The Mask at the Edge of Dying
My beloved sister on holidays. A most honest and delightful candid capture I love dearly.
The Tangled Grace of Grief: Honouring My Sister's Life and Leaving
I always feel a bit uncertain starting these things, as if writing about my sister, Janet, and the tender work of grieving her might land in a world that’s too hurried or too polite to care. But grief has no need for permission. It asks to be spoken, not for its own sake, but because it carries something vital—something we tend to overlook. I mean no offence to anyone by sharing this; instead, I offer it as a gesture of reverence. Janet’s dying was a great honour, not in the way people tend to dress that word up, but in its raw, unadorned truth. Her life, her leaving, and the strange unfolding of grief that follows are gifts—messy, tangled, and luminous. This, too, is one of them.
Walking the Fine Edge: Grief, Gifts, and the Unspoken Truths of Dying
There are moments in the dying time that linger and moments you don’t recognize as significant until they haunt you long after the body is gone. Six weeks on from Janet’s passing, I find myself replaying one such moment, not because it was dramatic, but because it wasn’t. It slipped by like an uninvited truth, spoken almost casually, but now it sits at the center of my questions about her, about life, about the lies we live by and the truths we refuse to claim.
Janet lived much of her life under the weight of what I’ve come to call the Three Primary Lies:
I am not enough.
I am not lovable.
I can’t cope.
These weren’t quiet, background whispers in her mind; they were the loud and relentless mantras that seemed to guide her every action, every thought about herself. She would insist on her perceived inadequacies—her lack of intelligence, her supposed unattractiveness, and her belief that she had left no legacy. These were her truths, even when they were patently false.
To challenge her on these beliefs was like throwing a stone at a fortress. She would plead for us not to argue, as if disagreement would somehow rob her of the fragile foundation she’d built on the quicksand of these lies. And yet, one day in hospice, as she hovered near the edge of life and death, a crack appeared in that fortress.
It came in the form of a volunteer—an older man who, for reasons unknown, seemed drawn to her. He’d visit her room when no family was there, sometimes feeding her soup, his quiet presence offering a kind of steady care. One afternoon, I sat in the room with them. He was holding a spoon of soup to her lips when he made a lighthearted, almost flirtatious comment about her pretty eyes.
And then it happened. She looked at him, hairless from chemotherapy, fragile, diminished in body but still alive with something unnameable, and said, “You should see me with hair and makeup. I’m beautiful.”
It stopped me in my tracks.
This was the same woman who had spent years, decades even, rejecting her own worth. And yet here she was, at death’s door, speaking a truth about her beauty as if it were as plain and undeniable as the ground beneath us. I don’t know where it came from—whether it was a fleeting moment of clarity, a defensive instinct, or perhaps the raw honesty that sometimes surfaces when all the usual masks fall away.
But that moment has stayed with me. It has burrowed into my thoughts and demanded my attention. How could someone so deeply entrenched in the belief that she was “not enough” suddenly lay claim to her own beauty? Was it always there, buried beneath the mask of self-loathing she wore so convincingly? And if so, what purpose did that mask serve?
The Lies We Tell Ourselves
The more I sit with this memory, the more I wonder: Were her “lies” really lies at all? Or were they something more like armour, a protective layer against the raw vulnerability of being seen? If she declared herself ugly, unworthy, unlovable, perhaps it was easier to survive the world’s judgment—or worse, its indifference.
What I can’t shake is the possibility that these lies were never meant to deceive anyone else. They were, for her, a way of controlling the narrative about herself so that she wouldn’t have to face the unpredictability of being truly known. If you tell the world you’re not enough, you don’t have to risk finding out whether the world agrees.
But what happens when the mask becomes the truth? What happens when the lies you tell yourself take root so deeply that they shape the entire story of your life?
Janet’s words in that hospice room felt like a moment of rebellion against her own story. For that brief instant, she spoke from a place of knowing, a place untouched by the years of self-negation. “I’m beautiful,” she said, not because she needed validation but because it was true.
What Grief Reveals
Grief has a way of peeling back the layers of our own masks. In grieving Janet, I’ve found myself asking not just why she wore that mask but why I’ve worn my own. Because I see myself in her struggle. I, too, have wrestled with the belief that I am not enough. I, too, have looked for validation outside myself, hoping someone else would see what I couldn’t.
What Janet has left me with is the question of what lies beneath those masks. What truths have I buried so deep that they only surface in fleeting, unguarded moments?
And perhaps more importantly, what purpose do these masks serve now? If they were once armour, do I still need them?
The Gift in the Dying Time
As I try to make sense of that moment with Janet, I realize it’s not about her words but about what they point to. Dying has a way of stripping us bare, of revealing the truth that we spend our lives avoiding. Janet’s mask slipped at that moment, and what was underneath was luminous.
But what haunts me is the thought of what her life might have been if she had let that truth breathe, if she had lived from that place of knowing her own beauty, her own worth, her own capacity to cope.
Maybe the lesson in her dying is not just about her but about all of us. What masks are we still wearing? What truths are waiting to be spoken before it’s too late?
And what would it take for us to say, here and now, “I am enough. I am lovable. I can cope”?
The Mirror
Janet was, in many ways, a mirror for me. Her struggles were not so different from my own. And her passing has left me with the responsibility of looking into that mirror and asking hard questions.
Because the truth is, we don’t have to wait until we are dying to let the mask fall away.
We don’t have to wait to live from the place of knowing we are enough.
Janet’s beauty wasn’t in her hair or makeup. It was in her. And it’s in me. And it’s in you.
The question is whether we’ll let it breathe.
