Making meaning out of hair loss

Second week of chemo, after having my shoulder-length hair cut short.

In the back of my linen closet is a clear plastic bag of my own hair.

Like many people preparing for cancer treatment, I got my hair cut as short as possible to avoid having handfuls come out in the shower, on my pillow, or when running my fingers through it.

On a warm, sunny day in early September 2023, sitting on a kitchen chair outside on my patio, a hairdresser who makes house calls cut my shoulder-length hair to three inches on top and much shorter at the sides and back. Afterwards, I swept up the cuttings, which were entangled with bits of leaves that had fallen from the chestnut tree in our garden.

I thought I might want to do some sort of ritual with the hair. For example, I’d read about burning it as a way of saying goodbye to the past. Then I thought, no, that might smell awful. Plus, it would deprive the local blackbirds, wood pigeons and sparrows of using my old hair to make nests for their babies next year.

I’d also read about women inviting friends over and making a celebratory

The bag of my old hair, which lives in the back of my linen closet.

party out of shaving their head before chemo. I admired the women who brought this sense of celebration rather than gloom to their experience, but it didn't feel right for me.

Ultimately, I was looking for a way to make meaning out of my experience, but I couldn't settle on the right way to do it. Also, I wasn't ready to say goodbye. So I decided to save the hair for later, in a Ziplock bag, for when I might know better what to do.

Grief and mourning

My new haircut didn't last long. Within a couple of weeks, I noticed lots of short hairs on my pillow, and in the sink when I tousled my hair. So I asked my husband to shave it off. I sat on the same kitchen chair as before, this time indoors because the weather had turned. I heard the 'click' and the deep buzz of the clippers, and I cried as he moved them over my scalp.

This time I didn’t save the hair. I swept it up and dumped it straight into the compost. Later that day, my husband cut his own hair super short, in solidarity.

Rebirth and renewal

In the book ‘Entanglement: The Secret Lives of Hair’, Emma Tarlo writes about the practice of tonsuring in India – of cutting off the hair as a spiritual act or sacrifice. Removing one’s hair, she writes, is “ … an apt gesture for expressions of humility, self-sacrifice, renunciation and rebirth.”

“A tonsured head may be humbling and temporarily disfiguring," she writes, "but it also signifies ... passage to a new phase of life ... Hair’s vital capacity to regrow makes it an ideal symbol of renewal…”

I wanted to believe I could be renewed and reborn, instead of feeling damaged, degraded and used up by the ravages of treatment. However, without the cultural and religious underpinnings of tonsuring like in Indian temples, losing my hair was a lonely experience that seemed to have no meaning at all.

Hair’s vital capacity to regrow makes it an ideal symbol of renewal… – Emma Tarlo, Entanglement: The Secret Lives of Hair

Breathing in

Fortunately, I had started meditating again and was reminded by Buddhist teacher Sharon Salzberg that each time we breathe in we are reborn and renewed. Likewise, each out-breath is a little death, a letting go of what was.

The more I practiced this – exhaling, letting everything go, and inhaling, beginning again – the more I realized that feeling reborn or renewed is something I can choose. It is a sense of starting afresh in every moment, with every breath. When everything else felt out of my control, feeling reborn in each moment was something I could invite in. Every breath was a new opportunity for rebirth.

All through that long autumn and winter, with my head covered in a fuzz of soft, new fur, I breathed out and let go. The next moment, I breathed in, filling myself with fresh life, with the new and unknown.

Fledgling

It’s now been ten months since I finished treatment, and there are 4 inches of new hair on my head. The bag of my old hair is still on a shelf in the back of the linen closet.

Autumn is approaching fast, and all the baby birds have long since fledged. So, I'm thinking of saving my old hair for next spring – the season of renewal and rebirth – when the birds might make use of it to build their new nests.

According to Tarlo, hair has “...the capacity ... to retain connection to the person from whom it has been detached.” In this light, I sense something poetic about putting my old hair at the back of the closet, like tucking away some aspect of my old self. The old Wendy, with her long, straight, fine brown hair, waiting for me in the back of the closet until the new me is ready to let her go.