She worried that she was no longer beautiful. The doctor had botched the job; he had set her broken nose crooked, and now she looked in her vanity with the cast off and moaned.
In the silence of her darkened bedroom, the moan sounded like the whimper of a sleeping dog. She thought of Raggy, her childhood pet; she remembered petting him in the mudroom as he sighed his last breath.
Living seemed harder than dying sometimes, and now, how could she go through the world with a crooked nose? Who even was she without her looks?
Not that her looks were all that much anymore. She had been fading like an old rose for years. Every few months it seemed a new wrinkle had sprouted, on her face, and in worse locations.
The door slammed on the porch, then the front door. Her boyfriend was home. She spun away from the mirror and leaped out of the chair, to reach the bathroom before he could see her.
He could never love her now.
It seems, like our protagonist above, that Mrs. Dalloway too struggled with the passage of time. And yet she found a way to enter the day with exuberance:
And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning – fresh as if issued to children on a beach.
What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, … she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air.
– from “Mrs. Dalloway,” by Virginia Woolf
Woolf gives us Mrs. Dalloway, opening to the world and finding joy. Our protagonist, in suffering and fear, closed off. What joy could she have found if she had opened instead? Perhaps acceptance and love from her boyfriend?
It takes courage, for sure, to open. Until you’ve practiced it, and discovered the goodness that awaits.
I was with our family dog, Raggy, when he died. I was 14 or 15 at the time, and a practicing Christian. Raggy was really old, and suffering – for days he could barely breathe and hardly move. I sat in the mudroom with him, pet him, and prayed that he would be healed. His last breath was like a hard sigh.
I believe my prayer was answered. His suffering came to an end – in that sense he was healed.
And death is just a doorway. Who knows what new adventure Raggy plunged into that day?
