Through the Lens

Death is silent as a whisper and soft as a last exhale from parched lips. If death had a color it would be gray like the sky before an oncoming storm. The scent of death is indescribable by any vernacular, a cloying sweetness of funeral sprays combined with the stink of shed tears and rank decay. And death, it is a cold thing, a final brush of fingertips across waxy, spent, lifeless skin one last time.

What about life? What is life but a preparation for the inevitable? We spend the entirety of our days kidding ourselves. Ever so hopeful, but ultimately disappointed when that which we've pretended will never happen eventually does, when death comes to us.

What is worse than finally realizing your ultimate and inescapable end? Perhaps, it really isn't any different, but perhaps it is. Watching death happen to someone else, being so helpless as someone you love is torn from your grasp.

Unless you never love anybody, someday it is going to happen. You will lose someone you love and there isn't a damned thing you can do about it. Nothing really drives the point home that you're going to die someday quite like standing there impotent at the bedside of someone you love. Counting the breaths and the seconds from one gasp to the next until there's no more to count and it's over. At least for them, it is, but for you that final exhale never ends. Think about it. You probably can't remember what you had for lunch last Tuesday, but I'll bet you will never forget that last lingering wisp of air and how utterly helpless you felt.

Death is easy, at least for the dead, it is. The living linger on and on in a type of suspended animation ghosting through a seemingly endless series of days and nights trapped in the memory of all the things they can't forget. We've all lost someone close to us. We've all experienced that particular brand of private hell. The burden of living when one of the reasons you were living for is gone. Luckily, as people, we're resilient beings. We find excuses to keep on going, band-aids to slap over the wound until it eventually scabs over. For a while, this busy work of existing from day to day, is the best we can do. Until at long last, assuming we don't pick at the scab and keep the wound bleeding, a scar forms. Oh, the mended flesh never the same as before. But, at least, you aren't bleeding anymore.

It doesn't really matter how the person you love dies. Platitudes intended to provide a soothing balm really do nothing to ease the pain. Thoughts of eventually being reunited with that person in some shimmering great beyond fall short of the goal in terms of easing your pain. Have you ever thought about what a crock of shit the idea really is? Talk about irony. Break it down to simplest terms. Dwell on it for a minute or two. Isn't it like kissing a child's boo-boo? The wound still hurts. The scab and the subsequent scar still have to form over the wound. Despite the kiss intended to soothe, the pain is still there.

It's easy to place the dead on a pedestal, to venerate the person you lost to the lofty position of sainthood. But, you really know differently. People are people and that person isn't any different than anyone else. There were faults and mistakes, and plenty of them. Not even the saints were saints. They were just people and like all people prone to the plague of fallibility. No one is exempt from being exactly what they are. Human. Plain. And. Simple.

Everyone leaves something behind. Even the poorest of people have something they valued. The meager possessions that at one time weren't worth a damn somehow magically have a larger, more significant importance. Something as worthless as a set of keys, a state ID card, or perhaps, a pair of glasses with a missing lens is transformed into something priceless. At least, that's how it was to me when the moment I'd spent years preparing for finally came.

Let's be honest. It's not a shocker or a surprise, that when someone lives to a ripe old age that they're going to die sooner rather than later. Believe me. They know it too. The past, their memories become a type of currency they willingly share to anyone who will take time out of their busy schedule to listen. So few do, take the time, that is, to cash in on something that isn't as tangible as coin.

I had spent years playing out scenarios, doing practice runs in my mind, over and over again until it became routine. I'd get a frantic call and that'd be it. Peaceful. Blissful. Controlled. Contained. Neat. Clean. Over and done. It didn't quite happen that way. Oh, thanks to modern medicine, it was merciful, but those last few minutes that seemed like days were the worst ones I'd ever spent in my life. The waiting. The hopelessness. The counting the breaths. The dusky hands and pale lips. The glazed eyes and blank stare. The knowing that he was already gone and this writhing, barely breathing shell was simply going through the formality of dying.

Afterwards, I was empty and I began to wonder if he'd taken a piece of me with him. I didn't have to question that very long. The answer was obvious. Of course he had. The body was dead. The soul was gone and I had departed this earth with it. At least, he got to die. For him it was over. For me, it was just beginning. I had to stay behind and live, perhaps, for the first time ever for the one person I had never lived for. Myself. But, I had no idea of how to do that. To this day, I'm still learning the vague concept of life before death.

I wanted him dressed as he always had. Dapper Dan, I always called him. But, there was one problem. The glasses he always wore had lost a lens and it was nowhere to be found. He wore glasses for his final debut, but they weren't his. I had replaced them for cheap reading glasses from the Dollar Store. After all, wasn't that better than entering the afterlife with only one lens?

It was a beautiful funeral. For a man of his age, he commanded a large circle of influence and the service was standing room only. I couldn't say goodbye. I couldn't look inside of the coffin. I wasn't ready to mourn him, or perhaps, I already had. He didn't die suddenly. He died little by little, day after day, going slowly down an inexorable vortex that eventually pulled him under. Most people never saw that side of him. He hid it so well from everyone except for those closest to him. I saw it, those subtle changes, the tremor of a hand, the unkempt hair, the dulling of his eyes, his surrender and acceptance, perhaps, even anticipation for the end to come. I tried, I truly did. I righted the wrong, combed the hair, wiped at the stains on his collar, but in the end not even I in all my determination to fix everything could fix the unfixable. I couldn't save him from the inevitability of dying and that was my biggest failure of all.

He was ninety-seven. Ninety-Seven. Not a bad age to live to. He had but one goal and that was to be the oldest living member of his family tree. He wanted to out live an uncle that made it to ninety-six. He did it. I had another goal in mind. I wanted him to have a hundredth birthday. Sure, it was selfish of me. I wanted him around for as long as I could have him. I couldn't see things from his point of view. When the only goal he had was to stay alive just long enough to make it to ninety-seven. I couldn't conceive it. An entire life whittled down to just one goal when I have so many yet to achieve.

It is odd, isn't it? How we find significance in insignificant things at the end? I couldn't take comfort in those around me. I didn't want to. I needed my pain and the suffering of loss. I hoarded that agony as a kind of therapeutic banding I intended to use to hold myself together. It worked. The banding held me together, but it shut everyone else out. I floundered alone by my own choosing because I needed to control something...anything.

It rained the day he died. I drove home alone because I didn't want to accept a ride from anyone. On the drive I saw something so seemingly unimportant, pretty, but hardly meaningful any other time, but on that day it had a deeper truth. A rainbow. A sign of God's promise to never destroy the world by flood again. Twin rainbows trailed across the horizon in splendid glory that I took as a sign from him. He was ok. He was where he belonged. He was happy and finally at peace. I was the one with the problem, the pain, and feeling so abandoned and left behind. God might never destroy the world by flood, but it felt like He had destroyed my world and I was being sucked under by the tide.

The nursing home boxed his things up nice and tidy. It was business, after all. The revenue machine had to keep on rolling and the bed filled. Most of his possessions weren't worth two cents. Just a few tidbits. There was very little to mark such a long life. Souvenirs of the dead, I like to call that cardboard box of useless stuff transformed into things of immense value.

Finally, I got up the courage to do something with the stuff in the box. I dug down deep and pulled out the one thing I least expected to find, the missing lens to his glasses.

It was too late. In death there are no do-overs and no second chances. The funeral was over. The grave sealed up nice and tight. There was no way to get him his glasses. No way to replace the cheap Dollar Store substitute he'd been buried in. But, to me, fixing those broken glasses became the most important thing in the universe. I had to make it right even though I had no reason for doing so. I was careful, handing the glasses with the most delicate of touches as I made the repair. Such a simple thing it was, replacing a screw and securing the lens in place with tiny screwdriver included in the eyeglass repair kit I had purchased at the drugstore for the meager price of two dollars and some change.

After the glasses were fixed. I didn't know what to do with them. I considered going to the grave with a handheld spade and digging a hole in the soft earth and burying the glasses alongside of him. But, I figured that was probably illegal and more than just a little creepy. He didn't need the glasses. Wherever he was, I was pretty certain, his vision was crystal clear in a way we earthbound mortals could never comprehend. I tried like hell not to make things any more or less significant than they were. Not to read any hidden meaning into the glasses. They were eyeglasses nothing more-nothing less and that was all. An inanimate object intended for a practical purpose. Silver aluminum frames, brown plastic earpieces, and no line bifocal lenses with a glare protective tint and that were it.

He was a trickster in life. A joker. A man who could enjoy the simple things and simply loved living no matter what the circumstance. Perhaps, these glasses were his final jest. A joke he'd played on me. After all, I still felt terrible about sending him into the great beyond without his real glasses. The substitute reading glasses weren't his prescription. They weren't tinted. They were too shiny and too new. But, I think what bothered me the most was that he never got the chance to see the world through them and the glasses he had worn to view the world were here, sitting in the palm of my hand. The glasses were just one more thing in an entire universe of things that I had no control over and could not fix.

Morning sunlight streamed through the blinds as I sat there contemplating the glasses resting in the palm of my hand. I held them up to the light and stared through the smudged lenses. Of course, I couldn't see through them. They weren't the right prescription for me. They were custom made for him. His lenses, the lenses through which he viewed his world.

My lenses are thicker and heavier, refracting the light and bending the view in a different way. For as long as I can remember, I've worn glasses. I've always needed that extra help to see the world clearly. Without my glasses, I'd simply walk right into something in my path because I didn't see it. Something big that anybody else with better, perhaps clearer vision would easily see, to me didn't exist. Someone else would see the obstacle and avoid it. Not me. My mother used to chastise me for hiding my glasses when I was a little kid. I couldn't see without them, but I hated to wear them. My sisters usually got the brunt of her wrath and the burden of finding my hidden glasses wherever they might be. But, they knew what at the time I did not. I couldn't find my way and avoid the obstacles in plain sight without them.

I held his glasses up into the sunlight and strained my eyes trying to see the world, to see myself, as he'd seen me. But I couldn't. I couldn't imagine what I looked like, what the world looked like to him. The lenses were so smudged and that would not do. I didn't want to wipe away the blurred fingerprints on the glass. His fingerprints. During visits, cleaning his glasses was one of my primary functions. It was my duty, my job, perhaps one of my main purposes in life at the time to make sure he could see the world and stay connected to it. For him, as one final act of providing care, I cleaned the lenses, and then for good measure cleaned them again till they were spotless and in proper order, definitely, cleaner than my own and measuring up to his precise standards. I stared through the lenses as if washing away the smudges would make a difference and I could by some miracle see through them, but it was a fool's errand. There was no way to make the view through the lenses clear enough.

I was careful with the glasses, packing them away in a safe place. Why? I couldn't tell you. Nobody would ever be able to use the glasses. They were his and his alone. The odds were nil that anybody would have that exact prescription and see though those lenses with absolute clarity. But, what was done was done. He didn't need the glasses. I put them in the box along with the few other remainders of a long life lived and ended. With keys to a car he hadn't driven in ten years, the plastic comb I used to use to comb his thin, baby fine, white goose down hair, a pocket knife so old and cracked with age the blade had rusted shut, and a faded state ID card that belonged to a man that no longer needed identification anymore.

But, to me, he was just as alive as he had been when he was breathing and his heart still beat. The box is sealed up nice and tight, probably as secure as the coffin that holds his mortal remains. He is gone, but never far away. I see him in myself when I look at my reflection. He's there in the shape of my eyes, the cast of my jaw, and the color of my hair. As the years pass, there'll be more of him in that reflection. Even though there are pictures that prove he was at one time long ago a young man. I will never see him as such. My reflection will fade into the face I knew as well as I know my own.

Perhaps, someday, I'll open the box and try to look through the lenses again. Maybe, time will make a difference and I'll be able to see things clearly. I don't know. Maybe, I'll wear them and stare at my reflection to see if I'm finally able to see things as he did. The world. Myself. I'd like to think someday, I will. I'll eventually evolve into the version of myself that he saw through the lenses and that the world will be transformed into the place he saw. A place filled with stupid albeit joyous and funny moments that take little effort to see. It's a lofty goal for certain. Because it wasn't the glasses that affected the way he saw the world or me, but love of the simple things, of all the simple people in the world, and of me that made the view so clear.