Chapter II - Mom and the dinosaur tracks

In the end, it was my dead mother who actually wound up making the decision about my facelift. I made the phone call that set things in motion a few months after she died, but her imprint was unmistakable.  

My mother had died at the age of 91.  Silvia had been beautiful as a young woman, an occasional model in her native Manhattan, tall and slender with a "horsy" build and fabulous cheekbones.  She loved wearing expensive clothes and elaborate hats and striking jewelry.  She CARED about the way she looked.

From the time she had hit her 50s, she had talked about getting a facelift.  She wasn't blessed with good skin, she had always been an outdoors girl and to hell with the sunscreen, and it all caught up with her.  She wrinkled early and deeply, her skin lost its elasticity, and the flesh above one eye drooped so much on one side that it looked like she was perpetually squinting.   Sometimes she would ask me, “If you had to choose, which would you preserve after 40, your face or your figure?”  I didn’t think about it much, having neither an exceptional face or figure to preserve.   My mother didn’t have to make a choice:  her figure remained lean and model-like until the day she died.

Her chatter about a facelift always remained chatter, since my father didn’t have the money for one and my mother was in and out of hospitals for more important reasons much of her adult life.  A frivolous facelift was never a serious consideration.  But that didn’t stop her from talking about one, well into her 80s.

I should point out that my family has a healthy dose of longevity genes. Not only did my paternal grandmother live till almost 99, but her sister ALSO lived to 98 (in spite of diabetes and an amputated leg), and another sister to 94. This record of nonagenarians on my father's side of the family meant that the likelihood of my living to a ripe old Rose Kennedy-kind-of-age was high.  And what's the point of looking like a prune for the last 40 years of your life?

By the time Mom was 90, she was a prune mentally as well as physically, incapable of sustained conversation.  Confused by Alzheimer's and senile dementia (exacerbated, in my opinion, by her inherently ditzy nature), bedridden by two broken hips and internal infections, she was in no condition -- physical or mental -- to think about her face.  A few days before her death, I had gotten a call from a friend in the States that Mom was in the hospital again with an infection in her feeding tube.  As this was my mom’s second hospitalization within two weeks, I understood the gist of the conversation, even though Gina was vague, calling from a phone with my dad standing next to her.  (My dad was deaf by then and unable to make a phone call on his own). Sounded like Mom really WAS dying this time.  

Because I was at home in Italy and Mom was in Maryland, flying to her side wasn't as fast or simple as popping down the road.   I arrived too late to be with her during the last moments of her death watch, but the point had really been to keep Dad company.  She had been doped up with morphine during her final hospital stay, anyway, to the point where she perhaps hadn’t recognized my father on some of his final visits and definitely would not have recognized me.  She hadn’t known who I was for about two years.     But usually she knew who Dad was, and would call him her “Prince of Love”.   She might stumble over his name, but the “Prince of Love” label came flowing right out.    

Dad told me later that she brightened up when he came to see her on the afternoon of May 1,  a few hours before her death.  Maybe she knew who he was and maybe she didn’t.  She wasn’t talking at that point.  But she did recognize that SOMEONE was with her.  So she didn’t go out alone; she had the company of someone who had loved her and her alone for 76 years, and never mind the wrinkles and pale fragile flesh that had long obfuscated her beauty.

But how many women are so lucky?  How many women are so loved?

I had begun thinking about all this a few weeks before Mom died when Rico, my Italian husband (Rico is short for Enrico), came back from a trip to the South of France.   He had visited friends in Monte Carlo and couldn’t stop raving about a woman we both know, a woman a couple of years younger than I.  He hadn’t seen her for about a year and was amazed by how rested and glowing she looked.  Joan had confessed to him that she had recently gotten a face lift and she recommended it highly.  

Rico was impressed by her honesty but didn’t want to press her for details at the time.  It was more of a woman’s thing, he felt.  He urged me to call Joan and find out more -- who, where, how much, how soon.  “You should do it yesterday,” he concluded.  

I have never looked carefully at my neck, but my younger son Sacha, a few months earlier, had commented on how spidery the skin there had become.  I have never worried about a double chin because my face is small and my skin fairly taut, but lately Rico, had been calling attention to the extra roll of flesh beneath my once-firm chin line.  

I hadn’t fretted unduly about the two lines running down from my nose to the outside of my mouth because they would disappear into hyper-attenuated “dimples” when I smiled . . . and I did try to smile frequently.   As for the laugh lines around my eyes -- those had appeared when I was in my 20s.  They were old friends by now.

So it took me until May 29 before I got up enough nerve to call Joan. When I returned from my US trip, I initially postponed the call.  It was not that I felt awkward about asking her about her surgery; she had spoken frankly, openly to my husband. Nor did I feel embarrassed about my interest in a facelift since I had been joking about one for years.   The excuse for hesitating was the frivolity of a facelift so soon after Mom’s death.  At the same time, that event was my very catalyst for calling.

What I vaguely wanted to do, I thought, was to look in real life like I look in my photos.  I have one of those faces that photographs well, and this has been a constant through the years.  But recently, when I would be showing people a family photo album, they would ask me how many years ago such-and-such a picture was taken -- when it might have been a few weeks earlier.  I would laugh and make a joke about it, but the temporal gap between my photographic image and real life was increasing.  

When I finally called Joan, she put me at ease right away.  She had never done anything so wonderful in her whole life, she gushed.  If she had it to do again, she’d do it tomorrow.  No, it didn’t hurt, not enough to fuss about anyway.  And no, she didn’t look plastic or pulled; she still had wrinkles on her face and was plenty proud of them.  

“I spent three years interviewing eight surgeons in four countries (five if you count Monaco) before deciding on Dr. Delos,” she said.  “I wanted to take my time.  This is my only face, after all.”  She described the woman doctor who had taken harshly unflattering “before” pictures to convince Joan of the need for surgery.  She described the Parisian doctor who had promised to eliminate all her wrinkles.   She described the Milanese doctor who had flaunted his celebrity clientele.  

“Dr. Delos seemed the most honest and correct and professional, and VERY discreet.  He was neither the most expensive doctor I interviewed nor the cheapest.  Right about in the middle, I’d say.  But he was very good and I am simply THRILLED with what he has done.  If you decide to make an appointment, call me back and I will give you his phone number and all the coordinates.”

Her enthusiasm about her experience combined with my husband’s enthusiasm for the change in her appearance were almost convincing enough for me to decide then and there.  No commitments.  Just a consultation.   Do I WANT to spend  €10,000 on my face?  Is my face worth it?

More significantly, is my LIFE worth it?  After all, plastic surgery IS surgery, with all the risks involved.  It involves blood and needles and things that I prefer to stay away from, and it is non-essential.  You don't HAVE to do it.  Plus . . . my life doesn't depend on my face.  My everyday life does not consist of smiling to a television camera, or making face-to-face presentations to clients, or showing up at society balls, or doing lunches in posh Milanese venues with well-preserved women of a certain age.  

I work at home as a researcher-writer-translator, with most of my client contact done by phone and email. Once in a while I have to do a personal interview, but these are so few and far between that I have plenty of time to pull myself together -- the hair, the makeup, the right outfit and jewelry.  Okay, okay, the bella figura bit:  when you gotta do it, you gotta do it.  But usually the people I interview don't care who I am, they want to do the interviews as fast as possible so they can get back to their "real" work.  When I have a face-to-face encounter, some of them barely look up at me from their desks.  

My close friends who are about my age are scattered all over the globe.  I see very few of them on a frequent, regular basis. None of my best friends had had a facelift, to my knowledge, though several women had made a few tentative noises about it of late.  In short, there was no job pressure, no peer pressure, no social pressure to do something about my face.

Ricco was making some noises about it, but he didn’t press the issue too much because he would be the first to admit that he has aged less well than I.  He wrestles with adult-onset diabetes, high blood pressure, overweight, baldness, and depression as a result of all of the above.   He had been a drop-dead gorgeous Italian bachelor when I met him, so the change in his appearance was far more dramatic and weighed far more heavily on him than my aging has on me.

In fact, one of the reasons he was starting to talk up the idea of a facelift was because he was thinking about cosmetic surgery for himself.    Not a lift!  He has wonderful skin inherited from his mother, fine-pored, unwrinkled, rosy-peach colored skin.  That plus the extra pounds on his face meant he had no wrinkles to address.  

However, he has had bags under his eyes for as long as I have known him.  He has large, slightly bulging eyes, bright blue and very striking; they are the first thing you notice about him.  The second thing you notice -- if he has had a bad day, or little sleep, or has drunk too much fluid (not necessarily wine or liquor, but liquid of any kind, including water) -- are big puffy bags beneath those beautiful eyes.  

This trait runs in his family; his father had bags too, and so do all his paternal relatives.  When he was young and fit and his skin more firm and he had black curly hair to balance out the face, the bags were not so noticeable.  But they had become more so in recent years as the hairline receded, then disappeared entirely,  and the skin lost tone.  

Ricco did know, or know about, some men who had undergone surgery to remove their bags.  He was thinking about doing the same, but needed a little . . . incentive.  I could be that incentive.  He wasn't manipulating me in this effort because we were both fully aware of his interest and intentions.  What was missing was some catalyst on my part.  

Mom's death ultimately provided the catalyst to call Joan.  What was still missing was the extra something that would bring me to dial the doctor's number.