Jesus of the Scars
“He'll have that scar forever.”
“Couldn't you do something about it, Dumbledore?”
“Even if I could, I wouldn't. Scars can come in handy.”
- J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
A few weeks ago, I went to get fitted for a breast prosthesis. My first thought upon seeing the prosthesis lying in its box was that it was not all that different in concept from an eye prosthesis. Most people think fake eyes look like the glass balls rolling around the decks of The Pirates of the Caribbean, but in reality, when an eye is removed, the space is filled with a Styrofoam-like sphere sewn permanently underneath the socket muscles and tissues. The actual prosthesis is merely an oblong shell, inserted behind the eyelids to prop them up, and painted to match its pair so exquisitely that quite often even I cannot tell an eye is fake until it’s under a microscope.
The breast prosthesis looked similarly unlike the half-spherical silicone implants I’d seen in the plastic surgeon’s office, and more like a triangular shell, filled with fluid but still light enough to slip into a bra cup without weighing it down too much. As the person assisting me went to find bras for me to try, I stood before the three-paneled mirror in the fitting room, really looking at my body for what felt like the first time since the mastectomy nearly four months ago.
I had avoided looking at my body because I could, because I knew the surgeries were over and I was preoccupied with starting chemotherapy. But I think too that I was still a bit scared to look. People have asked whether I regret not reconstructing, whether I would ever go back to do that, and my answers have been quick—no, and probably not though who knows—but making a decision, and living into the reality it entails, can be two different things. I remember those early nights after, when the dressing was gone and I’d brush up against my chest almost by accident at night and realize how flat it was on that side, and start crying. Then it gradually became a kind of functional reality, simply the way things were. But I don’t want to just be in my body by default, I thought. It was okay to give myself time, but now I should look.
In front of all those angled mirrors, it was impossible to ignore the fact that my breast on that side was truly gone, and that made me think about all it had been to me, all the changes it had already gone through in my life. Because breasts aren’t static: they change, through youth and adulthood, through each pregnancy and hormonal milestone, connecting us to ourselves and others in ways more felt and experienced than spoken out loud. And staring at the spot where it used to be, it felt like this was not a disaster, not a disfigurement, but the next step. Another change, so I could stay connected to this earth a little longer.
What is there now is a scar: a thin, neat dark line running across the outer side of my chest. A smaller set of marks below where the drain and its attendant suture had been, because my skin remembers everything. And a lot of numbness. People talk less about this, but that entire side of my chest feels permanently injected with lidocaine, strange to the touch, as if disembodied. Somehow, I had made it through four decades of life, through birthing four children, with hardly a mark, but no more: here I stand, with my scars.
Edward Shillito wrote these words in 1919 after the Great War: If we have never sought, we seek Thee now… We must have Thee, O Jesus of the Scars… to our wounds only God’s wounds can speak / and not a god has wounds, but Thou alone. I have loved Jesus for many reasons, but this year, I love him because he has scars. Because his wounds are not something to be ashamed of or forgotten, but remembered. I love him for his suffering.
Yesterday in clinic, I saw a young woman with a thyroid disease that had caused the tissues in her right orbit to swell, pushing that eye out further than the other. At one point, she started crying: I hate how I look, what this disease has done to my body. I don’t know if anyone will ever like me. This is not how I used to look, but no one knows that except me. I thought about all the things I could tell her—you won’t look like this forever, we have medications and surgeries, you’ll get through this—but I got the sense that she needed a space to be sad and not have to pretend to be okay. So I just sat with her and said the truest things I knew: this is really hard. You’re worthy of love just the way you are now. You’re not alone. The same things that I tell myself, the same things that I know because of Jesus of the scars.
The assistant came back to the fitting room, with armfuls of bras that made me feel as beautiful as I ever had before. Covered up and with prosthesis tucked in place before it, the scars slipped into invisibility, known to no one but myself. Strange how we carry our scars, I think, under our shirts, on our faces, in our souls. Others might not know, but we do, we know about these scars that point to tragedy and healing alike, these scars through which we come to know our own selves just as it is how we know our Savior.
