I conclude this personal reflection series on beauty.
She Saw Him Well: Beauty and Granny
I must confess that loving love nearly destroyed me and hurt people around me. Beauty was in the eye of the beholder, me, making me a god, but I did not realize it. When my god failed me, I learned to hate myself and this began to breed cynicism toward the world.
A desire for a soul mate swallowed up all my other passions. Calling myself a Romantic, I ended up just bad. The true romantic, the one who loves most abundantly, is driven by duty to his beloved to a profligate passionate to God, the source of love.
Perhaps I am not the only one to make these mistakes and what I learned through pain can help other would be romantics. The beginning of absolute romance was learning to love real Beauty, but before that I had to come to believe it existed. Arguments, experiences, and the Bible forced me to this conclusion and caused me to make Jesus Lord of my aesthetic life, not just my moral life.
My serious, tragic self faced the stark and uncomfortable reality that the truth was happy. School taught me that traditional comedies, the ones my Nana liked, end in weddings and happy-ever-after. By contrast, tragedy ends in death.
My smart friends all bet on tragedy and I did too. We took to wearing Hamlet’s black, and would roll our eyes at comedy. Our grandmothers wisely faced old age in bright floral dresses and enjoyed movies with happy endings. We grew up in the relative comfort of the seventies and the eighties. They grew up in the Depression and faced down Hitler and Stalin cheerfully. They knew what was coming and it was going to be fun and not tragic.
The reality of beauty started making me cynical about my cynicism. After all the best comedies, such as Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, contain a lot of pain before the fun. What if darkness is prelude to dawn?
Both my grandmothers, Nana and Granny, understood all of this because they lived in a happier time when the reality of goodness, truth, and beauty could be taken for granted. They could not have argued for it, but they lived it.
My Dad’s mother, Granny, showed me when Papaw died. She was attractive and enjoyed nice clothing, but if I had been looking for romantic advice I would not have talked to her. She seemed more interested in the cleanliness of her floors, than poetry.
The funeral home, in good West Virginia style, held a viewing the night before Papaw was buried. People passed in front of the body and Granny kept worrying about how Papaw did not look like himself. I did not understand her worry.
He had been declining in health for years. His strong body and big hands which had finished his home in oak using only hand tools had become weak. He was a wonderful story teller and natural wit. . . able to do the voices of people he knew at church or at his plant, but by the end became quiet and afraid. His death was not unexpected and caring for him had been hard on my aging grandmother. As a deacon in a church he had helped build, the home was very full . . . even though he had outlived many of his contemporaries. His sunken frame was a challenge for the undertaker.
Friends and family sat in a room filled with over-stuffed chairs that looked comfortable, but were unyielding to the spine. Granny sat surrounded by good folk and enjoyed the comfort of their presence. I was near her and heard one exchange.
“He had grown so weak. It must have been hard on you to care for him. After all, it is a mercy . . .”
Granny’s bent back grew very straight for just a moment and her voice was tight and penetrating, “I would do it all again for years for just one moment with him.”
God help me, but Granny’s words put everything I had ever called love to shame.
The beauty of that moment blots out the rest of the evening. My grandmother was such a plain woman, hard working, and not at all romantic. How could Granny still feel that way about Papaw? She missed his beauty. Granny was not a Romantic, but she had a romance. She believed in God and God showed her beauty.
Papaw was beautiful. She had seen him well and it was I who had seen him badly. It was not just that he was beautiful on the inside. Even I could look into his eyes and see the force of his character and the soul waiting to be born again into Heaven. She could see his withered body and love it. She could see the beauty in old age and I could not.
This is the lesson that my students need to learn as well. They are beautiful . . . just as they are . . . and their doubts and fears about their appearance are part of a lie they have been told.
For me this was another stop in a long thoughtful journey about beauty. . . work Granny would have found unnecessary, like worrying about how to breathe. But I had never learned or had forgotten how to breathe in beauty and turn it to love, so had to begin to teach myself what should have come naturally. Philosophy brought me back to my senses by forcing me to confront the reality of beauty.
