I cant give you back what nature gave you, he began.
Well, thats okay, I replied, a few months shy of my 45th birthday.
My face was going to be changing soon anyway.
Courtesy of subject
Watt, a trained opera singer, is seen here in costume for a production ofCarmen.
These perverse vanities did not originate with me.
Even uber-feminist poet May Sarton once described an aging woman as a grotesque miserable animal.
Watt, a trained opera singer, is seen here in costume for a production ofCarmen.
How I resented this poison against the cycles of life, especially my own.
For I had my life, my limbs, and love.
I had been saved by grace, brilliance, dedication, and courage.
Watt in more recent years during a choir concert.
To complain of aging, even inside my head, was petty and unworthy, I knew.
The battle for life may be waged in the craniofacial OR but not won in any conclusive sense.
All that can be done has been done, and were now disease-free.
But no longer dying.
For scant prior experience prepares a patient to face what memoirist Lucy Grealy described as the deep bottomless grief.
It is no comfort to know psychologists study disfigurement under a clinical entity called the Quasimodo Complex.
The human predilection for pleasing harmonies is universal, even as real human experience veers toward disharmony everywhere.
So, smooth symmetries become synonymous with virtue.
Its not unique to our own selfie era.
Its in our culture.
My facial reconstruction dragged on, with setbacks.
The most noticeable aftermath was around my eye, which I protected behind an eyepatch throughout my procedures.
Wearing a contact lens in my good eye, I made up my face as usual.
And the rindy scar tissue resisted my usual foundation, mascara, and liquid liner.
Everything slid across my new contours, directly into my bad eye.
I looked into my options.
The first thing coming up around my new criteria was mortuary makeup.Ack.
So everyone looks pretty good, but by different routes.
It could work for me.But only on half my face.
Next I discovered permanent makeup, to satisfy my beauty regimen forever, or almost.
For better and for worse.
Watt in more recent years during a choir concert.
I loved looking my best, onstage and off.
But after cancer, I just wanted to look normal.
More like a completed vessel than a potters pile of thrown clay.
For, as everyone knows, when reception is bad, the short-circuit is sometimes in the receiver.
I know I have options for enhancing my attractiveness at any age according to any rubric.
And sometimes I do.
But now I know I donthaveto.
Thats the beauty of it.
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