Loss Is In The Details

I would never have noticed except that Pam pointed it out to me as I looked at her mother Nora sleeping in the hospital bed:  She did not have any eyebrows.  There were two crescent depressions in their place. “That’s because when Mom was eighteen years old she thought she would be smart and shave off her eyebrows and put makeup there to look like she had them. But they never grew back. So I would always see her, flipping out her little mirror, and making her quick little movements with her cosmetic pencil to make them keep looking like they were there. So it’s weird looking at her face and not seeing anything there where the eyebrows should be. So I miss seeing them there and now that she is too weak to use her liner I miss seeing her fill in those two bare recessed spots on her face.” Thus her mother had surrendered even her stand-in eyebrows for good.

Nora’s granddaughter Merced was there too, reminiscing about this micro story of the eyebrows as well. Meanwhile I could not help but notice that Pam’s and Merced’s eyebrows were only minimally present on their faces, like the sketchiest of crescents.  After everyone ran out of things to say about eyebrows, the talk tilted away from intimacy and more towards small talk, as if they were afraid anything more than a normal pause would hint they had enough of seeing a hospice chaplain and that I should go. Merced announced she was a real estate agent. I said, “I bet you encounter plenty of emotional drama with people buying and selling such an important thing like a home.”  “Oh yes,” she agreed. “Each home has its own story.”

I thought about Merced’s remark, and all that it implied. So much emotion and personal history is invested in the places we dwell in, and so much loss and confusion faced when we sell them. Then there is so much disorientation upon occupying another. If one little thing out of place like eyebrows gone missing can throw us off it is no wonder what a confounding experience it is to move into a new place.

Nora of course, who had transferred to a hospice residence, was in alien surroundings.  But almost constant sleep guarded her from registering all the other things she had given up besides the mock eyebrows. She still had one more “home” left to move to, and the story about that place is perhaps the one most often told albeit with so little to go on besides the hypotheses of one’s religion.

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Reprinted with permission from the blog, Expired and Inspired in the Jewish Journal, June 27th, 2018 at this link: http://jewishjournal.com/blogs/expiredandinspired/235492/loss-details-rabbi-karen-b-kaplan/

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On a personal note, this week marks the 5th anniversary of my blog, Offbeatcompassion. Would that be considered a “venerable” age in the blogosphere?