out of this? You know in your heart that everyone knows about it, but we say to each other, ‘I can’t imagine!” Stop saying that. ‘I can’t imagine,’ is such a lie. 

I want people to know the book is not a total downer. It’s funny and not everyone dies. I hope that people’s experience reading it is that it’s a book about love, but with a feminist, genderqueer point of view and experience of the world with the fucking reality of the American healthcare system and the shallow breast cancer industry. There are a couple cancer memoirs I like that were by the person who was experiencing cancer, but I didn’t see anything from the caregiver’s point of view. I wrote it in real time and finished it very quickly after Deena died. It’s a way for me to put my little bleeding heart in a glass case and feel like I can heal. But let’s not forget the bruised-up little heart. Let’s keep that, too. 

Ariel Gore: Rehearsals for Dying: Digressions on Love & Cancer Reading: 6 pm Tuesday, March 11. Free but buying the book costs money, duh). Collected Works Bookstore & Coffeehouse, 202 Galisteo St., (505) 988-4226

Gore will donate a portion of book sales to The Cancer Foundation of New Mexico.  

Excerpts from Rehearsals for Dying: Digressions on Love & Cancer

The River Trail

I want to quicken up the pace of the beginning of this narrative, but the beginning meandered like a river.

Deena thought her breast looked weird.

Deena had lived through her mother’s breast cancer.

Deena called her doctor to schedule a mammogram.

Some days, we pretended not to think about it. We fell easily into bed, and I pressed my fingers into the soft edges of her breasts. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong—no lumps—just this slightly spongy redness at the bottom—maybe it’s just a perimenopause thing—maybe it’s that cute, new, red polka-dot bra just rubbing the wrong way?” And Deena said, “You’re just looking for an excuse to feel me up.” And maybe that was true, and we laughed at all the ways our bodies would always look weirder and weirder, the delights of middle age, and Deena used her strength to roll both of us over so she was above me now.

In the morning, Deena would get that mammogram.

In the morning, I’d take our son, Max, to middle school, and I’d come home to work on an editing deadline or ghostwriting project.

In the morning, I said, “First, let’s go for a walk.”

Said the river: imagine everything you can imagine, then keep on going.

—Mary Oliver, “At the River Clarion”

Outside our mid-century house in Santa Fe, a flagstone path leads from our front door to the sidewalk.

Turn right. Amble past our free, little library.

(It’s a busy walking street, so every day new book titles glow in the window. You can stop if you like.)

Keep walking past the cedar coyote fences and the bent chain links, past the cinder block and stucco walls.

At the corner, look both ways before you cross—even when the light holds green. It’s a notorious intersection.

Once you’re safely across, you can cut through the parking lot, blow kisses to the crows on the fenceposts, loop around the pull-up bars and the edge of the little playground, and follow the path downhill between the running track and the round labyrinth dug into the dirt.

The color scheme here is the color scheme everywhere in this high desert town: juniper greens and chamisa yellows, clay reds and tumbleweed browns.

Cross the bridge made of rusting metal and wood planks that look like rail ties.

Most seasons, the Santa Fe riverbed below runs dry, but it’s early summer now, so a streamlet flows along this endangered tributary of the Rio Grande.

From here, you can turn right or left. A paved trail wends above the waterway in both directions. I like to turn right.

Deena reached for my hand and held on.

At our feet, a gray bunny darted out from behind a stand of aspen trees and hesitated. Above, a Cooper’s hawk circled. The blue sky stretched cloudless ahead of us to the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in the distance.

I squeezed Deena’s hand. I saw she had tears in her eyes as she watched the bird. I said, “What do you think’s gonna happen?” 

She said, “I think I probably have breast cancer, so it’s a good thing we’re catching it early.”

Knives 

Deena wouldn’t be able to work at the country club anymore. 

Cancer treatments took place during business hours. Even though Deena had drawn a line at intravenous chemo, it turned out there were plenty of chemo drugs taken orally, and some other cancer treatments that weren’t considered chemo. Still, this first line of treatment— MONALEESA-7, an oral chemo—would surely make her puke. It could possibly cause her to lose her hair. Commercial kitchens are not a good place for shedding hair. She might not be able to smell.

Later, as we tried to sketch out the narrative arc of her autobiography, Deena mentioned this as an important story beat. This leaving work, this packing up her knives that felt maybe final. The way the light changed from golden to gray. The way life felt mean.

She stepped into our home kitchen through the back door, holding her knife bag, her eyes red. “I just need a bong hit,” she said softly. She set her knives on the counter. The water in her glass bong made a bubbling sound, and as she inhaled, she stifled a sob.

Bucket List 

I was learning to navigate mood and nuance as the topic of death became ever-more uncomfortable. We would not speak of it directly. Not unless Deena had that singular gleam in her eye, not unless she gave that particular nod—something that would signal her consent to continue.

After Hawaii, we would go to Europe. Deena wanted to eat pizza in Napoli. She gestured her okay to call the plans a “bucket list” even if that phrase invoked the unspeakable.

It seemed like an upbeat response: to fly away.

At home in Santa Fe, the river ran dry, and the last trickle froze. We would go to Oahu in January, Paris and Sardinia and Napoli in June.

Would Deena feel well enough then? Would she be able to take a break from treatment? Unspeakable.

I bought travel insurance.

In Hawaii, we ate sushi and drank fresh pineapple juice on the beach and dreamed we’d never have to leave. There was a strange virus in Wuhan. I told Deena stories about the days when Wuhan was the punkest place in all of China, and I was seventeen and right there in the middle of it.

Should we wear masks on the plane home? Would that be weird?

No way our Europe trip was going to happen, not if this strange new virus had already shut down China and Italy.

I called the insurance company.

They said they didn’t cover COVID. I said, “Well, the passenger has Stage 4 cancer, too.” They sent me a check. That surprised me, lemme tell you, getting something out of insurance.

Instead of snorkeling and pizza, we spent the early days of Deena’s retirement planting victory gardens and keeping her quarantined whenever Max or I thought we might have gotten exposed. I learned to book all travel plans, all long- and short-term dreams, with clear cancellation policies. I learned to buy insurance and to read the small print. I learned to live without being able to make any plans at all.

Every morning, Deena got up and made coffee, committing to the future. And I dug my fingernails into my palms to feel the sharp realism of everything I did and didn’t understand.

Starts

 Deena planted zucchini, corn, and beans with restaurant-level intensity, like we might get an evening rush. She planted Yukon spuds for my potato salad. She delivered sproutlings and saplings to doorsteps and condos all over town. If she couldn’t feed people in the ways she’d always fed people, she would find new ways.

She haunted the big commercial nurseries on the south side, collecting starts in her shoes. She brought tomatoes to Jess and basil to Sam and left Spanish tortillas on Sol’s front porch. Her friend Wendy moved to town from New York, and Deena instructed her on the nuances of New Mexican cuisine.

Our friend Anah’s mother died of COVID, and Deena messaged, “What kind of soup do you like? Pretend I’m your private chef while you’re in quarantine.”

She made Anah borscht and sweet-and-sour noodles with tofu.

She dug into the dirt, digressed from her own apocalypse.