Every Love is For Us

This is one of my son Kai's sculptures that he made four years ago in his grade ten art class at Victoria's Mt. Douglas High School. Kai has been sculpting since he was a toddler. While he was growing up, working with sculpting media was the only thing that was able to entertain him.  When Kai got to high school and had access to a kiln and limitless clay, he was in sculptor heaven.

At the time Kai told me that this sculpture was about loving. I think he called it "The Embrace". What I love about this sculpture is that at sixteen, my son was able to express through his art work what most of us middle aged folks are still struggling to become reconciled to. To choose to love is to wrap our arms around a person or a passion, and it is also a choice to be speared through the chest in the midst of the embrace. That fact is the balance of life.

I am not advocating for the pursuit of dysfunctional relationships, or telling you that being abused by a lover or friend or family member is your spiritual destiny, I am simply saying there is no love without injury, and there is no joy with out an equal amount of sorrow. It is the yin and yang of life. Light is what makes the shadow. The endurance of winter is what is required in order to welcome the arrival of spring.

I frequently listen to people verbally tantrum over this balance of life. They want the light but not the dark. They want the benefit but not the price. Whatever it is that they do not have, that is what they decide to want. They hate the discomfort of yin. They want a big pile of yang. And don't get me wrong, I've been there. I too have cried for the big pile of yang.

This is almost every conversation between close friends. We report on the things that are going well, and then we report on the things we don't like that are happening, as if we could separate them from each other. But all of these circumstances are actually one thing and it is called LIFE. That is why jealousy is so silly, because whatever that other person has that looks so good to us always comes with something that is equally unpleasant, something that we probably just don't know about.

Spring has arrived in Tokyo and I am enjoying the mild weather and natural beauty that surrounds me. I take quiet walks in the nearby forest and at the local shrine, and I am overwhelmed with gratefulness for my life here. In equality at times I am overwhelmed with how much I miss my family. It is the yin and yang of my life. I love my family a lot, but I also love Japanese people with an equally overwhelming passion.

NO! NUKES NO! WAR NO! EXPLOIT NO! FASCISM some musicians on the train last night with their guitars and their political opinions... the best part of watching them was how much they made each other laugh. they had love.

I am completely convinced that there are no people more magnificent than the Japanese people, and that is why it fills me with joy to spend my time in life using my gifts and talents to help improve the chances of Japanese children to fulfill their ultimate personal potential. By supporting Japanese children now, to fulfill their potential in the future, I believe that I am fulfilling mine. Whether I am quietly puttering about my apartment, or out and about on various escapades, I am constantly plotting ways to use my unique creativity to support more Japanese children in bigger and better ways, that I hope will eventually assist them to be of greater benefit to the world. Maybe this sounds like a lofty goal, but I like to be incredibly challenged on a daily basis. That is also why I chose to raise four children instead of two. I like to be busy and to do something that will have a lasting impact. I like to be in way over my head. Not everybody is able to be my friend because of my extreme personality, and because like everyone else, I also have as many demons as I have angels.

sakura over the dead

what's not to love?!

the kichijoji funk band i get to jam with

rishu and his mom at our favourite raman place

a tokyo salary man loaded down with his loves

   In February my sister got married to her longtime sweetheart, who is the father of one grown and two almost grown amazing children. We had such a unique and private celebration of their marriage, in our empty little country church, but for the two families gathered together to celebrate this beautiful love. It was so yin and so yang. I was overjoyed to be with my family, but my brother's grave was behind the church, reminding me that one of us hadn't made it this far. All of my children were there, being wonderfully talented and gorgeous, singing a song my sister had written for the wedding, but their father was absent, and that was my fault, by divorcing him, which made me sad. But I was also so happy, because I was with my family and because I have this fantastic life in Japan, and all of this is ultimately because there is no happy without sad. Nobody gets to ditch the parts of life that hurt. Life is the dancer, we are all just doing our best to play the music of being ourselves with as much integrity as is possible.

My parents were attending their beautiful daughter's  wedding together, at peace with one another, after years of conflict, an unhappy marriage and a traumatic divorce. The balance of life. They had endured the hard stuff, and this was their reward.

This got me thinking about the purpose of love, asking questions like "Is the primary goal of love for things to work out between two people the way that they had hoped them to?" and not just with romantic love, but with every love we share with one another, our friendships, our family relationships, and even our mad crushes. Or is the purpose of love something all together different than the pressure we put upon it?

just before the ceremony, kai is on my right, my parents are on either side of the bride and groom, my older children are to their grandfather's left in a row of three. all others in the photo are the wonderful groom's beautiful children and lovely parents.

where my brother john was, we had a very cold candle lit toast over his grave after the ceremony.

I am beginning to conclude that the purpose of love is not for our personal satisfaction or emotional happiness, although those things can certainly be a wonderful perk within our loving relationships. But I am suspecting that the ultimate purpose of love is creativity and transformation. I think that love is meant to bring people together in order to create a life experience with one another, an experience that will ultimately transform them into their wiser and deeper selves.

What if love, every love, is always, ALWAYS a gift, including the loves that result in our greatest heart breaks and our most desecrated bank accounts? Why would we regret any love? For example, so many important and hugely contributing members of the human race would not have existed were it not for the love and physical passion of some of the most ill matched and miserable couples to have ever copulated. Those loves should not be regretted.

my daughters

And there are so many other things that are created by people who love each other, by friends or lovers who take on projects, or support each other in all sorts of ways, projects that are beautiful and contributing to this world, by friends or lovers who may at some point part ways with one another in terrible disappointment.

And what about the catastrophic loves? The loves that embarrass us the most? Those can be the most transforming loves of all. Those epic fail loves can actually catapult us into heights of wisdom and prudence we would previously never have imagined as possible for ourselves.

Love inspires creativity and it has the capacity to transform us into being far more than we were before that love took us on its hazardous journey. If every love is for us, including the ones that are not happily ever after, including the uncomfortable loves with family members or friends who end up estranged from us, then nothing needs to be wasted when we are determined to find the benefit within it. We know there is always a yin for every yang, so we don't need to be surprised when the hard stuff comes up. And in regard to jealousy, we should never wish for somebody else's yang, because it would only come with an equal yin, one that we might not have the strength for. Instead we can be grateful for our own balance of joys and sorrows in life. For our every moment, our every tear, our every smile, and for our every love.

father of the bride... way more entertaining than any movie ever made

For me my sister's wedding was not only about the love of the bride and the groom, the wedding was about every love represented that day. The love of the groom's parents, whom danced together at the reception, letting their hair down to celebrate the marriage of the eldest of the seven children they had raised together in a marriage that had lasted their entire adult lives. It was also about the love represented by my children's presence, the sorrow of my failed marriage, and the glaring absence of their father, and it was about the love I have for myself that required me to tragically end that marriage. It was about the love of my brother who was there in his own way. It was about the love of the newly deemed cousins celebrating their official status, and it was the love of my sister as a step mother to her flock of beloveds. It was about the love of the community that protected the church from being sold off as threatened a few years ago, allowing us to have this beautifully private occasion in this sacred place, and the love of friends that had allowed the bride and groom to stay for the weekend in their beach house, which added so much relaxation to the weekend. It was about the love between my parents whom after such a terrible ordeal of disappointed love, were standing together giving their daughter away in marriage to the sound of her and her sister and their grandchildren singing and making beautiful music in the same place that they had christened her as a baby. I could see how my parents were overwhelmed to the point of holding back tears. That was such a beautiful moment to me, because it powerfully echoed my thought that every love is for us. 

click on the link below if you want to see the bride's family singing to the grooms family <3

my sister's wedding,video of us singing

For some reason, I absolutely love that we are singing and the church pews are empty.

me and some beautiful j babies, i believe these are the future solvers of our world energy crisis puzzle, canadians like my mother can stop the pipeline by standing outside the liquor store with petitions, and in the meantime i will prepare these geniuses with the skills they need to bring their engineering brilliance onto the world stage. let's get things done!

Keep Going Sister

My brother John died last month. The day after his funeral which I did not return to Canada for, I went on a camping vacation to probably the most incredible place I have ever visited away from the glorious gorgeousness of my own province. I went camping on a small volcanic island off of the Izu Peninsula called Niijima. The campsite was free and I was surrounded by a back drop of geographical beauty, joyful surfers surfing, and a group of creatively inspiring hula hoopers hooping. It was in the midst of this overwhelming outer good fortune that I was processing my own greatest inner turmoil both in personal circumstances and in state of mind.

Life is complicated. Death is complicated. Sibling relationships are complicated. Love is complicated. Creating our own physical and emotional health is complicated. Putting up 'boundaries' is complicated. Having a schizophrenic brother is complicated. To be honest, sometimes I am just really `gosh darned` tired of how freaking complicated it all is. But we can`t give up right? or so I am told by good friends.

Who is a person's brother to them? For every person it is a different relationship, as unique as the individuals involved and the circumstances of life they find themselves born into. Some of us don't even have a brother, so perhaps they dream of an idyllic relationship with the brother they wished to have had, sort of like a single person dreams of an idyllic relationship with a partner they wish for.  In my case I had a real brother, a complicated one. I arrived in this world two years and three months after him. It was just John and Kristin until seven years later when we both won the lottery with the arrival of our surprise baby sister Katie.

My older brother's hand was probably the first I ever held on a regular basis, but only when we were terribly small toddlers, as ours was not to be an affectionate or pleasant relationship. I adored him, but the feeling was never mutual. I like to think that during the short time when I was still a baby that my brother John didn't mind me, because from my earliest recollection, my brother did not like me at all, ever. My brother was a reserved and intelligent person, and although wonderfully friendly to others, it was no secret that I was his nemesis. I was an overtly expressive little girl who received a lot of attention from strangers over my beautiful coloured eyes and my avid interest in connecting with the people who crossed my path. But as far as my intellect, I was never in the running for any sort of academic awards and my brother`s aptitude in math was always a great mystery to me.

my eyes forty years later, surrounded by the beautiful eyes of younger women on niijima

In our teens my brother was wonderful with our grandparents and all older people, whereas I loved children and thought elderly people were grey haired kill joys. John and I were night and day. Probably the only thing we shared was our love for and giftedness in music, something that our baby sister Katie would also inherit from both of our ill matched and soon to be divorced parents. But John even hated the way that I sang and used to scold me for it. Now that he is dead, I think I can safely say that I really don`t think there was one thing that my brother John ever liked about me, except that I moved to Japan.

In 2010 when I moved to Japan and my brother John said goodbye to me, he gave me a large and genuine hug. It surprised me. We had long ago negotiated an unspoken truce between us, but when I left for Japan I could actually sense his sincere well wishes for me as I embarked on my great adventure to a country that my family has always had a love for and fascination with. Twenty seven years ago John had embarked on a similar adventure. He went off to Europe and North Africa and worked in England in order to explore and make his own way in the world. It was during his two year international adventure that his schizophrenia appeared, the mental illness that he would suffer from for twenty five years. Schizophrenia, the medical condition that would isolate him from his friends and his dreams and his aptitudes and his potential for success.

family send off to tokyo october 2010, the day i got the HUG

If I had thought that John`s and my relationship had been challenging when we were kids, our relationship as he navigated every day with a devastating mental illness, was even more difficult. But we kept going. We were a brother and sister with completely opposite lives. I had the weight and wealth of responsibilities of raising four children at a very young age, my fourth child was born to me when I was only 24. John had the responsibility of trying to stay alive, and managing his episodes of psychosis, followed by a strict regime of medication and dealing with their many side effects. I watched his journey, he watched mine. We were brother and sister, two years and three months apart.

24 and 26, a mother of four and a young man after five years of schizophrenia 

The misfortune and losses of my brother`s life are too extensive and depressing to fully list, but I was witness to how he kept going. The fact that he carried on despite of everything was ultimately how he won my admiration. It was the most difficult on my mother who would become repetitively distressed as she witnessed her son`s world becoming smaller and smaller. She was understandably tortured by the upset of him suffering from the medication side effects of his parkinsons like tremors, shaking so badly that it was hard for him to feed himself, in additional to the diseases of cancer and diabetes which were added to what John had to deal with. What upset her the most was that he spent almost all of his time alone. I don`t know when we all understood and accepted that John would never finish his degree in sociology, or have a proper career worthy of his intellect, or raise a family, or be fit and healthy and play music the way that he used to. It was one loss at a time. I guess we all just kept going.

Something that has been interesting to me since John`s death is realizing what happens when a family group carries a member who is sick for many years. When that family member dies without warning, the group is disorientated. That person who needed us, to whom we were so important to has suddenly vanished. Twenty five years of our family group`s journey has included taking care of, and including, and being concerned about a person who was mentally ill. By his death, although it was of natural causes, the physically weakest person in our family group who in some ways defined us, has abandoned us. What do we do now without our person to carry? Who are we without our John?

John has always made me re evaluate my thoughts about what we each `contribute`in this world. I cannot imagine raising my four children without a schizophrenic uncle, as he so greatly contributed to who they are so far as developing their compassion and kindness toward others. Using his intelligent mind to converse with each of them while caught inside of a shaking and suffering body, my brother John taught my children to respect all people, including those in unfortunate circumstances.

Now that my brother`s life journey is over and the story of his spirit has been told, it feels like I have a greater amount of responsibility to tell the stories that are mine and yet to unfold. John`s death at 46 sent me into a crisis about my own life, about where I should be, and about what I should be doing with the story of life that I have been given to tell.

I had to take everything apart and figure out if I should return to Canada to be with my family in the immediate coming years, or if I should stay in Japan. It has been a long long time since my big brother John has held my hand, but by him leaving this world last month, as I faced a future without him, my hand has never felt emptier.

So there I was on Niijima at a Hula Hooper retreat in one of the most beautiful settings in the world, trying to sort out what to do with my life again. Fortunately I was with my Jewish friend Liane Wakabayashi, an artist and a writer who created the Genesis Cards. The Genesis Cards are these wonderfully beautiful tools that can be used to facilitate creativity and life direction through the intuitive process. http://www.genesiscards.com/ With the Genesis Cards Liane patiently helped me use my intuition to map out my life direction.

My assumption that I should leave Japan was clarified as a ruse. I will stay in Japan. It seems that I have more stories to live out in this great country. I feel grateful and excited for all that comes next for me, even though I also feel deep sadness that I don`t have a brother back home anymore. Keep going sister. That is how I feel about my life when I think of my dearly departed brother John. In the beauty of the earth I hear John saying `Keep going sister.`

Scroll down to see related videos. One from Niijima, and one from Canada.

The music festival on Niijima with the surfers and the hoopers

My younger sister`s song `If I`m not Dead`with her band Pawnshop Diamond in Vancouver

top photo gratitude to Rob Moreno

Portraits

Twelve months ago I meandered into a stand up drinking bar in Shibuya by accident, because I had a bit of extra time in the late afternoon, and because it seemed like an interesting place to be. I had been living in Tokyo for three months and had just come through an unreasonable series of travails. Still weak and recovering from a bad bout of pneumonia that had seen me hospitalized a few weeks earlier, and only arriving in the country six weeks before that, I was still completely and passionately in love with the enormous city of Tokyo, a place  that seemed to pull to it my kind of people; creative, eccentric, and brave souls. Being happy hour, the bar began to fill up with an equal collection of Japanese and expatriates who were winding down from a long day out on the job. It was there and then that I met the talented photographer Alfie Goodrich, who would more importantly become my friend. Alfie was with another photographer, and the two of them and myself began a fascinating and humorous conversation with an interesting young journalist from America who spoke with a strong Southern accent. 

Sometimes you meet people that you understand very quickly, and who understand you. Alfie and I were like that. We were born in the same year, 1969. We were the baby busters who arrived on this planet after all of those baby boomers had already blazed their path to greatness and used up a considerable amount of resources in doing so. Both of us understood what it is like to get to the table too late for the big helping of easy come opportunities. Alfie and I also had the shared history of being freelancing artists, him as a photographer and me as a performer, who had managed the pressures of supporting children without the security of being an employee. Pursuing your professional passion when it is only your own provision that you are risking is one thing, but to pursue your passion with a small crowd of foot growing dependents that need supper every night, that is a more complicated and costly type of bravery. 

After discovering that we had a lot in common, Alfie suggested that we do an exchange of talent. He would photograph me and I would write an article about portraits for his website Japanorama. This would also allow me to meet his beautiful family. About a week later the two of us did the planned portrait shoot and I got to spend an afternoon with the Goodriches. I even got to take a nap in the kids room before eating the delicious supper that his wife prepared for us that evening, because people who are recovering from pneumonia need a lot of naps. Supper with the Goodriches was actually my first meal shared in a home since I had arrived in Japan. Until that evening for almost four months my every meal had been in isolation, in public, or in a hospital bed. 

During the photoshoot before my nap and supper with the Goodriches, I was surprised at how quickly and accurately Alfie was able to capture the images that expressed what I was feeling. Before we got together I had confided in Alfie about some of the things that were happening in my life and what I wanted to say in the portrait. At that time it had taken everything I had within me in order to survive and to overcome the initial circumstantial difficulties that met me upon my arrival in Japan, the place where I felt so passionately it was my destiny to be. My youngest son was eighteen and back in Canada living in a small apartment on my friend's property during his grade twelve year. The trials I was encountering in Japan were making it hard for me to predict my long term situation and my ability to provide for him. Popular opinion back home was that I should give up on things working out in Japan and return to Canada. However after almost dying by myself on my apartment floor in a city full of strangers a few weeks earlier, and experiencing fever induced hallucinations, and honestly being terrified that my young adult children were possibly hours away from not having a mother anymore, I had come to believe, possibly for the first time in my life, that I was actually an incredibly important person. Since those scary moments of facing my mortality I  believed that I was important enough to pursue my dream of having a life in Japan where I felt I could be of much greater benefit to others than in a dead end local job back in Canada. It was in consideration of the way that I was feeling, stronger than ever in spirit, albeit still needing frequent naps due to my physical state, that I wanted Alfie to record those emotions visually through the medium of a photographic portrait. I wanted him to capture my feelings of spiritual strength during a time of physical weakness. I knew that I did not need to return to Canada. I knew that I just needed to be myself, to stick some tough things out, and to believe that things would work themselves out, which they did. 

A brilliant photographer and a beautiful person, Alfie put into images the sentiments that I was feeling. He helped me to express that I was not ashamed to be who I am, to pursue what I feel is my fate, and to ask for and to receive help along the way to it. The photographs that Alfie took remind me that I am an intense woman who resides in a physical form that reflects exactly who I am; strong, solid, mature, feminine, and non apologetically passionate. I do not behave in a way that has a stamp of socially accepted responsibility on it. Instead my life is about learning, experimentation, and the determination to be of the greatest benefit possible to others by using my talents and accepting and rejoicing in the life experiences that are uniquely mine while following the exact pursuits that bring my soul the greatest amount of joy. I found almost dying while alone in a foreign country a wonderful reminder of such things and I am grateful for every single circumstantial trial that met me upon my arrival in Japan. Those experiences made me a stronger and more determined person. 

The above would make a wonderful conclusion to what happened when Alfie and I collaborated on a portrait session, however there is more to the story that makes those photographs from one year ago even more meaningful to me. The unexpected and unpleasant event of having plastic surgery on my face four months ago due to a cancer diagnosis has permanently altered my appearance. I will never again have the scar free face that Alfie photographed. How much more precious to have those Alfie Goodrich images now that I am temporarily disfigured and awaiting my physical healing and long term facial changes as created by my plastic surgeon? Alfie and my portrait session and the circumstances that followed reminded me of the importance of grabbing the moments of now, to work with the artists and circumstances that are available to us in each moment in order to create what we can, when we can, things that may no longer be available to us in the future. I believe it is the fleetingness of opportunities that makes our 'now's so precious. Thank you Alfie for grabbing that winter now with me and for giving me the gift of documenting images of my strength and beauty in Tokyo in January of 2012. You are a wonderful artist and I consider myself privileged to have been photographed by you and to call you my friend.

To see more of Alfie's amazing photography click on the links below;

More of Alfie's work

A couple of roosters meet up in Tokyo 

trying out those crazy ass japanese boots... not so much

Being Naked with your Neighbours

Public bathing is part of the culture in Japan. Until a few decades ago many families did not have their own baths and showers. Each neighborhood had its own bath house and in the evening people made their way to it in order to get clean, to relax, and to catch up with each other about the day. Many of these bath houses still exist, and even though now families have their own bath tubs and showers, almost all Japanese families still take the time to go to onsen when they get the chance. The onsen bathing is segregated by sex, but children of both sexes can be found on either side.

For a Westerner, it is disorientating to be naked among strangers, and even more intimidating to bump into a person that you know. Ya, so this is me naked.....and apparently that is you naked..... maybe next time i will bump into you at the grocery store instead of here at the onsen where we are both naked....this kind of neighborly experience feels pretty awkward for a Canadian who always preferred to put my bathing suit on in a change room, and who learned very fancy ways to put on one item of clothing on while still wearing another, then taking off the first one after I had replaced it with the second one. I went to boarding school during junior high, so I have great skills at changing clothes without ever being seen naked. Those skills are wasted in Japan.

Not being one to miss out on opportunities to learn from another culture and to appreciate all of the things that other cultures get right, I have recently started to get into onsening. The most profound part of the experience of this activity that I find so intimidating is how it has affected my sense of adequacy versus inadequacy. When we onsen we cannot hide anything physical from one another. Being naked in public requires us to accept things about ourselves because in the presence of others there is not time to obsess over our imperfections as it would only draw more attention to them. When I am naked with my neighbors in a bath house, even though no words are spoken between us, I know that they know that I have had children, just like I can see the maps of stories written on their bodies.  The other women see my comparatively curvy build, and the dramatic cancer surgery scar across my face when they look into my light blue eyes, so different than their own. My body silently tells them that I am a bit of a war torn woman who once had a completely different life thousands of miles away from here and now she chooses to bathe with her new neighbors, to be a part of their world.

In the onsen I am different and I am flawed and nobody panics. There is peace among us. We are all adequate. We surround each other with thoughts of kindness and acceptance. In our ultimately vulnerable state I even become less afraid of aging, because when we are naked with our neighbors, together we inexplicably become more beautiful.

Website link to One of the local Onsens

Now That I`m Less Pretty

Two days before the shock of my more serious surgeries. This is me arriving home on Wednesday morning after walking from the train station during a huge downpour after my date in Hiroo. You can see a small scar on the bridge of my nose from my first cancer removal surgery a few weeks before.

Friday afternoon five minutes after my two surgeries, the larger area of skin cancer removal, and the  reconstructive plastic surgery to cover the missing skin over the bridge of my nose.

Friday night, six hours after surgery

Saturday September 22, 2012, the very WORST morning after of my life.  Enduring the hell of excruciating pain, social isolation, physical hunger, and worst of all, being the owner of an asymmetrical nose. 

Saturday afternoon, managed to have a shower in hopes of feeling human again

Monday morning, back to work. After all, this is Japan. Weeks later my adult students confessed that some of them cried after seeing me for the first time after surgery. I received several very kind get well gifts during my second week.  

Wednesday one week after my date in Hiroo. That morning I started to suffer from a fever and what appeared to me as an infection on the incision. I ended up in emergency that evening after almost collapsing during teaching a class that afternoon. I started a cycle of antibiotics upon leaving the hospital.

Me in the natural light

Maybe Friday or Saturday? On antibiotics, starting to heal up, no more fevers.

Three weeks after surgery, me in the classroom

Three weeks ago I was on an operating table getting my face changed for the rest of my life. I know that there are people who have endured much worse events, but for me, losing my original face was hugely traumatic. It was a loss. Each of us are managing our various losses in life, losses of our health, our youth, our relationships, our dreams, or our loved ones, we are all losing things. I do not have the corner on losses, but I do understand what it is like to suffer them. I see our losses as something that we balance every day. We tell ourselves `I don`t have this, but at least I do have that.` or `Then I had that, but  its okay because now I have this.` When the balance that we have reconciled ourselves to is upset by losing something that we might have felt was our compensation, it shakes us. I have always had such a pretty face and it has made the other things that have been difficult in my life easier to bear. When I lost some face in that Japanese hospital surrounded by strangers and a language that I do not yet understand, I lost an important part of my life`s compensation package. In less than an hour I lost my `pretty` and ever since I have been thinking about losses and about what our faces mean to us. Our faces are our first foot forward out into the world. Our faces are what we present to strangers to convey confidence even when we are feeling less than so. Our faces are also where we express our most intimate feelings to those who are closest to us. Our faces are a really big deal.

The abrupt loss of the original prettiness of my pre-surgery altered face happened within a matter of hours. I was attending an appointment with a surgeon because a previous surgery that was supposed to remove skin cancer on the bridge of my nose had not been successful. When the surgeon saw me at ten that morning he told me through my interpreter that in only a matter of two weeks since the previous surgery the cancer looked to have visibly spread. This meant that he needed to operate as soon as possible. He informed me that because I would be losing quite a bit of skin during the second surgery, he would be doing plastic surgery in a third surgery to cover the bridge of my nose where the skin that had cancer would be taken from. He told me that as a result of these two upcoming surgeries my nose would be pulled up for a year until gravity stretched out the skin to make it look more normal again. As I sat in the chair of his office reviewing the photos of other people`s faces who had needed the same kind of surgery, I concentrated on not throwing up or passing out in horror at their various levels of resulting disfigurement. I was in shock. How do you prepare to lose your pretty face? Only 48 hours before I had been recovering from one of the most exciting dates of my life, I was on top of the world, and now in approximately three hours I was about to become dramatically less beautiful or risk my life expectancy. With my family and friends on the other side of the world in Canada, but for my interpreter and the hospital staff, I was completely alone in a foreign country and about to get a different face for the rest of my life. 

Although I am not used to being unattractive, I am used to loss. The first traumatic loss in my life was also a sudden one and it happened when I was still quite a little girl. I was seven years old when my beloved playmate Davie Johnson who lived just down the country lane from our farm, died in the night of meningitis. Davie and I had adored each other from toddlerhood. He was fascinated by my endless stream of imaginative ideas and my almost white blonde `popcorn hair `. I was enraptured by Davie`s playful creativity and his incredibly gentle and sensitive heart. When my mother told me that Davie had died in the night, but that it was actually fortunate for him as otherwise he might have become something called `a vegetable`, I remember collapsing onto her bedroom floor into the fetal position and sobbing on the fresh new carpet from my deepest deepest place. These new and terrible words, `died`, `meningitis`, and ` becoming a vegetable`, which was apparently some sort of physical state where you cannot move or speak, had completely broken my seven year old heart. What a terrible way to be initiated into this world of earthly mortality and devastating disappointments. Over the next year and a half of my childhood I remember having random and unexpected emotional breakdowns and crying in situations that brought up how much I missed my beloved friend, until eventually Davie no longer being with me became normal in my world.  I think the things that we lose during our lives become such a part of who we are that eventually we cannot imagine who we would be without having lost them. I cannot imagine who I would be without the experience of loving and losing such a close and special friend during my childhood. I could never ask for or want that kind of pain in my life, but I would not trade the love I felt for Davie for escaping how much it hurt me to lose him. I think it will become the same with going through this trauma of losing my original face. I think this experience of being less pretty will become an integrated part of who I am. 

People lose all sorts of things during the course of their lives. I know that losing a portion of my beauty a few weeks ago is so much less than what others have lost or are losing. People have been diagnosed with terminal illnesses and are losing things like being with their children or grandchildren as they grow up. I don`t know what the things are that you have lost or are losing. Davie`s parents lost a beautiful and brilliant child and his older brother lost his best friend and his only sibling. Some people lose parts of themselves during their childhoods because of the harmful actions of others, and other people are the children who`s parent is leaving them in an untimely death before they are ready to face this world without that mom or dad. There are much more difficult things to lose than having such a pretty face, but this loss of my beauty has triggered me to write about the exploration of the journey of losses.I  don`t know or have the answers, I only have the curiousity and the desire to learn more, to be more. I want to do the work on the inside, on the way that i spiritually think and feel about life, in order become even more beautiful than I was before this most recent physical loss, even if it is with a less pretty face. I know that I am fortunate to have had a skilled Japanese surgeon, and I know that this time of having dramatic scars will pass. I don`t know exactly what I will look like after my scars heal, comparative to the disfigurement in those photographs I saw when I was in the hospital, but I do know that this experience of loss and trauma is now a part of who I am, just like Davie`s and my friendship will always be an important part of my life and the person that I grew up to become. I will always love Davie Johnson very very much, because some things, things like love, unlike our beauty, can never be taken away from us.