So Dame Elizabeth Taylor has died of congestive heart failure at age 79. The wonder is the Hollywood star lasted as long as she did.

She was a great beauty in her youth, with uniquely violet eyes, known in her time as the most beautiful woman in the world. She didn’t hold on to that title for very long, as she wasn’t much of a beauty from the inside out.

Her internal environment was perfectly hideous, thanks in no small measure to alcohol and drug abuse (she was addicted to pain killers). She was riddled with a long list of health problems that quickly ravaged her natural beauty, leaving her a fat, puffy, heavily wrinkled, wheelchair-bound shadow of her former self.

She had more than 100 operations in 25 years, including for recurring back problems, the most serious of which was scoliosis (curvature of the spine), a congenital defect. She suffered kidney problems, ovarian cysts, amoebic dysentary, bronchial infections, including pneumonia in 1961 that almost killed her and required an emergency tracheotomy, and another bout in 2000 that once again nearly carried her off.

Doctors removed a benign brain tumour in 1997, treated her for skin cancer in 2002, and performed procedures on her to treat congestive heart failure. She also had seizures, a stroke, and three hip replacements.

It didn’t help that in her emotional life, the only triumph was of hope over experience. Taylor had the dubious distinction of being one of the world’s most married and divorced women.  So no chance for her, of any emotional equilibrium necessary for health in body and mind.

She must have been more than ready to let go of this moral coil.