The Face of Life

"My poor baby!"

She kissed the mole on his right cheek she had first kissed when he was born. Her finger ran across the scar under his chin he got playing football in school. She kissed him again, now to the nose crooked since that terrible car accident on his twenty-nineth birthday. He had been drinking, but after that he gave it up completely. She placed her hand on his scalp, bald since he was forty. His pores were big and thick, his forehead like wrinkled leather from thirty years of railroad work under the intense California sun. Before retirement at sixty-five, he got specks of skin cancer here and there, basal cell carcinoma they called it. The doctors carved it out leaving a noticeable defect on his left ear. That was curable, but the melanoma they did not see was not. Two tough years of surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy had hollowed out his face. She took one last look at the ghostly complexion of death no mortician could possibly remove from the seventy-two year old corpse. A teardrop landed on his pale blue upper lip.

The ninety-five year old mother reached and closed the lid of her son's casket.