A while ago, I told the story of Lucinda’s accident. This is the aftermath.

Driving home was an exercise in grief. I’d feel okay for minutes at a time, and then the sound of her hitting the ground, the sight of the hole in her face, the weight of the blame I carried would crash down on me all over again.

Lucinda was broken.

I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know if I could fix her, if this project would survive, if I even wanted it to. Nothing would ever be the same. It couldn’t be.

I took her home and carried her, inside her suitcase, carefully into my craft room. I set the case on the table. I couldn’t look, not that night. There was nothing I could do one way or another. I slept.

The next day I opened the case. I pulled back the fabric covering her face. It was both not as bad and so much worse than I thought.

The break was a clean one. Basically triangular in shape, It bisected her left eye and split her right eyebrow. The hole stretched from her left cheek to her right temple.

Worse. When I lifted her, I found that the only thing keeping the top of her head in place was her wig. Without the glue that held wig to skull, the whole top of her head lifted off.

I didn’t try to fix her right away. I didn’t have the tools on hand. Instead, I used some scraps of lace to make a veil that hid the worst of the damage. I took some pictures.

Over the next few days, I pieced Lucinda back together. A bit of glue helped me reconstruct her face and reset the top of her head. I left her hair off, because I want to fill the chips on her nose and temple and that will take special materials that need to be ordered.

I bought new lace and some wire and made her a more flattering veil. She was actually very pretty when bald, but she was self-conscious about the chips in her face and the discolorations left behind by old wig glue.

The following Saturday, for the first time in over a week, Lucinda went outside and stood in the sun. She’s still broken, she always will be.

But that’s not stopping her.