BENEATH THE SKYLINE

IMPERFECT SCRAPS

Deborah Good

I am learning to be like the Mennonite women in my family who made and make quilts. I don’t know how to quilt. But I do make collages from time to time, as a form of therapy. And I write. All three—quilts, collages, and writing—are a bit like life. I bring what I have, which are mostly imperfect scraps and fragments, and I work them together. I make art.

Every last one of us is laced with imperfection—much the way the gas we feed our cars is laced with the sin of war and Arctic drilling. Yet I am learning to love myself unconditionally, personality flaws, chunky thighs, the works.

I like to pretend I am an enlightened woman, resistant to our image-centered culture and media, and I think I have deceived most people into believing me. But really, like many other women in this country, I spend much of my time wishing I was thinner and sexier. I have this image of myself 10 pounds trimmer with smooth, tan skin. I have slimmer thighs and fuller lips. My clothes are trendy and my hair glows blonde in the sun (like it used to when I was 12 and didn’t care anyway).

I realize that having any of these would only make me less like myself and more like some hip Euro-chic I’ve seen in an outdoorsy magazine. And, after wondering for a brief moment if this might be an improvement, I decide, for the humpteenth time, that I am okay as I am, and that being me actually has far more to offer—to myself and to the world—than trying to be some magazine model I’ve never met.

It’s amazing how many times self-acceptance has to be discovered again and again. And how much self-criticism I must endure between discoveries.

I was thinking about the great, radical act of self-acceptance today, as I sat in a waiting room at the National Institute of Health. It was a particularly crazy day in the radiology department, and more people than usual were waiting longer than usual for their CT scans and MRI’s. My dad, a wonderful man made gaunt and depressed by disease, was among them. For an hour or so, we read and dozed and looked around at each other in silence.

Slowly, patience began crumbling and the patients, all looking sharp in their blue paper scrubs, began to complain about the long wait. First to each other and then to the staff, who explained that an emergency case had pushed everything back. They were behind, and they were sorry.

Our health, it seems, is among the most fragile—and the most resilient—of all things. I have, at times, believed it was countercultural to proclaim my physical body unimportant. At some level, this is true. As Anne Lamott writes in Plan B, "When we get to heaven, we will discover that the appearance of our butts and our skin was 127^th on the list of what mattered on this earth."

But at another level, it seems to me that body and spirit are in a big tangled dance together, inseparably connected. It is our bodies, not just our minds and spirits, that determine whether we feel like getting out of bed in the morning, whether we walk or wheel ourselves around, whether we live or die.

As the minutes ticked by in the waiting room, some of the patients continued talking. I began noticing that these people were among the kindest I had met in my lifetime. Granted, they had hints of being frustrated and skeptical—I would be concerned if they weren’t—and surely, they must have darker sides that come out in the safety of their own cars and homes. But generally, everyone there was pleasant, genuine, gentle.

And everyone in the room, except me, had cancer.

All of a sudden, my ability to act like physical bodies don’t really matter seemed a monstrous privilege—a luxury. Body matters very much to cancer patients. I imagined these blue-gowned men and women doing the same work I was of accepting themselves, while, in the same moment, being at war with their bodies and the tumors that threatened them.

I know that rain falls on the good and the less good alike. But does cancer have to do the same? I think of all the people I am angry with in the world—an ex-sort-of-boyfriend who will go nameless and a number of politicians I’ve never met—running about cancer-free while all the wonderful people sitting in this room, and my dad who has a huge piece of my heart, are in various stages of fighting and dying from this terrible disease.

(I in no way mean to imply, of course, that people I am angry with should come down with cancer. Maybe just a really bad case of the flu.)

The unfairness of it all makes me ache and punch my pillow at night and consider giving up on religion. If I could send God a petition, asking for a change in cancer policy, it would be eloquently written and signed by everyone I know times ten.

I don’t know much about God. But sometimes I imagine God is a lake, so that on days like today, when the world feels weighty, and the madness of it all makes me sweat on the inside, I can run to the shore and dunk my head in.

One by one, my waiting room companions are called away for their scans and procedures. Dad returns from his, and we begin weaving through the maze of hallways to the exit. Mom and I walk. Dad rolls, like a royal (and dejected) king on his chariot.

Outside, the sun is shining. Spring has come and I almost melt with my gratitude for it. Dad’s life has become a series of waves called chemotherapy, crashing and settling and crashing again. But in between, the sun sets, the sky turns pink, and the moon rises in all its breathtaking beauty. We remember that life is really worth fighting for and crying about.

Meanwhile, 10 students die at a school in Minnesota when a surely broken young man opens fire, later taking his own life. Iraq continues burning—along with the Middle East and Darfur, dark smoke and mournful cries rising. What is health and wholeness amid such destruction and death?

I don’t know that I have found it. But I get glimpses of it most when I sit with Dad, doing nothing but being together, being comfort, being in love with ourselves and each other.

There is nothing quite like true self-acceptance, discovering again and again that, all arguments aside, we are okay. And when I truly believe this, the obsession I sometimes direct at myself, wishing I was somehow different, can break open into compassion for others. My arms open. And I find I am no longer alone.

—Deborah Good, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is writing and piecing together part-time work, while spending much of her time in Washington, D.C., with her parents.