I am re-posting this piece for Breast Cancer awareness month. I have been fundraising and sharing the blog series for a few weeks. I just re-read this after a number of years: Even I was touched by it.

Cancer leaves its mark in the heart no matter how small the lesion; it inches its way into the consciousness and bores at your peace of mind, your serenity and your everyday living. It’s a ghost that teases and haunts and doesn’t leave you be. We must triumph, we must find a cure.

Makeup Meltdown

I love Charles. He is an ebony Adonis with the body of a dancer. He’s thin where a man should be thin and built where a man should be built. He’s so damn sexy, it’s scary. Charles is an old soul, like I am. He doesn’t let on to what he has seen in his native Jamaica but I can read his eyes and he knows mine very well. We are on very intimate terms.

Charles touches my face regularly. He is a head makeup artist for Bobbi Brown cosmetics.

When Charles greets me I light up. He embraces me with those strong
Aaron Neville tattooed arms. He helps me up onto the stool, calls over his trainee to take notes on the face schematic, like she is assisting a surgeon.

My visit to Charles yesterday began very differently. Yesterday there was a charity event at the department store where I see him every so often. It’s bedlam at these functions and I was early. I let him know I was his 1:00 appointment and his white toothed grin grabbed my heart.
He was making a woman look beautiful, applying the perfect makeup to her canvas of a face. Then it would be my turn; Spring would recolor me.

I moved away from the crowd of shoppers. There were several salesladies poised for action, waiting at attention in their Bobbi Brown black uniforms with nothing to do as Charles and his entourage brushed and buffed their charges.

“I can get you started and ready for Charles,” said perfect makeup lady #1. She was joined by two other ladies who were ready and willing to get me. Charles called me over and told me to wait for him. I returned to my spot. The ladies in black rushed me with the following words: “We can get you started, we can prep you.”

With the word “prep” a scalpel advanced towards me. My knee-jerk reaction was to throw my hands in front of my mouth and say, “Don’t use the word PREP!”

At that point I must have had NO color in my face and was totally in need of makeup. All I could offer to the two women in black standing in front of me and looking at me curiously was this. “I had five surgeries for breast cancer. You can’t imagine what the word PREP means.”The two women looked stricken, apologetic, saddened. All I could think of was, “I will NOT cry in the middle of the makeup department in Lord & Taylor on a bright, sunny day, when I am already standing here sans makeup.

My face was the reflection of my soul: naked, raw and vulnerable. I had been hiding behind my own makeup for the last five years, pushing down the post traumatic stress, denying my fragility. I did everything I could to swallow hard and suppress the embarrassment of wanting to erupt into a full blown sobbing cry. Right there, in front of the multi- hued pallettes of eye shadows. In front of the pink, red and coral sticks that promised that my lips would forever be soft and supple. In front of the creams that offered me eternally youthful skin.

I had lost my right breast and though it had been reconstructed, it was only makeup, an illusion that everything was back to normal.

I wanted to take my potentially youthful and pre-glowing face and hide under the makeup brushes. Then came my Charles.

The last time I had seen him was in the Fall, and while he was putting autumn on my face, we talked about cancer and how is aunt was undergoing chemo and how his grandmother died of it. Charles knew some of my story. He put me on the tall stool and looked deeply through my eyes into the part of me that needed to be soothed and brightened. He pushed the craziness away from me and silenced the what if’s by massaging the oils and foundations into my skin with his warm black hands until my being relaxed into a sigh and I could breathe again. Layer by layer he put the color back into my face, my eyes, my lips. And not with makeup, but with the warmth and generosity of human kindness.

About thirty minutes later he was done reconstructing me. I was another beautiful canvas that was put on his wall, a picture of how my spirit looks inside: fresh, renewed, vibrant, confident. Intact. When I saw my dewy self in the mirror, I was twenty years younger (or so I imagined.) But the reality was for the brief time of my melt down, I allowed intense fear and pain to claim me and age me beyond recognition. I can’t allow that to happen to my essence again.

Until I see Charles for my Autumn face, I will take his quiet kindness with me and try to remember that being “prepped” can also mean applying the foundation for all good things to stick.

I became manic and bought myself a pair of cool sandals and an expensive pair of earrings. I am not going to die tomorrow.

And then I went home and cried.