Wednesday, September 03, 2003
Losing Face
This one gets a little disturbing. Just so you know what to expect when you read it over lunch.
Let’s talk about courage. There’s lots of kinds of courage, ways of confronting that which by all rights should have you cowering under the sheets, breathing used air because you know it’s safe. I hear about acts of extraordinary courage every day. There are soldiers enmired in hopeless wars, facing snipers and landmines, getting picked off one at a time but still answering reveille at dawn and facing the music. There are the survivors of domestic violence who must work to make up for the child support they’ll never see, fully expecting that their batterers will show up at their job at any moment to get them fired and then to assault them anew - yet they go to work anyway, choking back their fear. There are children who aren’t safe at schools that can’t teach them, much less protect them - and still they brave the streets of their cities and the hallways of their academies because it is the only way, their only hope. Courage abounds. The world is too, too full of people overcoming grave danger, petrifying fear, impossible odds. Their stories start to blend together into a haze of the possible-yet-incredible. I start to wonder if my life has room in it for that kind of strength of character.
Then there’s the man who is losing his face. I see him every week or so on the bus. He wears clothes and carries a satchel and combs his hair like everybody else; he has two hands and two legs and doesn’t take the seats that are reserved for the elderly and disabled. Something about him is wrong, though. It’s centered on the bridge of his nose, or where the bridge of his nose should be. It’s like a hole, or a deep abrasion, or an enormous scab. Really, it’s like all three of those at once. It goes halfway across either cheek, down to his upper lip, and laps at his eyebrows so it’s hard to tell where his eyes even are anymore. It is wrinkled and corrupted, and not very dry. I don’t know if he puts something on it or if it simply seeps a milky substance, but his raw open flesh looks wet and glistens. He is gruesome almost beyond my ability to bear his presence. From the side, it seems that a big chunk of his face has simply been eaten away. Little kids literally scream and run from him. Everybody who sees him evinces the universal shock evoked by disfigurement. He looks like meat. Rotting meat.
This man gets up in the morning, dresses, packs himself a lunch and walks to his front door. Does he check a mirror? Does he avoid looking at himself? Does he think of himself as he is, or as he may once have been - with regular features and a face that blended into the crowd? I don’t know. All I know about him is that he lives with what he looks like every day, having disgust and horror meet his gaze wherever he turns. Yet he opens his door and walks out into the world anyway. He makes himself keep going, braving our revulsion. One could say that he goes on because he has no choice - but he does have a choice, albeit a final and permanent one. Yet he hasn’t taken that option. He goes out and goes on, the sun warming his back, music lifting his soul. He has pleasures - I hope, pain and fear - I doubt not, and loneliness - I must imagine. But he neither gives in nor gives up. When I see him I must turn away so as not to gawk at his hideousness, but as I do so I admire him terribly. His strength and courage are an example to me which I cannot emulate but to which I nonetheless aspire. Courage can be as simple sometimes as walking out your front door with your face, or what is left of it, on your head.
