One of the last times I saw Kathy Acker she was wearing a gauzy white top through which you could see her mastectomy scars. She was tiny, wide-eyed and gossipy. We didn’t talk about the cancer. It was impossible to. Just as it was impossible to not see what was happening. She was healing herself and had rejected Western medicine. She was not to be a passive patient, an object; instead she would be subject, a seeker of alternative wisdom, and that wisdom would save her. “I live as I believe, that belief is equal to the body,” she wrote.
She died in 1997 in an clinic in Tijuana, Mexico. She had wanted to go to a Gerson Institute alternative treatment centre, but the disease was so advanced they would not take her.
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