silver lining

One of the patients I see at the clinic where I work is almost exactly my age. She's from another country. She always looks elegant, even when casually dressed. I could listen to her beautiful, expressive, precise Spanish all day. She contends with a lot of hardships in her life, and though she has a family and a church and even extended family locally, true social support eludes her. She presents herself flawlessly but she is devastated inside.

During our first visit I noticed her silver and gold watch flashing beneath the fluorescent lights of my office. It always reads five minutes til one. Maybe she can't find the time to get a new battery; maybe there's something really wrong with it that she doesn't have the money to fix. Maybe it belonged to someone special - she has a sentimental attachment and it doesn't matter if it works. Whatever the reason, it makes my heart ache every time I see it, which is every time I see her.

I feel sad because it says something about an outside/inside disconnect; a fear of being seen. Can a broken watch protect her? From a distance the shininess says success, independence, money. But up close it just seems to emphasize the brokenness within that she is trying to hide.

I first noticed my gray hairs in graduate school. I remember looking in the mirror with surprise, fingering a few strands and wondering if stress was the culprit. By my early thirties I had quite a bit of gray, mostly isolated in one little patch which I told myself would develop into a supercool, dramatic Cruella de Ville style streak. That's not old. That's punk rock.

But by the time I had Beatrice it was pretty pronounced and new sprinkles were cropping up everywhere. How could I have a new baby and a gray head? It seemed wrong. So I would periodically have it colored. I tried different approaches whenever I felt like I could spend the money and time (which was infrequently) and felt really, really ambivalent about the whole thing. It is so not punk rock to do something like color your pesky stubborn gray roots.

Ask my mom, my sister, my best friends: I went back and forth endlessly. I would write lengthy emails and appeal to them to tell me if I was obligated to dye it, or obligated not to dye it. Was it morally bankrupt, this covering up my gray? I have never minded playful hair color, but hair color applied for the mere purpose of denying a natural process that is well underway...?

I began to notice that lots of women dye their hair. It was a terrible, tacit conspiracy. If everyone dyes their hair as they age, it makes it that much harder for any one woman to tolerate the gray, let alone embrace it.

I had a breakthrough about this last fall, when Mike was terribly sick and I was terribly exhausted taking care of everyone during his chemo and radiation. Every superficial concern or worry seemed to miraculously recede. I thought: this is NOT a moral question. It's not worth any more hand wringing. If I don't want gray hair, I should JUST DYE IT, as often as possible, and enjoy the results. There are big deals in life, and this is not one of them.

But friends! Stick with me just a bit longer. Though I think that realization was true, I have had an interesting turn of heart and mind about this whole thing.

We've been through yet another heartbreak with Mike's cancer treatment. These past weeks have been so hard: we thought he was in remission, but then some late arriving pathology revealed that his disease has in fact cropped up in another part of his body. We had been trundling towards a stem cell transplant, but now we have to recalibrate our expectations and lives once again and put our hopes in more chemo that will get him to that transplant this spring.

There's been a lot of procedures, coordination, intervention, travel - and my neglected head is absolutely sparkling with long, defiant gray roots. But now? Now, it's just crazy, but I feel eager for them to grow. Show yourselves! I would like to see my big head of hair as it really is, beneath the layers of dye - a long salt-and-pepper mop. I would like to see my face framed by the dark and light of it.

Roots, to me, have always looked kind of tawdry. Seeing them on my own head could stir up a mini bout of body hating - and/or situation hating - like, look at the proof of my poor, tired, no-fair life! World, behold: I am the kind of woman who can't take 3 hours away from her responsibilities to maintain a tastefully youthful-ish appearance. Worse still was the time I knew I couldn't find a way to see wonderful Courtney at the salon and so did it myself with a box. The roots came out a shade lighter than the rest of my head. Excruciating, I tell you.

It's like red lipstick on a tooth, or a pair of underwear rising up above the waistline of your jeans when you bend over. Wearing a nice watch that doesn't work. When careful artifice slips out of place, the underlying vulnerability veritably screams. Why do we cringe for the woman whose slip is showing? Her humanity is revealed. Maybe she isn't supposed to be human. Maybe we can barely tolerate our own vulnerability, let alone other people's.

Anyway. I didn't want to keep setting myself up to feel terrible every six weeks.

But there is something else within the core of my eagerness to see what my real hair looks like.

When Mike used to talk about what retirement would be like (perchance a modest apartment in Brooklyn and many excellent movies?) or the kind of old people we would become (grumpy, frank, and oh so wise), I would respond in the voice of abuelita Dolores, a world-weary child of Franco-era Spain and my host during a semester abroad. When I lived in her Sevilla home, I'd go to class in the morning and wave as I left, cheerfully calling see you around three for lunch! She'd settle deeper into her chair, sigh deeply and say si Dios quiere. Good night Dolores! See you in the morning. Si Dios quiere, carina. I'd roll my eyes. Man, she expected disaster at every turn.

Dolores had seen her share of unexpected heartbreaks. She didn't take anything for granted. Losing my dad so young - carrying the sadness that my parents were never able to enjoy the gift of old age together - made me skeptical that it was something I could depend on in my own life.

But growing old together isn't something that happens in a remote future. It's something that we do every day. My husband and I are aging together, which is exactly what I've always wanted. No matter what our future holds, this day was one that Dios did queria after all. And if I cover up my gray hair, it feels like I'm denying the gift I am offered every morning: another day of growing up and growing older with my husband.

I think this new way of seeing the signs of aging might actually stick, because it is no longer about doing the thing that I think I should do, but rather doing the thing that I want to do. That I've always wanted to do. It's about opening my eyes to my own life's richness.

Heck, I might even be able to do that and eventually return to the hair dye. But for now I hope I will see the silver lining my scalp as a reminder of the bounty of this moment, and of all the moments that have come before.