George Davis was only there to repair Marjorie’s refrigerator. But her eyes told him stories he would take home with him.
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I was haunted by Marjorie’s eyes. The 83-year-old was staring down the barrel at her approaching death, and she knew it. I had stopped by to fix her ailing refrigerator. She lived alone in a modest Cape, a lifetime of memories hung on walls and covering dusty shelves. She met me at the door with a weak smile.
Her eyes reminded me of animals I’ve seen through the years who knew death was approaching. I once worked for a pork producer at a commercial herd in Indiana, so I saw plenty of dying animals. Pigs, mainly, but a cow once also, wide-eyed in terror as she smelled her death arrive. The cow’s eyes said so many things at once, but mainly, fear of the approaching blackness.
Marjorie’s eyes, large and blue behind her bifocals, told me everything I ever wanted to know about her.
I saw a kindhearted soul, one given to a lifetime of sacrifice to her family. I saw a woman filled with devotion and love. I saw tenderness and the wisdom that comes with having lived through hard times and heartaches, including the death of a son.
I saw fear as she, too, realized her time left on earth was as fragile as the silken thread of a spider’s web strung in the wet dew of a forest glade. I saw hope that I could give her something; some words, some magic mantra, perhaps, to steal the cancer from her body and banish it to hell where it belonged.
“The hardest part is dragging myself every other morning to the clinic for chemotherapy,” she said.
I imagined her lying awake nights wondering if she had the strength to get dressed, climb into her Buick and navigate across town to lie on a stretcher with an IV bag full of chemicals plunged into her veins. I pictured her debating as the first signs of dawn began to steal into her bedroom whether or not it would just be better to simply quit going back to the chemicals. To raise the white flag, throw in the remaining cards, and leave the keys on the table.
“I am astonished you are in your eighties,” I said. “You don’t look a day over 70 …” She didn’t, either. I wasn’t lying.
“Even with all my hair falling out?” she replied, her eyes filling and spilling over.
“Even with that, Marjorie.”
She smiled through her tears, her beautiful eyes sparkling joy. For just a few moments as she sat on her couch and I said goodbye, maybe for the last time, those eyes didn’t seem so haunted.
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Photo: Rob Thurman/flickr
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