You Look Great

One of the really nice things about sharing my lung cancer diagnosis with people is that when we visit in person, my friends and acquaintances often tell me how great I look. It's not like nobody ever said that to me before, of course. I can clean up pretty well for a fancy dinner or a night on the town, and my husband is more or less required to comment on my especial loveliness at those moments.

I'm not what one would call a "beauty" in the moviestar/model sense of the word. My face is remarkably asymmetrical; one eye is quite a bit bigger than the other, and the two are not placed equidistantly from my nose. My face is also long and horsey-looking; I've gotten a bit jowly lately, and my teeth have gone crooked as I have aged, despite a couple of years in braces as a kid. That fact doesn't keep me from smiling, though, which I hope I do a lot.  I do have awesome hair, which is silvering, and nice olive skin. I'm not what Hollywood would call especially "great" looking on any given day, but my looks aren't scaring off small children either.

So this is the part where I am supposed to say looks don't really matter anyway, and it's what's inside that counts, etc., etc. Of course that's all true. It really is. And I absolutely believe it. You should too. Everyone should. And by now we all know that standards of female beauty especially are a bunch of patriarchy-concocted nonsense.

But that doesn't change the fact that it's nice to hear "You look great!" nearly every day, even several times a day. I know. I know. When folks say that to me now, sometimes they say it in part because, well, I'm incurably ill, but I don't look sick (though I did look pretty crappy back in December when I had a pericardial effusion). They also say it, of course, when I wear a cute outfit or an adorable hat. But when I discuss this lung cancer thing with someone, explain to them the grim prognosis and hopeful therapy, often the conversation closes with this exchange:

Friend/loved one: Well, you look great!
Me: Thanks! I feel really great right now.

And none of that is even a little white lie. I do look pretty great.  And it's so incredibly kind of folks to notice and to say so, even if the parenthesis might read "for someone who has terminal cancer." I feel great too. And my saying "right now" is a way to acknowledge that I won't always look or feel "great," because one day, just like everyone else, I'm going to be a corpse! In the meantime, though, I love being told several times a day that I look great, no matter where the impulse to say so comes from. It's affirming. It feels good. And I want the folks who tell me that to know how nice it feels to be told "you look great"  as well. So, I've got a new thing to say when people tell me how great I look. I've started saying "Thanks! You look great too!" Because they do!