Scar Tissue

A Scar Was Born here

I once wrote a post entitled “We Are All Tattooed." In it, I discussed tattoos as commonly understood (including the ink my Rose sports), and as inevitable indicators of life lived over time (wrinkles, gray hair). No one gets out of here unmarked, I wrote, and that’s actually a beautiful thing: we carry the outward signs of our journey with us as we age, telling our story without saying a word.

What I didn’t write much about in that piece, were scars. I am fortunate that I am not scarred from battle, or other physical wounds inflicted by another—and I recognize that this is strictly because of my lucky circumstances. A kid growing up in a rough neighborhood in the inner city has an much greater chance of being shot on the street, for example, than I do.

Nonetheless, I do have a few scars, seen and unseen, which bring back a flood of memories. 

There’s the still-visible scar on my finger from a bad burn. Seeing it, I am transported back to the shabby living quarters above a dinner theatre in Nashville, Tennessee. There we lived for a while in 1978, performing in “Don’t Drink the Water” (as usual, I was the ingénue and Steve played my father.) We shared space with several sloppy actors, had just about zero privacy, and even less disposable cash (we were so broke that we’d take the extra desserts from the theatre buffet line upstairs wrapped in napkins for breakfast the next morning.). The burn came from my attempt to make toast in the tiny oven—they had no toaster—when my finger hit the heating element inside. I remember crying, both from pain and general discouragement.

There’s my C-section scar, an ugly reminder of a wonderful event (the birth of Julie). I vividly recall seeing my mom’s huge, uglier Caesarean scar (she had all three of us that way, which in those days meant opening the same big incision again and again). The night Jules was born, amid the fear and panic as we watched her heart rate dipping and dipping on the monitor, the doctor kept apologizing for the operation to come (“We tried not to do this, we’re sorry”). At that moment, my bikini-less future could not have mattered less to me—I only wanted her born, quickly and safely. I do now feel a twinge of sadness observing my slightly disfigured tummy—but more often, I just feel grateful to have my daughter.

Lovely Julie, all grown up

Inside, there are the scars no one notices but me: the forever loss of innocence and joy that came with my sister’s sudden, tragic death at age 23. The frightening knowledge that my brain is still sick, and that without medication I would surely slip back into the miasma of severe mental illness.

Just as we are all tattooed, we all bear some scars from the trials we survive. We make it through, burned and bruised though we may be.

And that’s a beautiful thing, too.