Rebuttal
When I was a year old, I got glass in my left eye, and unfortunately it happened at a crucial time, that is, before my eyes had fully developed. Despite the technology now being available to fix my eye (“We can rebuild her”), the fact of the matter is that the development of that eye was halted at a year old, and therefore wouldn’t be improved beyond the cosmetic by any of the measures that could be taken. It’s a neurological problem now, and unfixable.
It happened 34 years ago, and therefore I should be used to it, right? It should be a non-issue, shouldn’t it? It is not. I can never forget it, because it affects me every day. It affects me when I drive. I have to turn around two, three times to check traffic when I turn right on a red, because the whole left side is my blind spot. And I have still had some close calls that scared the living daylights out of me. I have to adjust my mirrors such that I can see all of them with my right eye in short order, and no one else driving my car can use the mirrors without adjusting them. I have to make sure I have a really big spot to merge into traffic, because I have no depth perception, and could cause some serious damage to myself and others if I didn’t allow myself a significant margin of error. I have taken the mirror off the passenger side of my car using the garage doorjamb because I misjudged the distance. And E put one of those tennis ball hanger things in the garage to help me park because he feared one day he’d find my front bumper in the kitchen.
The same lack of depth perception made it impossible for me to see if the field goal was good or not at the football game Saturday night. The lack of vision in my left eye makes 3-D movies and stereoscopes and a whole host of other things impossible for me to use. And it leaves me wondering how the rest of you see the world, in 3-D, and what I’m missing. And the fact that my left pupil doesn’t contract with light means that sunglasses are a must for me during most daytime hours, even on cloudy days, or the squinting I do to accommodate that problem will leave me with a bitch of a headache. Time didn’t heal this; it just gave me enough room to learn to work around it.
My left leg is enough shorter than my right that to walk around barefoot for an hour is to leave me in crippling hip pain for the rest of the day, maybe two. I suffered with this pain, going to the doctor, the chiropractor, the massage therapist, and the acupuncturist, with little good result, for over a year before I happened to go into a shop that sold orthotics (because, of course, I had foot pain, too), and the gal noticed my shorts were at a different length on each leg. She put a cushion in my left shoe and changed my life, and now all my shoes are outfitted thusly. Time didn’t heal that pain; the pain will always come back. The best I can do is to try to prevent it by wearing shoes with the insert, and not gripe when I don’t and I end up hurting. It is inevitable, and it always hurts the same way for the same reason.
Eight weeks ago, I really didn’t know how to cope with the pain of losing A. I wasn’t sure how to go on in the face of such crippling, unimaginable pain. I still don’t know. The fact of the matter is, you don’t cope with the pain. You learn to live with it, which is a subtle, but important, difference. The pain, when it hits, is as bad as it ever was. It isn’t any better. It doesn’t make any more sense. I know this. I allow for it. Just like talking to him was a part of my every day before, missing him is a part of my every day since. I adjust my rear-view mirrors and put a cushion in my day for the pain that I know will be there, in varying degrees, from the time I wake up until the time I go to sleep. Sometimes it’s an ache, sometimes it’s a knife, but it is here, and I accommodate it. Just like my eye. Just like my hip. It will be here, and I live around it, make allowances for it. But there is no healing of this pain. Not really.
Time does not heal pain. Time merely gives you the room to get used to it.