I met an angel today......

Today I met a woman who had been terribly burned. The burns are long healed but they had reshaped her face and ear and arm and hand (and I should imagine much more hidden by her blouse). I grinned at her because despite only having stumps for fingers and thumb she continued to use her left hand, not withstanding the damage to it, when it might have been easier to learn to use her undamaged right hand. I commented, as I often do, that all the best people are left handed and she laughed outright – relief, I realised in that instant. She said, holding up her damaged hand, that God and Fire had shaped her this way, different from most but she was still as she had been made. Left handed. We talked, two strangers, about intimate damage and maiming. Mine not so visible but present none the less and obvious, seemingly, to her. She said it was not the surgery's, not the pain, not the rebuilding and reshaping of her face and body that had been truly hard but the daily living with the changes unwillingly wrought upon her.

She said her scarred skin would need extra care for the rest of her life, that she would always need to stretch what remained of her maimed muscle or it would seize completely, that she would always be vulnerable to certain "looks" (pity, disgust, horror and others) from strangers, and even friends, that she still fell prey sometimes to despair and depression. Mostly, she said, knew now how to deal with these two, but she didn't tell me how.

In a flash this angel woman revealed to me what I have seen so hazily at best and mostly not at all. This is what healing is. This is what health is. Maimed she might be, for the rest of her life, her soul and mind and spirit and body reshaped by the fire. But it is being able to live with the maiming, being able to live with the consequences of this crippling, productively, constructively, in peace, and contentment. In happiness even.

She did not tell me what I most desperately want to know - the how you live with maiming and the demons of depression that lurk on the fringes of ones mind but she did show my what the direction was.....