October 29th, Two Thousand: My Grandmother's Glasses
Her small apartment was full of sons and daughters and in-laws
and cousins, each fingering through the things of interest to
them. Some of them bickered a little over this thing or that,
most of them meaningless: pie pans and picture frames, furniture
and sewing machines -- things which, for a small fee, one could
get anywhere, and within a few uses, no one would know someone
else had or had not used them before.
On her night table sat her glasses, which no one fought over or
even paid notice to, and which were destined for the Goodwill;
perhaps for someone else's face, who we'd never know.
My grandmother and I had little to no history at all, and the
history we did have was stormy, fraught with conflicting feelings;
many of anger, some of sadness, a few of blank apathy. When she'd
died, I agreed to come down and help with the funeral, write the
eulogy, support my mother. I did so reluctantly, and I didn't
expect to be very upset. I wasn't. I played my usual role of the
strong one, the one who holds it together when everyone else is
fraying at the edges, though in this case, it wasn't because I
was strong, it was because I wasn't sure what to feel at all.
On the last day before we left, after the wake and the funeral,
after the dinners with the family, after the devil and the details,
I saw those glasses, which no one cared about. I cried suddenly
then, and bit it back in my throat because everyone had already
had their tears and were done with them.
I wondered, picking them up in my hands, how much my grandmother
had seen -- or not seen -- through those glasses. I knew there
wasn't a single day she didn't use them; that they didn't rest
gently atop her delicate skin and in front of her strange grey-green
eyes. I wondered, if I took off my own and put hers on, if I might
see things the way she did, or if there was, in fact, some flaw
in them that might have brought about the flawed way she did see
things from time to time.
The idea of tossing them aside made me tremble inexplicably.
I asked if I could take my grandmother's glasses, because no one
else wanted them, tears barely held back behind my eyes, a lump
in my throat. No one argued, but I am not sure that anyone understood,
either.
They are still inside my purse. I am almost fearful at taking
them out, wondering what they hold, wondering if through them
I might see bigotry, violence, sadness, a vacant solace in religion
when there was no solace elsewhere. I am perhaps more scared that
what I might see is love and beauty; that I might see something
which would make me deeply regret the opinion I had of my grandmother
most of my life. I am less scared of a loss I know than I am of
discovering I may have lost something which I did not know was
there to be lost.
I feel odd at having what was perhaps the most personal artifact
of my grandmothers, and I am not sure quite what to do with them.
But they remind me that when all is said and done, and our last
breath taken, we have no need of glasses; no need of anything
with which to see more clearly than we already do. I suppose that
having them comforts me, in some small way, that they make me
think that her vision is now perhaps no longer in need of correction.
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