The night my father lost his left eye to a rare disease, my parents and I were playing a game we called The Memory Game. The goal was to find among sixty-eight cards in all two that matched. I remember there were sixty-eight cards because it was my father’s age that year and I made the deck, using white construction paper and crayons, for my father’s birthday; I was five.

It was my father’s turn. I waited what felt like a long time for him to choose a card when, finally, I turned one over for him: an open door with nothing on the other side.

What am I looking for? he said. I can’t see what it is I am looking—then he stopped.

I could see him as he looked at me, looking as if he were looking through me. I followed him to a mirror and watched him close one eye, then the other. When the right eye closed I disappeared.

I close my right eye and I can’t see Jeannie.

Was I someone no one could see? Had I really disappeared?

I closed my left eye, then my right, in that game of illusions that moves objects, moving my father an inch each time.

Next: my father in his casket thirteen years later, his eyes closed, and the funeral director asking, “Would you like to keep your father’s eye?”

I suppose I conflate the memory of the loss of his eye with my loss of him. What is the term in literary theory? Synecdoche? When the part stands in for the whole?

My father’s eye has become, for me, a profound interrogation of the act of looking at myself.

*

Something was wrong with me yet nothing was wrong with me because I knew something was wrong with me. I crawled to the corner of my room and held my head in my hands. My thoughts pinned me to the floor. They darted too fast, from behind, from the sides, from the front. I emptied my bottle of antidepressants into three neat piles on the hardwood floor, seven pills to a pile. I swallowed the first pile. I had accomplished something. I swallowed the second pile. I called the campus hotline.

“Something is wrong with me.”

I was asked what was wrong with me and I said my thoughts were moving too fast and I took too many pills, “in that order,” I specified. The voice asked me to hold. All at once my eyes had fallen out. I looked into the mirror and my sockets were all black. I curled up on the floor and started sobbing into the receiver.

“Hello? What seems to be the problem?”

The campus therapist. I had stormed out of her office earlier in the day because she had asked to see my wrists, which I had spent the afternoon cutting.

“I’m prying open my lids and there’s nothing there.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. It wasn’t like this before, but my thoughts now, I… I can’t explain.”

“Is this Jeannie?”

I swallowed the third pile.

“I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know anymore.”

*

“I don’t understand,” I told the doctor. “My thoughts were moving so fast… They’ve done this before, but never like this. And then this spasm, it ran through me so hard…”

Two orderlies with ponytails wheeled in a burn victim. Somewhere behind my room’s dividing curtain a woman wailed, “My husband!”

“Try to explain.”

“I can’t.”

The doctor opened my book on the side table.

“What’s this?” he said.

“What’s what?”

“The book? You like Elizabeth Bishop?”

“You know of her?” I said.

“Of course.”

I was relieved and tearful at once. I felt there was nothing I couldn’t tell this man.

“Before I called the campus hotline,” I said, “I looked into the mirror and my sockets were all black. They looked empty.”

“You were hallucinating then.”

“You know my father lost an eye when I was young,” I said, “and I saw him without it once. It was white, not red like you would think, and not black like mine had been. I mean, it’s been almost four years since he…”

“We think the loss of your father triggered this.”

“Triggered what?”

He gazed abstractedly at an old coffee stain on the side table, then shifted his eyes toward The Complete Poems of Elizabeth Bishop.

“I like her poem ‘The Fish’ that’s often anthologized,” he said, “but I also like ‘Questions of Travel.’ Is that in here?”

“Think of the long trip home,” I recited. “Should we have stayed at home and thought of here? / Where should we be today?”

“You know the poem then?”

“Of course.”

“Why those lines?” he said. “Why didn’t you start from the beginning?”

*

I have almost no memory of the time before my father lost his eye. It is as if my childhood begins there, with The Memory Game. I remember sitting in a hospital waiting room,  watching my mother lay the cards out on a glass coffee table, face-down.

The first card I turned over was an eye. I remember that.

“Go on,” my mother said. “Choose another card.”

So I turned another over: the open door with nothing on the other side.

“You go now,” I said. “Find the other eye. I want you to find it.”

*

Elizabeth Bishop in her personal essay “Primer Class” writes, “My grandmother had a glass eye, blue, almost like her other one, and this made her especially vulnerable and precious to me.” When Bishop was a girl, she asked her relatives if they thought her grandmother could go to heaven with a glass eye. “Years later,” Bishop writes, “I found out that one of my aunts had asked the same question when she’d been my age.”

“Where is he?” I asked my mother.

I had been told that the men at the cemetery were waiting for the hard, November ground to break before they buried my father.

“Heaven,” my mother said.

“But where is he here?”

*

I sat at the edge of my father’s bed, avoiding the photographs of us that I had taped along its silver rails: my father reading a book to me despite the white patch over his eye, the two of us coming up for air in the town pool, the two of…

A hospice nurse called me aside and said I would have to start administering the morphine.

“What if I give him too much?” I said.

“You won’t.”

“But I’m not a doctor.”

“He’s in pain. The medicine will help.”

*

“Why did you take so many pills?” the doctor I trusted completely asked.

“I thought they would slow things down. They were prescribed,” I said.

“How many were prescribed? For one dose?”

“You don’t understand how I feel.”

I watched a man step into the hospital’s revolving door.

“Tell me then,” he said, “how do you feel?”

The man pushed at the glass, watching a woman press toward him and away from him at the same time.

“Like a revolving door,” I said.

“Can you be more specific?”

“Like she’s inside, trying to push forward, but her father’s pushing back.”

“’She’?”

“I feel like my life is narrated in close-third: she feels nothing; she knows her sockets were not empty; she would like to leave.”

“It’s clear to me that you’re a very smart person, but you’re not behaving in a smart way. You’re not in control at the moment.”

He handed me a clipboard.

“What’s this?” I said.

“It’s a form to voluntarily admit yourself to the psychiatric unit.”

“No, no, no. I’m fine,” I insisted. “I miss my father is all. And I didn’t sleep for a week. Of course I would be acting a little crazy.”

“A lot of creative people suffer from what we think you have,” he said as he paged through the poems of Elizabeth Bishop.

“What do I have?” I asked and, before he could answer, “How can anyone be creative like this?”

*

Elizabeth Bishop in a speech in Rio said: “Off and on I have written out a poem called ‘Grandmother’s Glass Eye’ which should be about the problem of writing poetry. The situation of my grandmother strikes me as rather like the situation of the poet: the difficulty of combining the real with the decidedly un-real; the natural with the unnatural; the curious effect a poem produces of being as normal as sight and yet as synthetic, as artificial, as a glass eye.”

I wrote a poem called “My Father’s Glass Eye” after my father died. I had not yet read the speech by Bishop. Reading over the poem now, seven years later, I see the problem I had with my father’s eye is the problem I have with him now: he no longer can see me. I met with the poet Rosanna Warren to discuss a later draft of my poem.

“My father had a glass eye,” she said of her father, the writer Robert Penn Warren. “I didn’t keep it, though.”

Had I implied I kept my father’s eye? I didn’t mean to. Had I implied it was glass? I suppose so. Not until much later, until after he died, did I understand that the term “glass eye” is one we still use, even though glass no longer is.

*

In the weeks after my father died, I went to the campus library and sat with every book I could find about glass eyes. I took notes.

At the turn of the century, one in four hundred Americans owned at least one glass eye, many unable to afford a custom-made eye. Before World War II, all artificial eyes in this country, in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, came from Germany and were made of cryolite glass. Eye craftsmen, usually peasant artisans living in the Black Forest or some other remote region in Germany, toured the United States, setting up their services for several days at a time in one city after another where they made artificial eyes and personally fitted them to wealthier patients. “One rich woman is a connoisseur of glass eyes,” reported The New York Times in 1902. “She visits the stores several times a year, and spends hours having new eyes fitted, and sitting before the mirror to examine the effect. She seems to regard it as a privilege of wealth to have a change of eyes, and her jewelbox must contain enough of them to stock a small store.” Not everyone, though, could afford a change of eyes.

In the Pennsylvania mining regions, The Edison Monthly in 1922 reported a loss of three-hundred-and-fifty eyes every year, the highest in the nation. Here the workers were often poor, Irish and American, blue-eyed races. Those in need of artificial eyes turned to pre-made eyes that rarely matched their counterparts, especially if the counterparts were blue. (Blue being the hardest color to match, as more shades of blue exist than of any other color.)

By the start of World War II, artificial eyes were no longer made of glass in the United States. German goods were limited and German glass blowers no longer toured the country. The United States military, along with a few private practitioners, developed a method of fabricating artificial eyes using oil pigments and plastics and since then plastic has become the preferred material for the artificial eye in the United States.

“Plastic implies fake,” I wrote in my notebook, “whereas glass implies the ability to be broken.”

*

“What gets me so down about this,” I said to the doctor, “what makes me so sad, or furious, or whatever it is I am, is that you say the illness is genetic, but I have no family history.”

“Do you know anything about your family beyond your parents?”

“No, not really.”

“Tell me about your mother.”

“Until my father died, she had always handled everything well. When he died, though, she tried to climb into his coffin.”

“That must have been hard to watch.”

“Yes, but her behavior seemed understandable, rational even. My father, though, he almost killed himself. When he was younger, I mean. I heard that once. Not from him, of course. Although the reason he almost did was because his daughter Jeanne had died, Jeanne without an “i,” which is interesting, when you think about it, that he added an “i” to my name.” And here I quoted Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “In the Waiting Room. “You are an I, you are an Elizabeth. Do you know that poem?”

“You’re named after a dead sister?”

“Half-sister. So don’t you see? It’s normal. It’s normal to go nuts after someone you love dies. It’s normal. This, what I’m doing now, it’s normal.”

“It’s not normal to cut your wrists. It’s not normal to have crippling racing thoughts that you can’t stop and then overdose and hallucinate your eyes have fallen out. It’s not normal.”

“You lose somebody perfect, then. Then you come back and tell me what’s normal.”

*

I remember when I read the newsclipping about Jeanne’s death. I found it in an album somewhere when I was young, maybe ten or eleven. “Jeanne is survived by her father, Giovanni Batista Vanasco,” I think it said, or must have said. I tried learning everything I could about Jeanne, but I could only ask my mother. I was too afraid to ask my father.

“He was very depressed when I met him,” my mother said. “His daughter had been dead for decades, but he was still very depressed. You don’t get over a thing like that.”

*

“I’d like you to sign this form,” the doctor said.

I brought my legs in closer to me, under the blanket.

“If you don’t sign the form, I’m afraid I and another doctor will have to admit you involuntarily, and it will be harder for you to leave as quickly as you’d probably like.”

He handed the form to a nurse as he left. I wanted him to come back. He understood Elizabeth Bishop. At least he knew of Elizabeth Bishop. Or had he merely skimmed the table of contents? Either way, he was trying to understand me through poetry, and therefore would understand how to understand me. I needed him to come back.

The nurse sifted through my papers as I signed hers.

“Have you been hospitalized in the past?”

“Yes,” I said.

“When?”

“Last year,” I said.

“When exactly?”

“April.”

“What was it for?”

“I was sort of feeling like I am now.”

“How long were you hospitalized?”

“Just over a weekend. I felt better and they let me out very quickly. Maybe that will happen this time.”

“What is it about April do you think?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it has something to do with May.”

“What is it about May do you think?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it has something to do with April.”

*

My father lost his eye in April.

“No,” my mother says. “It was snowing. It couldn’t have been April.”

“I thought it was April.”

“It was closer to November, I think.”

Am I remembering any of this right? Does it matter if the month he lost his eye coincides with my diagnosis? Or does it matter if the month he lost his eye coincides with the month I lost him?

“Well, anyway. How did Dad accept the loss of his eye? 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 and we had that sofabed 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.’

“In fact, when he went and got the eye out, he had a priest in his room, another patient, and the priest even said, ‘I don’t know if I could accept that.’ And your dad said, ‘Well, what makes the difference if I accept it? It’s not going to change it.’ He was very brave about it. Your dad was very brave.”

*

I spent years trying to see behind my father’s eye. When I was ten and my gaze finally met his empty socket in the bathroom mirror, the socket was beautiful and horrifying at once. Watching the reflection of my father watching himself and the eye which seemed to be watching but was not is a recurring nightmare that comes to me still.

Even though he looked normal, I knew my father had something wrong with him. I began suspecting everyone who looked normal had something wrong with them. I suppose the eye educated me in empathy. At the same time it made me self-conscious and maybe self-absorbed: I wanted to know how I was seen, and I wanted to see behind the eye because I wanted to see what hid behind my eye. His socket became a mirror of my own.

“Do I look mentally ill to you?” I asked the nurse as I stood there naked while she searched me. “Because I’m not mentally ill.”

“That’s something to talk to your doctor about.”

*

When I was five, my father’s eye fell out at the kitchen table. My mother says I kept eating as if nothing had happened. I remember differently. I remember my father covering his empty socket.

“Don’t let Jeannie see me like this.”

I remember running after my father, peering at him from the bathroom doorway, watching him slide the eye back in. But when I was eighteen and cleaning my dying father’s eye in my hand, I never looked into the socket. Had I matured, or was the act of looking into that empty space too inappropriate or too hard? Throughout his life, the artificial eye made my father more special to me than had his eye been real. The eye conferred on him something magical while at the same time making him more vulnerable, less superior, less father-like. He already had lost his left vocal chord to cancer and, now, with his left eye gone, I began to think he was slowly disappearing. If he could lose part of his voice and part of his sight, part of his ability to communicate with me, he could lose everything. I could lose everything: I could lose him.

“What was it about your father?” the doctors and nurses always asked.

What they really meant was, ‘You’re not normal for behaving this way.’ And maybe I wasn’t.

Maybe I mistook the emotions I felt for unconditional love when in fact they were part of my illness. Maybe my father’s death triggered something already inside me, some bad gene, or maybe the something already inside me that it triggered was even greater love for my father.

“What was it about your father?” they always asked, and I always replied the same way: “He loved me.”

*

My father was in his casket, looking like no one I knew. I had been carrying his glasses in my purse since he died, wearing them to bed at night. I slid them on him.

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

But I wanted him not to look like him. That was not him in the casket. So why did I put the glasses on him? Not because I remembered him in glasses, but because I wanted him to see me.

*

Are there benefits to having one eye? When my father wore an eyepatch, I taped pictures of myself in crayon to the inside, thinking this would somehow make him see me, even though I knew one eye still could.

The ability to depict a three-dimensional scene on a flat surface is enhanced by closing one eye, which is why art teachers instruct students to close one eye as they learn to draw. The neuroscientist Margaret S. Livingstone suggests Rembrandt had a walleye and was stereoblind, meaning his brain was incapable of combining independent images from each retina to create depth perception. Neuroscientists say his walleye helped him acknowledge the flatness of a blank sheet of paper.

The morning before they took his eye, I dragged a yellow crayon across a blank sheet of paper, trying to capture all the wrinkles on my father’s forehead, but my picture looked wrong, too flat. So I crumpled the paper and showed it to him and said the wrinkles in the paper were for the wrinkles in his face. Why did I never draw my mother? Did I know I was slowly losing him? Was drawing my father my way of holding onto him?

*

“I lost him,” I cried. Maybe I screamed it. “I lost him!”

The nurses took me to what is called “the quiet room.” They closed the door and I was allowed to cry as loud as I wanted, except it was “the quiet room.” I felt guilty for not being quiet.

*

Just as I have no idea how my father died exactly—“He had so many things wrong with him,” my mother says—I have no idea how 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.”

“Well, 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.”

*

“What’s my illness called?”

“The name doesn’t matter,” a new doctor said.

The old doctor never came back.

“It does to me. I’ve been here more than two weeks now, maybe three…”

“Three.”

“Three weeks and I don’t know what to tell people. I don’t know what to tell my mother. She thinks my phone is broken.”

“Do you want us to call her?”

“No. Please no.”

“For now then, don’t worry so much about other people.”

“But I do and maybe I’m worried about me.”

“What matters is the treatment.”

“Please,” I said. “I don’t know my family history. I don’t know what my father died of. And now I don’t know what I’m going crazy from.”

He sat down on the chair next to my bed.

“We think you have what’s called bipolar disorder.”

“What does that mean?”

“The crippling racing thoughts, the long periods of depression, the short periods of productivity and mania. Everything else you described, how this comes seasonally, your symptoms fit our diagnosis perfectly. They misdiagnosed you in the past as having depression, and the antidepressants were only making it worse, causing a period of rapid cycling. This all may be comorbid, however.”

“What is that supposed to mean?

“In your case, according to your files with campus doctors, the self-mutilation, the questions about your identity…”

“Questions about my identity?”

“We can talk about this later.”

“No. I want to hear this.”

“Well, we think you may also have borderline personality disorder. This will become more serious if you leave it untreated. You have to continue taking the medicine we’re giving you and stay with therapy. We have some papers for you to sign.”

“Does this mean I can leave?”

“Soon.”

“But before I do, tell me one more thing. My father, that was the trigger?”

“We think so.”

*

The summer after my father died, I went home to see my mother. This was before I could ask her any questions about my father or his eye. So I decided to search through our crawlspace. I wanted to find something, anything, about my father or his eye. Inside a box of albums, I came across The Memory Game, rubber-banded and a little bent. The deck still contained two open doors, two fish, two houses, and two eyes. Seeing the eyes, how I had drawn one slightly smaller than the other, triggered a distinct memory: a woman painting my father’s new eye under a red gooseneck lamp. I even remembered what the woman told me: “It is important the new eye look, rather than be, an exact match.”

Could that be right? I wanted my memory to be real, just as I wanted my father’s eye to be. I wanted to remember the woman handing me a thin brush and telling me to make a dab, “right there, on the center of your dad’s eye.”

“Am I remembering right?” I ask my mother on the phone. “Did I watch them paint Dad’s new eye?”

“You watched,” my mother says. “And I remember what you said when it was done: ‘It looks real.’”

*

The walls were mauve and pale-rose striped. The room looked like a funeral parlor, big and dignified. My father sat at the window and it was raining. A woman was painting my father’s new eye under a red gooseneck lamp. She said they made his new eye smaller than the other.

“It is important,” she said, “the new eye look, rather than be, an exact match.”

“We have a painting in our house of a boy in a blue hat and his eyes follow me across the room. Can you make my dad’s new eye follow me?” I pulled at the woman’s sleeve. “What can you make my dad’s new eye do?”

My father called me over. The woman’s eyes followed me like the boy’s.

“Why won’t the woman talk to me?”

My father said she was trying to focus.

I said the sky was leaking and he liked that “and the grass is yellow and there’s white on the violet horizon and there’s a violet, there, in the yellow grass. What color is the fire hydrant?  It’s not red, like you would think” and my father said “green” and I said “good” and I said “I want to paint your eye.”

I looked at the woman. She looked at my father. My father looked away at the band of white in the distance.

No one was looking at me.

“Come here,” the woman said, still looking at my father.

Was she talking to me?

“Go on,” my father said, still looking out the window.

Was he talking to me?

I thought of the boy in the blue hat, how sometimes I talked to him, even though I knew a painting couldn’t hear.

Who painted the boy and where is the painting now?

I walked to the woman and she handed me a thin brush.

“Make a dab, right there,” she said, pointing to the black center of the eye.

I pinched the brush and felt scared. I wanted to paint myself but not all of the colors were there. I handed the brush back and went to my father.

The band of white was disappearing, but the yellow grass, the rain, and the green fire hydrant were still there.

The violet I think I made up.

The woman left the room with my father’s new eye and we waited. I remember the waiting. I don’t remember the woman coming back.

It was raining the day of my father’s funeral. Four men were closing my father’s coffin and I don’t know what else to say. There is nothing worse than a blue sky on the day of a funeral? What color was the sky? At least it wasn’t blue, like you would think?

The new eye was dark brown with some gray.

Rumpus original art by Wendy MacNaughton

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