A couple of days ago I woke up to discover that my eye had fallen out. It clinked up against one lens of my glasses right after I put them on, and its departure from its socket initially rattled me. Michael Hughes, the gifted ocularist who had fashioned my first one for me in 2008, had warned me that I was likely to dislodge it during my first night sleeping with it and had given me a diagram showing how to restore it to its rightful place. Sure enough, in the middle of my slumber in that spring of 2008 I did something to jar it loose, and out it fell into the bedclothes and then onto the bedroom floor. I was teaching English at Woodberry Forest School at the time and living on campus, and that night we happened to have one of our occasional power failures. So I went downstairs and lit a couple of candles to provide light. I wasn’t trying to be ghoulish or gothic by forgoing a flashlight; I was going to need two free hands to replace the eye, and the candles would be easier to situate near my how-to diagram. Still, I couldn’t help chuckling over how the scene would look to an outsider: a cyclops holding a burning torch to search for his missing eye.
Prosthetic eyes are not round. They don’t roll around like marbles, but they do wobble. Out of the eye socket they look like tiny, shallow, asymmetrical bowls. Mine moves within its socket with the help of an orbital implant attached to my eye muscles by my surgeon—the fantastic Dr. William Deegan—and the delicate craftsmanship of Michael Hughes. Most people who meet me don’t realize that I wear it.
There was nothing cinematic or archetypal about this most recent displacement. When I had the truant eye in hand, I placed it on the tray attached to my walker while I got dressed and ate breakfast. Then I returned to the bathroom to replace the eye at the sink and the mirror. Over the past 17 years I have done so enough times to know how to proceed without consulting a guide, but I don’t do it especially often because I like to leave the eye in place 24/7. Step one: get the baby shampoo I keep on hand solely for this purpose, squeeze a little into the palm of one hand, and wash and rinse the eye thoroughly. Then I have to go more or less by instinct and muscle memory. I use one hand to hold up the lid of my right eye socket while I look down and use the other hand to slip the eye under the upper lid and then to pull the lower lid over the bottom edge of the eye. On my first try I put it in improperly, with the sides reversed, so that the iris was pointing impossibly sideways: the world’s worst case of strabismus. I keep a handy little rubber suction cup in the medicine cabinet, so I used that to pull the eye out to start over. With suction it comes out quite easily. In fact, it’s amazing that the thing stays in place at all. As a piece of medical-grade plastic that feels like porcelain, it’s fairly heavy, and if it weren’t designed to mesh perfectly with the implant left by Dr. Deegan, I sense that my eyelids would be insufficient to hold it in place. Indeed, I am amazed that it doesn’t pop out more often.
This has been a year of having things pop out of place. The last time I operated my car was on May 16, when I drove from Home Depot to my mom’s house in order to take care of a maintenance problem. During this routine chore, the time slipped out of joint when a hemorrhagic stroke took me to the ICU and then, eventually, to the same nursing home where my mother was living. When she died in June, that marked another dislocation; I had lived for every moment of my life with her as a part of it, and suddenly she was gone. What I have come to appreciate in the interim is that her physical absence doesn’t spoil my relationship with her, a relationship that continues to evolve as I reflect on her inveterate resilience. I am profoundly grateful to share some genes with a woman who set such an example of stoic defiance in the face of health problems. She accepted what she was forced to, but up to the very end, she refused to allow despair to infiltrate her view of the world. Troubles come? Sure. So shrug them off and keep living. Your eye pops out? Stick it back in and get on with your day.