Catherine Gigante-Brown

Mindel and Maria were young teenagers when the horrors occurred—but they remembered the tiniest details with crystal-clear intensity.

As a breast cancer survivor, the worst day of the year is when I go for my mammogram. True, nobody actually likes mammos, but I’ve been bitten by one. On the way to my annual squishing, I realized that I have a bunch of coping strategies.

I asked a handful of women: why are people so scared of ladyparts?

I’m boycotting you until you start recognizing breast cancer survivors like me by carrying mastectomy bras.

I try. I really do. But whenever I attempt to embrace my husband Peter’s Cuban culture, I always screw up.

I left Cuba in 1949, when I was 11 years old. Back then, I didn't understand why my mother sent me away. I still don't.

I was 21 –– a Catholic, heterosexual college student, living at home in Brooklyn and still trying to discover who I was. At the crossroads of her life, Lorde knew exactly who she was. She was waging a war against cancer and sharing an old house in Staten Island with her kids and partner. But maybe we weren’t so different after all.

“It’s almost as though this niche was patiently waiting for us to find it.”

My husband and I agreed: raising a child with an independent spirit who made decisions for himself was a good thing.

"I was afraid this thing was going to do me in. But I took a deep breath and decided very early on that I would face cancer on my own terms."