Sometimes touch heals more than words, presence more than platitudes. I’ve thought of it many times, and her gesture has changed how I see and reach for other scarred people. It has been more than three years since that day.
And a small part of my unseen wounds started to heal. With a gentleness hard-earned, she touched the skin, her fingers tracing the long line of memory in the form of an ugly white scar. My left arm looked like a scene pulled from Frankenstein. This is where they removed blood vessels and flesh to rebuild some semblance of a tongue. I reached for my left shirtsleeve, rolled it up slowly, past wrist then elbow, to reveal the largest of my scars.Īt least twelve inches, including a two-by-three-inch skin graft on the inside of my wrist. “Sometimes touch heals more than words, presence more than platitudes.”Īt the kindness of her question, my throat turned tight. She knew how a scar could leave a girl in irreconcilable pieces.
More than a decade before, she’d nearly died in childbirth and slept forty-seven days in a coma, and she had spent the years since trying to recover. If anyone else had asked, the words might have felt awkward, intrusive.īut this was Lindsey, my friend of several years whose body bore her own scars. It’s a grace to welcome Michele to the farm’s front porch today…
In this space of both faith and suffering, Michele has learned hard lessons about the presence of God in places of pain. Not only does Michele live with permanent functional disabilities and chronic pain, their entire household is filled with hard stories. In the years since, she’s endured two more cancer diagnoses, each more serious than the one before, and she and her husband have adopted three additional children with a heartbreaking history of trauma. I first met Michele Cushatt before she was diagnosed with Cancer of the Tongue, when she was a young mom of only 39.
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