The Glass Eye

div< div=””>The hero is a feeling, a man seen
As if the eye was an emotion,
As if in seeing we saw our feeling
In the object seen…
—From “Examination of the Hero in a Time of War” by Wallace Stevens

I had been carrying my father’s glasses with me. He was in his casket, looking like no one I knew. I slid them on his face.

“That looks more like him,” my mother said.

But that’s not what I wanted. I wanted him to see me.

I was eighteen when he died at eighty, but as I stood at his casket I felt like I was four—the year I was when he lost his left eye to a rare disease. I remembered, for the first time, the night he told my mother, “I close my right eye and I can’t see Jeannie.”

“Would you like to keep your father’s glass eye?” the funeral director interrupted.

I looked at my father, his eyes glued shut.

“No,” I said. “I couldn’t.”

Just as I have no idea why my father died exactly—“He had so many things wrong with him,” my mother tells me—I have no idea why he lost his eye.

“Degenerative eye disease maybe?” she says on the phone. “Advanced glaucoma? The doctor said it happens to something like one in a million people.”

“What happened exactly?”

“Your dad’s tear ducts were closed and clotted with blood, and the doctors couldn’t get them to drain. I don’t know what you call it.”

“Try to remember.”

“I can’t.”

Doctors called the pain in his left eye “excruciating,” but he never complained—not to the doctors, not to my mother, not to me.

“How did Dad accept the loss of his eye?” I ask my mother. “Did he accept it?”

“Yes, I think so. I don’t know if you remember how he used to throw up constantly and couldn’t walk up and down the steps. We had that sofa bed in the living room and he had to sleep down there all the time. It was like a pressure that built in his eye. He either had to live with it or have the eye taken out. So he said, ‘Let’s have the eye taken out.’ Do you remember when he went?”

I remember the hospital felt a long way from home.

I remember we stopped on the way and ate hamburgers in what used to be a bank. Chandeliers hung above us.

“Do you remember the priest in his room, the other patient?” she asks.

“No.”

“The priest told your dad, ‘I don’t know if I could accept that,’ and your dad said, ‘Well, what makes the difference if I accept...