The Survivors' Circle

The countdown has officially begun. After all of these months of training and preparation, I am having a hard time believing that the 3-Day is less than a week away. My stomach seems to have become home to a rather active flock (flock? group? bunch?) of butterflies, and my bedroom floor is a disaster area of piles of walk-related stuff. Mom arrives in just five days, and if everything goes according to plan, a week from now, we should be just about halfway through our 60 miles. Yikes!

As we draw ever closer to these three days, my mind keeps going back to past breast cancer walks. One of the many emotional moments in the 3-Day is the survivors' circle. Every walk begins and ends with the procession of the survivors' circle, which is a group of men and women who have survived breast cancer, who walk in a circle, holding hands. The empty space in the middle of the circle represents those who have been lost to the disease. The survivors process through all of the other walkers in silence, as everyone remembers those who have died from breast cancer. The entire experience is tremendously moving.

Here are the words that were read about the survivors' circle during the Closing Ceremonies at the 2002 walk, when Mom and I walked from Baltimore back to DC: "In the distance, you will see a group of men and women holding hands around an empty circle. The same circle we created three days ago in Baltimore. We used the circle then to remember, and we use it to remember now all those sweet souls lost to breast cancer--our mothers, our daughters, our sisters, our friends, our grandmothers and granddaughters.

We use it to remember a time when there was laughter and conversation. We use it to bring back, for a moment, the sounds of their voices, the fleeting mist of their faces, in the eyes of our minds. We use the circle to hold our tears. The 3-Day is a place where it is safe to let go of your tears--tears honor life. For we miss them. And they miss us as well.

But the circle holds more than tears now. It holds memories of the last three days--some of the happiest days of our lives. It holds the memories of new friends, new experiences. It holds the promise of a new self--new possibilities, new challenges, a new life, not ordered by the limits of the past, but wide open to the wildest of dreams. It holds 4800 spirits of the living now re-awakened. It holds our magnificence. And it holds the thought that we can do anything together.

Perhaps we see a glimpse now of what those who have departed have been waiting for us to see. Perhaps they helped deliver us here to see that life is to be explored. It is not to be squandered on doubt and on caution--that life is, in the end, to be lived."