With a traumatic brain injury, no one can tell you how it will end, or how much the victim will recover. There are no percentages; each injury is as individual as we are. And although our family had a happy ending and a strong recovery, I can vividly recall how each day of that early period in the ICU contained a fresh set of worries. In the quieter months after the initial shock, I began to think a lot about what constitutes love and how beauty stirs desire. But what, I wondered, sustains it?
I had always taken an unarticulated pride in my husband’s athletic appearance, the way he could walk into a room and unintentionally command it. “You look like you belong together,” people would tell us. And of course that was all just one part of a whole, only a fraction of “us” as a couple.But how would attraction and even love change in the wake of disfigurement and potential disability? What if losing what I loved on the outside meant things would change on the inside? Does a relationship mutate when beauty diminishes? Is something else strengthened?
What a shallow line of thinking, I chided myself. We had been married 18 years, were raising four incredible children. Both of us had worked to build a strong foundation, connected at so many critical points. Throughout history, couples have endured cancer, disfiguring burns, chronic pain, disease and accidents and have come out the other side, often stronger than before. Sure, life doesn’t promise anyone a rose garden, but no one ever expects to be handed a leaking bag of feces either. I had loved everything about our life exactly the way it was; I hadn’t wanted any of it to change.
This is the part where I am supposed to tell you that I love his scars; that they symbolize all that we survived together. But I do not. I miss that old face. These newer crags and divets remind me that the line that separates the before and after in this world is the thickness of a human hair. At some point most all of us will taste that bittersweet fruit of adversity. Life can change in an instant.
We find out more about ourselves in the periods we are tested than we do during the moments we succeed. It’s easy to navigate life in the places where the road runs straight and even. Sometimes the trick is to find beauty in the hairpin turn or the mountain switchback, to summon the courage to sift through the ashes of our darkest moments. There is a wonderful simplicity when I lie next to my husband now, and examine his face: the beauty exists in the very fact that he is still here, with me.
