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WHAT IF YOU THINK YOUR BODY IS TRULY UNLOVABLE?
This post is a response to my friend, Nirmala Seshadhri Jaggannath, who lost her husband, Steve, last year. She has kindly let me use it for my blog. This is her response to the last post, LOVING YOUR BODY:
Dear Kamla:
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The specific lines that moved me were, first: Don’t know if I could have grasped his love for me in that situation.
These words would not have resonated with me if I hadn’t experience the following the night before. The right side of my head, down my ear and into my jaw was hurting again last night, and being a hypochondriac I thought the worst, that I had a tumor, that half my face would have to be removed and I would be the Woman with Half a Face. How would I cover half my face, to shield others from what I consider a ‘horrible sight’, and shield myself from their curiosity/pity/horror/derision? Going through all the scenarios in my mind I knew only one thing for certain: that in such an eventuality I would withdraw from the world (yes, even more than I have already done), perhaps even from Payson who I would not want to straddle with a hunch back of Notre Dame, a smeeve, a golum, an ET, etc.
Again, in Nirmala’s wise words, there are many circumstances in which giving love is easier than actually receiving it.
There are things in things in life one cannot transcend, that matter so deeply that one chooses to live in the sewers, like the Phantom of the Opera, or even annihilation. Some events and internal circumstances are simply so painful that one comes up against one’s weak and helpless human core, the existential abyss upon which we are so precariously perched, as on a bubble.
This is a subject worth exploring since I am coming up upon the 20th death anniversary of Donald Dean Powell (1946 — 1983), my late husband, who destroyed himself 20 years ago on August 18th. He was not deformed physically, but had come up against, repeatedly, what he considered his ‘failure,’ something he couldn’t live with.
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