“You’ve heard of a bad hair day. I’m having a bad face day,” David Roche says to a group of grade six students who have assembled to hear his message. They laugh. “What you see is a birth difference, not a birth defect. It’s not something wrong—it’s just unique. It’s just something different.”
Photo courtesy David Roche
He calls himself an inspirational humorist, using jokes and anecdotes to explain his misshapen face and the impact it’s had on his life.
David was born with a condition that caused one side of his face to droop—doctors call it vascular malformation—and as a result, he immediately underwent a series of surgeries and radiation treatments.
At fifteen months of age, his lower lip was removed. Inspired to dispel myths and prejudice, he has devoted his life to helping others, first in community service and later as a teacher and motivational speaker, primarily addressing elementary and middle school students.
When he visits schools with his partner Marlena Brevin, Marlena gets straight to the point.
“I was shocked. I was repulsed,” she admits when she first saw David’s face, “but I could feel his depth.” She tells the class how she and David met while training to become massage therapists, and how she was attracted to his warm and compassionate voice, regardless of his appearance.
“It was who he was. It was so powerful. It was so intuitive. I felt like my soul needed to be with someone who could feel deeply like this, and I thought I’d be abandoning myself if I didn’t follow this through.”
She did follow through, and the couple began their 36-year professional and personal relationship, which continues to this day.
“What would have happened if I didn’t take that second look and get to know David more?” Marlena wonders. “That’s what I say to the kids.”
The message is simple: Don’t judge a book by its cover. Stop. Step back. Take a moment. What do you feel underneath the obvious?
It’s an inspiring story, but one that didn’t come easily.
“I wasn’t teased, I wasn’t bullied,” David says about growing up in small-town Indiana, “but at the same time, you know what’s going on. You see it, you hear it. People stare. It’s always there. It’s part of daily life.”
He wasn’t bullied, but he often felt isolated. At first, encouraged by his Catholic upbringing, he repressed those feelings by losing himself in good works.
“I concentrated on being a good boy who did what he was told. I always tried to be responsible and to change the world.”
At 13, he entered a seminary intending to become a priest, but it didn’t take. Later, as a young man, he joined the Democratic Workers Party and entered the world of politically charged activism.
“I have always thrived in communities — families, church, school, town, and then activism,” he says. “That helps me survive. That’s the key to who I am.”
Typesetting the Party newspaper, selling copies, and pushing the message gave him a sense of purpose, even though he says he didn’t know what he was doing.
“I didn’t have a plan, but I followed my heart. I became a communist because I wanted to change the injustices I saw.”
But good works only delayed an inevitable reckoning.
“As I approached my thirties, I had never dealt with my facial difference.”
In reality, he felt ashamed of his face, angry at the constant stares, and, to top it off, disillusioned with the Party, which was losing focus and tearing itself apart through internal squabbling. David left the Workers Party in 1986 after 12 years of service.
“I was at loose ends. I was in bad shape. I weighed 115 pounds, drank cheap alcohol, smoked, and didn’t eat healthily. What I needed to survive was nature and love—and love that was expressed.”
He found that expression through caring for AIDS patients in San Francisco. Feeding, massaging, and nurturing people who needed him was an intense emotional and life-changing experience.
“I was loved for who I was and what I could bring to the table, which was love long repressed. Love came alive.”
And then he met Marlena.
“When I met him, he didn’t talk about his face,” she says. “Sometimes he wouldn’t want to go to parties, and I thought, ‘Wait, he’s not talking about it — maybe it hurts him.’ I watched every movie that was made about people with facial differences, and I tried to feel what it would be like to be David.”
As their relationship grew, David allowed Marlena to reach out. “I lay emotionally naked on the table. Marlena was teaching me, integrating me with myself.”
Talking about his condition opened up another opportunity. In 1990, he approached the Canadian organization AboutFace and offered to become its spokesperson. His unique style of humour and candour led to speaking engagements throughout Canada and the United States, with side trips to Australia, New Zealand, and Hong Kong.
AboutFace is just one organization representing an estimated two million Canadians with some form of facial difference. There are others.
David and Marlena are also involved with the Children’s Craniofacial Association, based in Texas.
The association has even created the David Roche Award to honour individual advocacy. David is also an advisor with Faceout Project, an online resource for the global facial difference community.
“It’s taken me a long time to realize that my face is actually a gift,” he says.
“My difficulty, my challenge is on the outside, where I’ve been forced to deal with it. I had no choice. I had to look inside to find my beauty and my sense of who I am, and once you do that, you can see it inside other people too.”
Healing himself made it possible to heal others.
In 2004, the couple moved to Roberts Creek, BC. Although they’ve slowed down a bit—David no longer travels long distances—they continue their outreach in person or by video.
Marlena also volunteers at Sunshine Coast Hospice, teaching gentle touch massage to the staff.
“There’s an awkwardness when people meet someone like David,” she says.
“They get a little uncomfortable, so they don’t say anything. Now, it’s out in the open more. What David’s doing, and what other disability movements are doing, dissipates the fear. Talking about it is helping to clear things up and make it easier for us to accept each other.”
This was evident during David’s appearance at the Sunshine Coast Writers Conference in Sechelt a few months ago, where he read a chapter from his autobiography Standing at the Back Door of Happiness.
Focusing on his medical history, he used a passage on scar tissue as a jumping-off point for a discussion on compassion and understanding.
“Scars are about healing. Scars are about forgiveness,” the chapter reads.
“We got a standing ovation,” he says. “I love standing ovations.”
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