Seeing Clearly

One sweltering August day, my mother took her eye out. She was sitting on a folding chair under a luxuriant maple on my front lawn, but the sun was relentless. Not like today when the winter sun is shining crackling-bright even while the snow is falling. No, on that day decades ago, the air was heavy and suffocating. Mother's scalp was itching. The sweat was pouring down her neck. She decided it would be cooler on the porch, only three steps to negotiate. But, as in life, there was nothing to hold on to, no banister, no safety net. Her tiny feet in their backless, toeless Manhattan shoes, slipped out from under her, throwing her down so that her left eye hit the sharp corner of the middle step. I saw it happen in slow motion. By the time I got from the overgrown garden to where she lay struggling to get up on her own, the blood was pooling in her eye. I could only remember seeing her bleed once before. I was twelve and she was fifty. She had left home for an annual event in a midtown hotel all done up in tight-fitting ice blue satin. But she came home mortified with blood staining the seat of the dress. My mother was a powder blue and slate gray person. She never wore red intentionally.

The emergency room doctors at Fairview called the ophthalmologist in Pittsfield. It was a Sunday, but he rushed down to his office and we rushed up to meet him. I remember thinking it was a kindness. He could have been playing eighteen holes. The doctor explained that time was of the essence in these cases. He called Albany Medical Center to advise them that we were on our way. My mother, eighty-three years old, curled up in the back seat of the car like a small child after a tumble off the monkey bars...except she didn't cry. She didn't say a word.

At the hospital, wading into the great throng of diabetics, addicts and people with everyday complaints but no access to doctors, the seas parted for us. Apparently, this was not only a medical emergency, but a race and class emergency as well. My mother was wheeled on a gurney through the crowd of black and brown people like Catherine the Great on a sedan chair. Nonetheless, she lost her eye. She didn't misplace it, of course. She didn't lose it in the sense of disfigurement. She continued to look exactly the same, her hair swept up on top of her head and held in place by a large contingent of bobby pins, her cheeks rouged. There she is, a '20s beauty, an actual flapper, more than fifty years later. Nonetheless, she could no longer see out of her left eye and the books she read in the sixteen years she had remaining, would be reduced to what was available in large print. Romance novels, murder mysteries.

We stayed up waiting in an unsavory McDonald's in Albany when we weren't in the hospital lobby, an anthology of suffering. Then, we brought her home. My sister called to ask if I felt guilty. I guess about the missing banister. Maybe about the hot weather. But I somehow knew enough to realize it wasn't about me. It was all about my mother, who she had been, who she was becoming. I tried to shuffle alongside her in the present. I held her head back with my left hand as I dabbed her eye with a tissue in my right. I administered eye drops. Again, she was childlike, but patient, strangely undemanding. She seemed to revel in the attention as she had at the hospital. My mother was always a sucker for doctors. She developed intimacies with them. I thought....here she is. A six year old bravely standing up to iodine, a splinter in her foot. Or, a twenty-five year old with a sprained ankle smiling flirtatiously at a handsome medical student with a stethoscope hanging suggestively from his neck. Or, maybe the withered crone she would become when she could no longer see out of either pale blue eye, her smudged glasses really only a fashion thing.

Everything would be lost little by little, but everything would also remain, its lifespan beginning before memory, in a forever only hinted at by Hallmark. My mother took her eye out and I began to see her more clearly.

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Here's a link to Colin Harrington's review of my book Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement that appeared in the Berkshire Eagle https://www.berkshireeagle.com/stories/book-review-twilight-time-is-reflective-spiritual,591980

Please share your thoughts regarding this story and Twilight Time by writing to me at
seventysomething9@gmail.com