(This is another old draft I found in a long forgotten folder. Rereading it I find that not only do I still feel exactly the same way…hallelujah…I’ve actually made tremendous progress on losing what youthful beauty I once had. LOL. I’m looking more and more like the photo below all the time. Mission accomplished.)
My mother-in-law was one of the earliest nurse practitioners in the country. Years ago she helped found a rural medical clinic way back in the mountains of Idaho (getting doctors to settle in remote areas was, and still is, challenging) and, during the twenty-five years she ministered to the medical needs of the region she attended the scene of every conceivable kind of wilderness accident. I once asked her how everything she’d seen over the years shaped her understanding of dying and she didn’t hesitate for a second. Clearly, it was something she’d thought about. What struck her most over the years, she told me, was how truly difficult it is to extinguish a life.
Evidently, most people don’t part from their bodies easily, no matter how hard it gets.
I’ve thought about that one ever since. It helps me understand why the transition of life going back out of a body is so often grueling and violent. Depending on how long the two have been joined, the bond attaching life to body can be astonishingly strong and severing it requires a degree of mangling. Prying our fingers loose is no easy task. Of course moving into a body is no piece of cake either. The process of giving birth is usually described as labor and–as any woman who’s grunted and writhed her way through it will tell you–rightly so. And that’s just from the mother’s perspective. Think of the baby. It has to be far more traumatic for them, getting pummeled and crushed with no idea of what’s even happening. Dying doesn’t seem that much different to me. Just like the body of an infant in the birth canal, the body of a dying person is squeezed, strained and stressed in a way that drastically alters its appearance.
Physical beauty has always been—will always be–something delicate and brief. Perhaps that’s the very reason why we value it so highly, because we know it’ll never last. No matter how good-looking a person is, no matter how much they work at it or how hard they hang on, they’re still going to lose it in the end. Nobody gets out of here looking fresh. Nobody. But isn’t that as it should be? We’re not supposed to die looking young and perfect. We’re supposed to die looking dead. From what I’ve seen so far, the people (especially women) who have invested the most in physical beauty tend to suffer most at the inevitable loss of it. I remember the way a lovely friend used to talk about entering middle age—the self-loathing I could hear in her words as she described what she was becoming. Or an elderly woman, the wife of a patient, telling me again and again, “You wouldn’t know it to look at me now but I used to be quite a beauty”—a horror riding the tail end of her words as she turned to look at the face of an old woman in the mirror.
Listening to them I’m reluctant these days to invest much more in my looks. There was an Oprah show once on how older women can still be sexy. The guests were all upper middle-aged women, thin, well-coiffed, and still beautiful, and I remember glancing down at the menopausal redistribution taking place in my own body and feeling resistant. Partly because it just seems to be too late for me–physically, I no longer have a clue who I am. Somewhere in my forties, my body struck out on its own, initiating changes according to some master plan it wasn’t sharing with me. I’m no longer the nubile, strutting young thing I (like to think) I once was. No. My body is currently turning itself into somebody else and I don’t get any say in the conversion. But there’s more than just that going on. Something internal seems to be metamorphosing as well.
It’s as though there is a She unfolding inside me right now—a little edgy, irritable—saying Enough, Dia. Cut the crap. She’s impatient—intolerant really—of fashion have-to’s and beauty rituals and when I look through her eyes and see what she sees I can understand why.
She sees beneath things. Beyond the surface. She’s the part of me that sat with people disfigured and wasted by the dying process and saw, not ugliness and decay, but breathtaking lives and aching vulnerability, deep loss and staggering tenderness. She saw courageous, beautifully embattled bodies taking hit after hit and showing the beating and to her they weren’t ugly—they were magnificent.
Her vision captivates me. I think it might be wiser, right now while I’ve still got time, to direct my roots into the deeper level of beauty that she sees. Something that transcends the purely physical. A sense of myself as a truly, inherently beautiful being that will outlast—outshine—the inevitable processes of wrinkling and sagging, bloating and wasting to come. Joy seems to have something to do with it. As does humility and gratitude. Cultivating an openness and acceptance of others and a genuine curiosity about things would certainly be helpful as would a good sense of humor. Especially about myself. Being more honest and spontaneous, too—laughing and bitching, crying and apologizing freely—but most importantly I think, being truly respectful of others, of myself, and of everything in the world around me.
It seems like anchoring into those things would free me up. I’m pretty sure I was given this body for the journey, not for the body. Maybe if I stopped worrying about its looks so much I could turn all that attention to the rest of my life instead. Truth is I don’t want to die looking like an immortal monument anyway–I want to use this body up. I want to push it, stretch it and scrape it, let it run and fall and fly. By the time I go I want it looking like a limping, battered, rusted, pieces-missing, ancient safari Land Rover. One that crisscrossed continents a thousand times and broke down on every back road and mountain pass it ever tackled. Maybe go with one last, explosive backfire–my tissues, organs and cells finally blowing out every last drop of adventure, pain and rapture they contained for me as we traversed this life and world together.
When I have to say good-bye to this oldest, dearest, most beautiful of all my friends…my body…I want it to be with no regrets.
This Land Rover was born around the same time I was! Exactly how I want my body to look when it’s my time to go. Worked hard and used up. Photo borrowed from an entertaining and pretty fascinating if you love old cars, as I do, article by Vlad Mitrache…journalist and car lover…over at
There’s a long, south facing hillside up in the Stanley valley, near Redfish Lake, which is covered with an equally long stand of aspen trees. There’s a trail that meanders along the base of the hillside for a few miles and I’ve always thought that hike would be spectacular in fall when the trees were in full color but for two decades I’ve missed it. Successful leaf peeping requires timing, luck, and motivation and for whatever reason I’ve never had all three in sync.
Above is Fishhook Creek running through a large beaver engineered water system that spans the meadow with a couple of Sawtooth peaks behind.
Foothills in front of the White Clouds mountain range during sunset. You can see pockets of color as the aspen are changing.
This is a stone in Fishhook Creek full of iron, which gives it the orange-red color. (It’s an iron rich area.)
This is a view of part of that long hillside I mentioned. The color just keeps going and going and going and going…
Sunlight illuminating the leaves from behind. The photo doesn’t do it justice of course. The real effect was rather holy…another one of those moments out in the natural world when the impulse to fall on my knees and whisper thank you to whatever would listen almost got me. In the end I couldn’t do it in front of the Canadian hikers behind me but still, we were all pretty quiet and big eyed.
I think part of the reason this one hit me the way it did was because it was still fresh…the flowers, the grief, the love, the remembering. But it also felt personal because there was something we shared with these people; an obvious love for the place we were in.
Tired yet? But I have so many more. Sigh.
And the last is…well, we have no idea what this is. It’s a phenomenon we’ve only ever seen up at the cabin this once. It was a column of light that shot up unexpectedly from the setting sun. It was HUGE. The photo doesn’t capture that part. And most odd, lasting about two minutes from the time we first saw it.
Sorry for the enormous size of the photograph. WordPress changed the download media feature while I was gone and I haven’t figured out how to resize yet. As mentioned…dilettante. 
The Odd and Unmentionable 