The Hat Lady

“The Hat Lady,” by Linda Pastan, was a sad poem that took the reader through the death of a cancer patient with the use of hats. The “hat lady” possibly represents a doctor or a care giver for this lady who has cancer. She comes and “measures” for the mother’s hat, and it represents the docter measuring her health and how long the patient has left. “Last year when the chemicals took my mother’s hair, she wrapped a towel around her head. And the Hat Lady came, a bracelet of needles on each arm, and led her to a place where my father and grandfather waited, (…)” This is the part where the doctor or care giver takes the “needles and pins,” and gives the patient the drugs to help her slip peacfully into a different place and pass a way. When it says, “led her to a place,” I ultimatly think that references the care giver helping the cancer patient pass over to heaven. This poem takes hats and I don’t really know how else to describe it, but it makes them show death in a way? The first stanza helps describe my thinking, “In a childhoodof hats— my uncles in homburgs and derbies, Fred Astaire in high black silk, the yarmulke my grandfather wore like the palm of a hand cradling the back of his head— only my father went hatless, even in winter.” In this stanza I believe the hats represent the many that the poet knows who have had cancer and it has taken their life. She says that her father went hatless… so I can only conclude that he didn’t ever have cancer, but still is no longer with her because her mother meets her father again in heaven in the last stanza. At the end of the day, this poem was sad, yet it was very interesting; it really makes the reader think about cancer and how it affects many people in the world.