Don’t Die Ugly

Lynn Soles made her career about creating beauty – as an artist, art teacher, tattoo artist and owner of a “permanent beauty” clinic. Then her doctors told her she had cancer. She had to choose: Die soon and ugly from cancer or enter a long course of treatments that might allow her to regain the life she’d known. This remarkable memoir and guidebook, written in the course of her first year of treatment, gives real-life guidance for best supporting others through long-term illnesses and surgeries. Practical tips describe: how a cancer friend is different from other friends; things to say (and things never to say!) to your friend in treatment; essential cancer self-care tips for the habitual Superwoman; specific ways to ask for and give help to a person exhausted by cancer treatments. You’ll laugh with Lynn as she and her family adjust to the changes treatment causes. You’ll be amazed by her contractor husband’s commitment to support her–even applying her eyelashes to the sounds of crooner Dean Martin. You’ll sense her longing as family holiday traditions, client care schedules, and the most mundane of daily tasks are revised to accommodate her chemotherapy-induced exhaustion. You’ll marvel at the perseverance cancer treatment can teach and learn to respect the times when a patient needs to rest in the “cancer cocoon.” Hollywood stars rely on beauty professionals like Lynn to keep them physically beautiful right to the day their body is viewed in its coffin. Lynn’s cancer journey will inspire you to reconsider whether your hope rests in the beautiful things of this world that will fade away, and to rethink what it means to leave a beautiful, eternal Christian legacy.