I was sitting in my new optometrist’s office, glancing around the examining room at the framed Wyland marine life posters and the doctor’s numerous certificates, wondering how to pronounce his last name. He was asking about my medical history, and if any of my “immediate family” had been diagnosed with glaucoma–if I had noticed my parents or grandparents taking special eye drops. I explained that I was only privy to my mother’s side of the family, and that my grandparents are dead. He nodded. Then I realized that it was yet another one of those moments when there was just no way not to mention that my mother had recently passed.
Every time this situation arises, before I open my mouth I turn the words over and over in my head. My mother died a couple months ago–it was quite sudden… Yeah, my mom’s dead–she was only 62… My mother is deceased–it’s a new thing. I think about how I can avoid saying it. I wonder if there’s anything else I can say instead. I worry about the reaction of the person I’m talking to, and about the weepy unpredictability of my own reaction after having to repeat out loud that my mother is gone forever. Of course, in the end, I just said it, that my mom was dead. The kind doc cooed for a moment and quickly moved on to another ocular test, while I noted to myself with detached futility that I’m it, the last in my bloodline.
There’s no one left to ask about glaucoma or high blood pressure or who all those people are in the boxes of photos I retrieved from my mother’s house last December. I tried not to dwell on the thought, and placed my focus instead on the magnified photos of my eyeballs the doc had pulled up on his computer screen. “You have very large nerves in your retina,” he said. “I wonder if that runs in your family…”
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