Your Wounds Are Sad to Behold. But You Are Not Your Wounds

     I lived close to Washington D.C. at one time, and actually procured a job at The Pentagon. But since it seemed a bit too far to drive, I reconsidered my decision to take the position. Yet I remember the interior of that historical building, since I interviewed there.

    The building was erected in 1941 in an effort to bring the occupants of numerous War Departments under one roof. Arlington National Cemetery sits just across the interstate from the massive building. I remember it well. The Kennedy grave site, the mast of the U.S.S. Maine, the statue of the heroes of Iwo Jima.

    There were those people who walked those long hallways of The Pentagon every week day, and one day might have blended easily into the next, ‘til a career had gone by. Until the advent of a very singular day.

    We know the day as “911.” It separates one season of our history from another, as surely as “The Challenger Explosion,” or “Pearl Harbor.” Terrorists had their choice of several government buildings that day. Some believe they debated hitting The Capitol Building or The White House, before settling on The Pentagon.

    There’s an eerie film clip of the plane crash; taken from a permanent security camera. The frames move in semi-slow motion, and are not fluid like a normal film. We never see the airplane, but a massive red fireball; a fireball that expands, and diminishes. It’s easy to forget that people were dying in those few, elusive moments that we would like to recall; (re-call, in the sense that we could prevent it from happening.)

    Some were killed in a millisecond, while others stumbled out of the fire, unscathed. Then there was that third group,… those horribly burned individuals; those who lived, but who remain almost unrecognizable, even after extensive medical reconstruction.

    There’s a line in the book, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. Jane is visiting Edward Rochester, her former lover. In her absence, Mr. Rochester has been terribly burned in a house fire. Jane listens as the poor man pours out his woes to her.

     “I am just a burned-out hulk of a man. A vulcan. Just look at my wounds.”

     To which Jane responds, pitifully.

     “Mr. Rochester, your wounds are sad to behold. But you are not your wounds.”

     I have always been interested in innovative medical treatments that border on the bizarre. One particular treatment, already being experimented with, involves the transfer of a human face… from a cadaver to a living human being.

     Doctors have already managed to transfer faces from one cadaver to another, with unusual results. For most times, after the face is transplanted, even the very mother of the deceased would not recognize the original donor face. Since the bone structure is different from person to person, this tends to effect the final facial features.

     There are those burn victims from places such as The Pentagon, and other industrial and house fires that look forward to the day such treatments are widely available to them. They struggle to live with the results of their wounds, as people stare unmercifully at them.

      But we are not our wounds.

      Our wounds may detract from our overall appearance. They may glaringly broadcast the presence of a past event.

 

      ... But we are not our wounds.

 

By William McDonald, PhD. Excerpt from "Unconventional Devotions" Copyright 2005