On Beauty

Sitting by Larry’s side, I took in his face. His was a face that had changed substantially over the years, a roadmap of his life and cancer journey. His wide forehead housed a rectangular protrusion from 2020 when surgeons opened his skull to work on a tumour that had grown against his skull base and right eye. This same site was again lifted in 2022 to get to tumours that were in his brain. “It can be opened and closed, like the lid on a Milo tin,” his surgeon explained with mirth at its ingenuity. Below his forehead, Larry’s nose bridge was mostly flat. It had started collapsing after radiation in 2012, and by 2022, was almost non-existent. To wear glasses at home instead of contact lenses, he’d stick his adhesive eye patch to the top of his nose, which kept his glasses from sliding. Since the surgery in 2020 shifted its alignment, his right eye had been behind an eye patch. The eye patch helped him to see - out of only one eye - or he would otherwise have double vision. But also, he believed, it helped him to be seen - as a ‘normal person’. To most people, an eye patch was less jarring than a deformed eye. Even then, strangers would sometimes steal second and third glances of his face, or ask him about his eye patch. And though he was by nature mild-tempered, it grated on his nerves when taxi drivers asked one too many questions, or when children called him a ‘monster’. He much preferred ‘pirate’.

In the months leading to his death, he shedded the patch, the first of many layers that unfurled, like petals of a flower bud. It didn’t matter to him anymore how he saw - to reduce the double vision, he moved slowly and picked a point close enough to focus on, usually a point just beyond his feet. But most of all, it didn’t seem to matter to him anymore how he was seen. After 2 years, his right eye was finally uncovered and received as much light, sun and breeze as the rest of his face.

That afternoon, our sheer white curtain fluttered and grazed the foot of his bed, a bed we had rented from the hospice so we could feed and clean him with more ease. Neither of us knew then when his last day would be but we knew it was approaching. When I looked at him, I saw peace. “You’re so beautiful,” I said to him, caressing his face. I remember thinking how profoundly the meaning of the word beautiful has shifted for me as it lingered in the silence that followed.

There are three entries in the Cambridge dictionary for beautiful: very attractive; very pleasant; very kind. Though not intended to be sequential, the three definitions parallel the evolution of my own understanding of ‘beauty’. One of my earlier memories of beauty, or more accurately, my lack thereof, was when I was 9, looking at my bare thighs in shorts at Physical Education class, then at the other girls’ legs and wishing I could cover mine up because they were ‘jiggly’ and un-beautiful. It was around that age that I became increasingly aware of society’s yardstick for measuring one’s beauty by their outer attractiveness. Thankfully as I got older, life experiences expanded my scope for beauty so that I learnt also to appreciate the beauty in music, art, nature, and human behaviour.

By all three Cambridge dictionary definitions, Larry was a beautiful man. In the 19 years that we shared life, I saw all facets of him, and deeply admired his beauty, even, and especially when cancer became a part of his life. But in Larry’s final weeks, his unfurled petals gradually began to shed. The term used in science to describe this process of flower organs falling off is abscission, a word originally borrowed from Latin which means cutting off. As he approached the end of life, his body entered a process of cutting off its functions so that he stopped moving, speaking, eating and eventually, breathing. In this stage of his life, he no longer fit neatly in the dictionary definitions of beautiful. Yet when I looked at him, prostrate and peaceful, I was overcome by beauty, a beauty I’ve never known and felt. I could almost see through his skin and flesh, and into his soul - like looking into the ink black sky at night, speckled with stars, and knowing it goes on infinitely. He was physically still with us, but it seemed to me that his consciousness had already begun shifting into a different realm where his essence resides. Even as the light of his external life dimmed, the light of his eternal self kept glowing. I beheld this beauty. It was transcendent, and doesn’t yet have a place in our dictionaries.

At bedtime last night, Georgia pulled “Still Mine” from the shelves. “We haven’t read this in a long time,” she said. The first time we saw this book was last year when I brought the girls to the library. Larry was in the hospital and life was anything but normal, but I clung on to any semblance of normalcy I could give the girls. We had walked past a wall of shelves on our way to the children’s section but something made me stop and look back. My gaze fell directly on the cover of a picture book that seemed to draw me to it by an invisible thread. I knelt on the floor next to the shelf where the book was and the girls sat on my sides while I read. We were 9 pages in when I read the line, “Now you are gone and I can’t come along,” and burst into tears. Only then did it cotton on that this was a book about the death of loved ones. A few months later, after Larry died, I ordered this picture book, amongst others, all on the subject of death.

Last night, a week after the first anniversary of Larry’s death, we cuddled up in bed reading the book. “My eyes can’t see you anymore; my arms can’t hug you. But you are always there- just in a different way.” We started listing ways in which Larry is still here with us - dreams, feathers, flowers, wind, chimes, birds, numbers, food, songs…

Ushering Larry to the end of this life expanded my lens of beauty beyond the tangible and the sensorial to include the ethereal. My world has grown a lot bigger since, and I’m touched by beauty far more often. The day I looked at Larry and was moved by a beauty that is divine, was also the day I began to see that this beauty exists in all.