I can look at my younger son’s face and see stories written across it. He has one story etched over his right eyebrow, the story of when he got too close to his friend at bat and ended up with a fractured eye socket, a concussion, and stitches, which left the lasting evidence. Underneath his chin in the tissue that was once as soft as velvet against my lips and is now mostly covered with stubbly dark shadows, there is the story of the time he tried to do a backwards belly flop at the pool. As courageous a maneuver as that was, his one mistake was to fail to jump far enough backwards so that when he came down, the unforgiving cement on the edge of the pool opened a gaping hole parallel to his mouth. Every time he wailed, that hole opened and spurted blood until it was securely fastened with internal and external stitches. There are stories written across his hands and arms and legs, some of which I know, and most of which I am glad that I do not know. Once in a while, I will ask him, “How did you get that?” as I notice a new scar on his flesh. More than a few times, his response has been, “You’d probably rather not know.” True.

I look at my own body, and the biggest scar I have that is visible, but not to many people, is the scar across the width of my pelvic bone that reminds me of the two most precious gifts I’ve even been given, both sons taken from me via C-sections. I have a really great story on my right ankle about the time when I was swinging on the porch swing with the boys’ father and the swing broke and I ended up having a four hour surgery to pick bone fragments from muscle tissue before the bits and pieces of what was my ankle were wired and screwed back together. The doctor told me that I might never walk on that ankle again without a brace, but I did and I do.

I have some other scars: a couple that only tell the story of the pain leading up to the operation, not very interesting at all, except that I remember when I got them in relation to other life events far more memorable. The one on my neck from the cervical fusion occurred a couple of months after my father had died. The three small ones on my left knee are from the arthroscopic surgery a few weeks before my second marriage. And I have some scars that can’t even be seen because they are from healings below the surface. I can feel them with my fingertips instead of see them with my eyes: the small lump on the fifth metatarsil in my right foot, which I injured ironically just walking for my health, and the lump on my left fibia, which, again ironically, I got from a fall at the gym. These below the surface scars ache fiercely when the weather gets cold or stormy. I can tell the atmospheric conditions are changing by the pains in my body. I asked a doctor about that once, and he said that it was true, but no one really knows the scientific explanation for it.

Maybe our bodies leave these signs of the old stories that go along with them, so we won’t forget about the impact of events on our lives. After all, our lives are just one story on top of another one. We only remember the really amazing stories, whether joyous or devastating. We can’t possibly remember all the episodes. But there is one thing that all the dings and dents and bumps we carry with us have in common. They are all signs that we healed. We overcame whatever invasive procedure or circumstance that pierced us or broke us. The scars are testaments to our own survival, our own ability to outlast the stories until the final chapter is written, and we rely on others to tell our stories for us.