The Saddest Moments Of My Life Involve Hair

I hadn’t showered in one week.

As the technician pulled one last small, round electrode off of my head, I winced in pain. The pain was nothing compared to how grateful I was to finally take a shower. I had been on the epilepsy monitoring unit for a week, with electrodes glued to my head on one end and plugged into a wall on the other.

There was no showering for me or my hair, unless I wanted to be electrocuted. This would be deadly, most likely, but on the upside, could cause the seizures doctors were so desperately seeking from me. Nothing had worked-not sleep deprivation or going off medication had induced seizures. We were at a loss.

I was at a loss as I stared into the mirror. My 14-year-old forehead was covered in zits and my hair looked like something out of a cartoon, clumpy bits sticking in all directions-up, down, left, right, backwards and forwards. It would take hours to return my hair to a somewhat normal state, and weeks to fully get my hair back to normal.

In this article about motherhood that I wrote last week, I said my complicated feelings around having children was what I most resented epilepsy for. This holds true, but the short-term hair issues that not only that EEG but many EEGs gave me come in close second.

To be 14 years old and spend a week in the hospital while all of your friends are in school because you can’t stop having seizures at night is enough for any tender young soul to bear. Also having to worry about turning into a raisin because it takes 3 hours to get the glue that holds an EEG in place out of your hair is a little bit too much. As if life ever cared what was a “little bit too much.”

I grew up with many role models that showed me taking care of the one body you get in this life is not vain, but an act of deep love and self-care. One stands out, my maternal grandmother. She took care of how she appeared to others and physically embodied love. Her body was a home for her wonderful soul. Her example cultivated love to the point that I can’t ignore how much I miss her physical presence. I can so realistically imagine what it would be like to have her here in certain moments. I can even imagine(the many ways) her hair could look.

Growing up around my grandmother, I came to understand quickly that presentation was everything. From my earliest memories, she always had her red Chanel lipstick on and her hair was always done. This included while she was playing with her grandchildren on the floor of her bathroom, gardening, or at a nice dinner-it didn’t matter. If she was breathing, she would look nice.

Her short, seemingly low maintenance hair was anything but low-maintenance. Granny rocked styles from sleek and chic to big bouffant. She was the epitome of not a hair out of place in my saucer-like eyes that held her as my world. Whatever hairstyle she had, she was always elegant. It was not until my later years that I came to understand this elegance had absolutely nothing to do with her beautiful outfits but radiated from within. I don’t remember the first time I saw her without makeup, or without her hair done, but it was terrifying.

The night she died, it was memorable that her beautiful silver hair looked so frail as she lay there, like little wisps coming out of her head. She only stuck around for a few days after she started to decline, but I’ve never seen her less put together in my life. Not that I would have expected anything else-dying is quite a job in and of itself.

I personally did not want to see her in a casket, but my Granddad, now trying to be both mother and father, grandmother and grandfather wanted to make sure we were all going to be okay. This included seeing Granny one last time the way she had looked in life.

We all gathered around for about 5 minutes at the funeral home-who wants to linger at a funeral home?- a day or two after she died. There she lay, hair perfectly coiffed , makeup done, beautifully dressed. The way it had always been. I knew just as certainly as I had in the minutes after she died that she wasn’t there in that body that so resembled my grandmother. My last true living memory of her, lying waiting to meet death, is in alignment with the way she lived her life- with one notable exception. Her hair.

Other moments have been filled with sadness and hair, like a bad sixth grade haircut that took months to get over, or having longer split ends than I thought I would and needing 4 inches cut off instead of 2 inches. Reliving the importance of this piece of our identity, hair, brought into focus how much we hone in on details, not just in life, but in death in order to recreate memories of those we love.

Do you have a “hair” theme in some of your life stories? Happy, sad or otherwise? Does this make you consider how you will be remembered? What part of our very temporary bodies do we tend to identify with the most?