I left all my bras in Sarajevo

By / October 9, 2025 / cancer, commentary

I left all my bras in Sarajevo. This is something no one knows about me. We have returned to the Balkans – Albania at the moment – and this past life experience is in bloom, showing off substrate layers.

As a world traveler, I only carried three bras with me most of the time. The day I left Sarajevo, I thought: why on Earth would I bring these? I was about to travel to Croatia for a double mastectomy without breast reconstruction. My new life would be as a ‘flattie’ – a woman without breasts. There would be no more need for 36 B/C bras.

Sometimes I wore a B, sometimes a C. The truth is one breast was a B, the other was a C. I never had a cup bra that properly fit. If I wore a size B, the right breast would spill out. If I wore a C, the left breast would be lost. Some bras were easier to adjust, but none of them fit right. I used to hate my lopsidedness; when younger I often thought I’d get a boob job to fix it. But I never did. With age came a modicum of acceptance, or learned tolerance, or resignation.

I don’t remember the specifics about the bras I left behind. More than seven years have gone by since I put them in a plastic bag and bravely, hatefully, sorrowfully, said goodbye to the breast holders I left behind in Sarajevo — the former City of Tears. We have that in common, Sarajevo and I; I am a woman of many former tears. The bras I ditched were not white or wired — I hated those types. They were probably a nude color, a black, and maybe a purple, but all were likely practical for this early retired budget traveler: not too much padding for easier packing.

And so I put them in a plastic bag and… well, I did something with them. I’m not really sure what. I can’t exactly remember now. I think I remembered a few years ago, and I said to myself: oh how funny – you’ll have to write about that some day. But seven years have turned the bras into smears of somethings in a fuzzy setting on a recollection shelf somewhere in my mind. Maybe I put them in the kitchen trash can. Or maybe I left the bag of bras on the bed, or on the nightstand. Perhaps I tossed the bag into the dumpster outside our Airbnb rental – a giant concrete tower in a complex with bullet holes left from the Siege of Sarajevo.

In any case, my bras stayed behind in Sarajevo – City of Roses, City of Tears – as I went onward to Croatia to have a double mastectomy in a private clinic for early-stage breast cancer. The bras don’t haunt me; Sarajevo does.

We had planned to stay in the former City of Tears for a full month. We ended up staying 10 days. Within that time, I wandered around communist-era blocks with battle scars, walked through graveyards on the city’s surrounding hills, cried at the genocide museum, and went back to our rental apartment to plan how to respond to a breast cancer diagnosis. Like the bra details, I don’t remember much about the mundane during those 10 days. What stands out most during this time are the Sarajevo Roses. The man-made symbols and also the Earth-spawned bushes gave me an infallible belief that ‘Life is Now’.

Sarajevo Roses are mortar marks from sites where people died during the city’s siege. The deep pocks are filled in with red resin, and the shapes resemble roses. Over time, these Roses have begun disappearing as the city continues to rebuild some 30 years after the siege. When I was there with my husband in the summer of 2018, there were some Sarajevo Rose memorials still left. I was moved, of course. And I was equally moved by the city’s living roses on sturdy bushes anchored into the banks of the Miljaka River, in the same area where an assassination sparked World War I.

I found late blooms in early July. Those rose bushes were a ray of light to my black mood. The petals were already browning, past their prime, but the bushes were certainly alive. My breasts were like those aging roses — past their prime at 46 years, yet they still held supple signs of life on my living, breathing body. The roses still had inner velvety spots on their bright petals. The bushes, rooted in Earth, held promise of a future bloom. Like these rose bushes, I had promise to stay alive for another season — beyond my upcoming pruning to stop cancer growth.

This analogy might sound slightly poetic, maybe it even has a streak of a twisted romanticism. But it is not the full Truth. There is a darker side.

When I wandered around Sarajevo during those days between breast cancer diagnosis and double mastectomy, I was outwardly like a ghost, inwardly fighting trauma. I was something like the older people around the City of Tears. These people share a distinct look — a vacant stare. A trauma that lives on inside of them. They lived through a genocidal siege in their hometown, and then stayed. Mine was only a cancerous siege, far from home, and then I stayed. It is a different trauma, but in this moment, we still share the Now, and we are still alive.

Thanks for reading, “I left all my bras in Sarajevo.”

About Ellen

Ellen’s sobriety date is April 13, 2010. She left the news business in 2015 to travel the world on a budget with spouse Theo in early retirement.

She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2018 while traveling and had a double mastectomy without reconstruction in Croatia. She recovered, and kept traveling the world as a ‘flattie‘.

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