"We seldom get into trouble when we speak softly. It is only when we raise our voices that the sparks fly and tiny molehills become great mountains of contention."
Let
me say this right up front. I always assumed I’d die while I
was young enough to leave a good-looking corpse.
Longevity
does not run in my family. My mother died at age 42. My grandmother
also died at age 42. Everyone in the family assumed that I was going
to be a proper Southern lady and follow their good example. Nobody
was more surprised than I was when I saw my forty-third birthday. I
found out later that my sisters had created a “dead pool,”
and were making wagers as to which month of my forty-second year was
going to be my last.
When
I was younger, the fact that I wasn’t going to be a
good-looking corpse wasn’t even part of the equation. But then
God played a whopper of a practical joke on me (or maybe it was a
tender mercy), back in 1982, when I gained 140 pounds in six months.
It was the best thing that ever happened to me as far as my character
was concerned, and the worst thing that could have happened to my
self image. I went from being a human being to being a circus freak
in six months flat.
But
I always assumed that despite my super-sized frame, I was going to
die young enough that I would have a presentable corpse, if all the
other stars of good-looking-corpsehood had been properly aligned.
But
then I celebrated my forty-third birthday, and then my fifty-third.
I almost didn’t celebrate my sixty-third, because it happened
earlier this year, less than a month after I was released from my
three-month hospital tour. I was still as frail as a dandelion
puffball, but I was around to celebrate nonetheless. I felt ancient,
but because I wasn’t sturdy enough to look in a mirror I
naturally assumed I still looked like the same old Kathy.
Thanks
to my illness or the drugs I took to cure it, most of my hair fell
out. You can pretty much guess people weren’t taking pictures
of Kathryn H. Billiard Ball. But now that my hair is coming back
with a vengeance, the cameras are appearing. And what they’re
taking pictures of is not the Kathy I remember, but some stranger who
is a little old lady — a wrinkled creature I do not know, and
do not even care to know.
She
looks more than a little befuddled, as though she might forget her
name or what she had for breakfast or her all-important political
party affiliation if she were not prompted to remember those things.
She looks as though she could carry groceries in the bags under her
eyes.
Here I am, with Fluffy and our friend Rosie. Who is that befuddled old lady, anyway?
Frankly,
she scares me. I never intended to have wrinkles, and especially not
wrinkles that could swallow small household pets.
In
fact, the only advantage to being hugely fat is that hugely fat
people do not have wrinkles. All my adult life, people told me how
young I looked, and asked me the secret to my youth. I told them my
secret in six golden words: “The fat pushes the wrinkles out.”
I
lost a hundred pounds on the Coma Diet, and all of a sudden I have
the wrinkles that your basic sixty-three-year-old person is supposed
to have. I became a granny, but without the grandchildren to give me
presents.
All the wrinkles; none of the grandchildren. Bummer.
I
frankly had no idea I looked like a grandmother until my hair started
growing back and people started taking those pictures. That one day
with our friend Rosie aged me twenty years. Logistically, I
understood I was twenty years older than Rosie was, but I didn’t
know it viscerally until I saw those photographs.
Seeing
those pictures last week, it was as though I had experienced twenty
birthdays in five minutes. I was punched in the stomach by age, and
it left me breathless in a way that all those other birthdays —
even the big round numbers that always seem to send everyone else
into a midlife crisis — had never managed to do.
If you get old enough, you find yourself doing things no human being should ever do. Here I am, after ordering chicken and waffles. In my defense, I ate saved the chicken from the syrup and took it home for another day. And yes, that is my tongue hanging out in the picture. I’m pathetic, and I know it.
When
I first saw the pictures that Rosie took last week, I was
shell-shocked. I wanted to crawl in bed, pull the covers over my
head, and lie there until — well, until I wasn’t old
anymore. As if that
was going to happen. Try as we might, age is one clock we just can’t
turn backward.
But
the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the pictures
themselves are reminders of just how blessed I am.
First
of all, I’m still here. With all the things that happened to
me in that hospital (in those
hospitals, actually), I should be dead. The fact that I’m not
tells me that I still have things to do — things that are
worthwhile enough that God chose to have me stick around for a while.
This tells me life is going to be interesting, and that at least
something I do will be important to somebody. I like that.
Second,
the fact that I can be moaning (even in jest) about how I look shows
that I am happier about myself than I have been in decades. Before
the weight loss, I was so deeply ashamed of my appearance that having
people take pictures of me was out of the question.
Now,
I don’t care when the camera comes out. At least, I don’t
care any more than any other wrinkled old granny is likely to care.
That’s a huge step. I’m not skinny, by any means. In
fact, I’m still a whole lotta woman. But I’m not so big
that all heads turn when I enter a room, and to me that’s a
blessing so overwhelming that most people cannot even fathom it.
Third,
I am as healthy as an ox. I’m not going to say more than this,
because there may be a whole column in that. But miracles have been
done on my behalf, and I am keenly aware of them. Who would have
ever thought I would be able to breathe freely in this life, or to be
able to climb a set of stairs (if only I could walk, that is)? I am
grateful for every breath.
Last,
but certainly not least, I am continuing this journey through life as
part of a synchronized set. As Rosie’s pictures showed, Fluffy
has me matched — wrinkle for wrinkle. After all these years,
we have grown into people who will laugh at each other’s jokes.
We can be unemployed together, or share secret shopper experiences
together, or he can even help me write my columns. The older we get,
the more we are two halves of a whole, and I like that more than I
can say.
If you’ve got to get old, it sure helps to be half of a matched set.
I
may be a ball of wrinkles in a wheelchair these days, but if that’s
all people see, they aren’t seeing the whole story. The
wrinkles and the wheelchair are temporary. One of these days, like a
butterfly from its cocoon, I will emerge. I have no idea how I will
appear on the other side of that veil we call death, but I know I
will be my perfected self. And I know that I — just like you —
will be unspeakably beautiful.
Kathryn H. Kidd has been writing fiction, nonfiction, and "anything for money" longer than
most of her readers have even been alive. She has something to say on every topic, and the
possibility that her opinions may be dead wrong has never stopped her from expressing them at
every opportunity.
A native of New Orleans, Kathy grew up in Mandeville, Louisiana. She attended Brigham
Young University as a generic Protestant, having left the Episcopal Church when she was eight
because that church didn't believe what she did. She joined The Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-day Saints as a BYU junior, finally overcoming her natural stubbornness because she
wanted a patriarchal blessing and couldn't get one unless she was a member of the Church. She
was baptized on a Saturday and received her patriarchal blessing two days later.
She married Clark L. Kidd, who appears in her columns as "Fluffy," more than thirty-five
years ago. They are the authors of numerous LDS-related books, the most popular of which is A
Convert's Guide to Mormon Life.
A former managing editor for Meridian Magazine, Kathy moderated a weekly column ("Circle of Sisters") for Meridian until she was derailed by illness in December of 2012. However, her biggest claim to fame is that she co-authored
Lovelock with Orson Scott Card. Lovelock has been translated into Spanish and Polish, which
would be a little more gratifying than it actually is if Kathy had been referred to by her real name
and not "Kathryn Kerr" on the cover of the Polish version.
Kathy has her own website, www.planetkathy.com, where she hopes to get back to writing a weekday blog once she recovers from being dysfunctional. Her entries recount her adventures and misadventures with Fluffy, who heroically
allows himself to be used as fodder for her columns at every possible opportunity.
Kathy spent seven years as a teacher of the Young Women in her ward, until she was recently released. She has not yet gotten used to interacting with the adults, and suspects it may take another seven years. A long-time home teacher with her husband, Clark, they have home taught the same family since 1988. The two of them have been temple workers since 1995, serving in the Washington D.C. Temple.