This is Getting Old

by Susan Moon

  It’s disturbing. Sometimes, driving along one of my familiar routes, I suddenly can’t remember where I’m going. Then I’m in a dark place, even in broad daylight. I keep driving, slowly, hoping I’ll remember where I’m going before I get there. So far I always have.

  Zen Master Dogen, my favorite Zen master, wrote, “To study the Buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things.” What does he mean by forgetting the self? Could forgetting my social security number or where I parked my car be steps in the right direction?

  Once, twenty years ago, before I was “old,” I had a strange experience. I woke in the middle of the night and I couldn’t remember where I was. That wasn’t the strange experience—it happens to most of us from time to time when we are traveling, as I was. But on this occasion, I couldn’t remember who I was, either. The loud crack that had awakened me still rang in my ears; it might have been a door slamming in the wind, or a bowl breaking in my dream, but whatever it was, I fell through that crack into a dark space of not-knowing. I asked myself, “Where am I?” and then, shocked, “Who am I?” I lay in bed, waiting. For a frightening split second, I didn’t know anything about who I was. I couldn’t even have told you my name. Then my eyes grew used to the dark and I made out the window curtains. Ah! I recognized the room, in a family house by the sea, and everything, my whole impermanent life, fell into place. I wonder if that moment before the remembering is what it’s like to have severe dementia. Or is this what Dogen was talking about?

  If I lose my memory, will I stop being me, or is there a me beneath the memory? Is there a look in my eye that will stay no matter what I forget? The thing is, I don’t have dementia now, so worrying about it is a distraction from being present in my life, taking good care of myself, and focusing my attention on what’s important.

  I believe that Dogen is talking about forgetting self-concern, and as I grow older, I notice what an excellent time it is to practice this kind of forgetting. It’s all about letting go. I can forget about accomplishing all my ambitions—it’s too late for that. I can forget about “making something of myself,” a telling expression. Sometimes, for a moment, I taste the relief of letting this self fold gently into the next self, moment by moment, like eggs into batter.

  It’s time to forget some things and remember others. As a matter of fact, the planet needs all of us human beings to remember our history, and to remember our own accountability in it. History is a process that we keep on making out of the stories we tell each other about the past.

  Before written language, or before most people had access to written language, people had only their own brains in which to store their knowledge, and so they were much more dependent on their memories than we are today and they gave their memories more exercise. Buddha’s disciple Ananda, for example, had a particularly prodigious memory and recalled every single thing he heard Buddha say. He passed the teachings on after Buddha’s death, and for centuries, the monks and nuns of the sangha recited the sutras to each other until they were finally written down.

  The printing press made shared memory available to more people, and the Internet has further democratized our cultural memory. If you forget the books of the Old Testament, you can look them up. But there are still some things that the Internet can’t remember for you, like where you parked the car. And the stories of your life—they aren’t on the Internet either. How it was, for example, to be sitting in bed nursing your newborn baby when you learned on the TV news of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination.

  Oh, by the way, it’s creel, that wicker basket for fish.

  Stain on the Sky

  WHEN MY FATHER was in his sixties, his retinas slipped their moorings. He told me he often dreamed of the colored world. In the dark of night, asleep, he could still see the blue water of Menemsha Pond and the white sails of his boat. But when he woke in the morning and opened his eyes, he was blind. He said that though these awakenings were painful, life would have been even worse if he hadn’t been able to see in his dreams. He had lost the visual world—he didn’t want to lose the memory of it, too.

  Going blind is one of many things I try not to worry about as I get older. There’s a genetic component to detached retina. It correlates with myopia (nearsightedness), and I am myopic, though less so than my father was. I started wearing glasses when I was twelve, and I remember my shock when the elm tree outside my bedroom window went from a Monet tree to an Ansel Adams tree. I had no idea such sharp focus was possible, and at first I didn’t like it. Everything looked pointy. I could see the diseased spots on the leaves and a popped balloon caught in the branches.

  Out of vanity, I wore my glasses only in the classroom and at the movies. Much later, after I got married, I wore them all the time. Then, after my divorce, I got contact lenses. Dates complimented me on the blueness of my eyes, but the contacts were a lot of trouble. They were uncomfortable and occasionally got stuck way up under my eyelids. They required at least as much daily care as a small pet—a canary or hamster—without providing any companionship. So I went back to the glasses.

  But the contacts did come in handy when I was in residence as a monk for three months at a Zen monastery in California. Like all the monks, I had to take a turn on the crew that served our formal, silent meals. At breakfast, in the early-morning cold, I had to stand before the seated monks with a huge pot of steaming oatmeal and carefully spoon it into their bowls. The first person to be served was the abbot, an upright man who never suffered a lapse in attention. The first morning I served, I had my glasses on, and they immediately became so steamed up that I couldn’t see what I was doing. I missed the abbot’s bowl and served a spoonful of oatmeal right onto the mealboard in front of him. After that, I always rose ten minutes early on my serving days and put in my contacts.

  After my father went blind, my siblings and I—his four adult children—were all told to get our retinas checked regularly. I went to an ophthalmologist, who shined an unbearably bright light into my eyes. I couldn’t blink, because my eye was held open with a clamp. It was not painful in any ordinary way, and yet it was painful, to sit with my chin resting in the metal cup, unable to get away from the blinding light, unable to stop thinking of my newly blind father.

  My retinas were fine. The ophthalmologist told me that if I experienced any unusual symptoms, like shadows falling across my vision, I should report it immediately.

  One day I was studying a breakfast menu in a café, and all of a sudden I couldn’t see it. There were big white holes in the daily specials, and ribbons of light, like the aurora borealis, played at the menu’s edge. Worried, I called my doctor and described the symptoms. He said it sounded like a visual migraine, since it was the same in both eyes. If the symptoms didn’t go away in half an hour, I was to call him back. They went away.

  I have had several visual migraines since then, and I have learned to enjoy them, since they have never been followed by headaches. My favorite was the evening when bursts of colored lights danced across my field of vision, painting the face and black-robed body of a Zen teacher who was giving a talk in the dimly lit zendo.

  I was about sixty when, on a Zen retreat in a remote village in Mexico, I had new and scary visual symptoms: I kept seeing nonexistent flocks of birds flying above the ocean. A dark ghost haunted the middle of my right eye, and a spark flashed at the bottom of my vision whenever I shifted my gaze. The retreat center’s director made an appointment for me with an eye doctor she knew in a town two hours’ drive away. She even hired a driver from the village and asked one of her employees, an aging beach bum from California who was fluent in Spanish, to go with me as my translator. I was embarrassed that it was such a major production, but it would have been worse than embarrassing to go home to California blind in my right eye. And so the three of us set off to the town of Tepic.

  The eye doctor was a kind man, who said, through the beach bum, that he liked to meditat
e and was curious about Zen. In an ancient, dark office with high ceilings, he questioned me about my vision and typed my answers on a red manual typewriter. Then he examined my right eye and reassured me that my retina was not detached or torn—there was no emergency. He said he could see a spot at the bottom of the retina that he thought might be a certain parasite you get from pets that’s common in Mexico—but I didn’t have any pets. He suggested I have my vision checked when I got home. He wouldn’t accept payment—he was doing this as a favor for his friend, the director of the retreat center—so I later sent him a Spanish-language book about Zen.

  The symptoms all went away by themselves except for the shadow, which the California eye doctor told me was just a big “floater”—a tiny, harmless clump of cells within the vitreous humor, the clear gel filling the eye. After a while, he said, my brain would correct for it, and I wouldn’t even see it anymore.

  It didn’t go away—in fact it got bigger—but I learned to see through it, or around it. I often think my glasses are dirty, which indeed they often are, but after I clean them, the gray spot is still there. I notice it when I look at a solid field of color, like the sky. Still, that stain on the sky is not just a blot in my vision; it’s what’s in front of me, a reminder to be grateful that I can see as well as I can.

  In recent years I’ve fallen in love with taking photographs. The sun lays its light on whatever it meets, and I have only to raise my camera to my eye and put a frame around what’s given to me. I’ve been taking pictures lately of screens, veils, curtains—things that seem to obstruct vision. But when I focus my camera on the veil itself, it becomes the subject. What’s in the way is not in the way after all.

  My father went blind one eye at a time. After the first retina detached, he continued with all his normal activities, even though he didn’t have binocular vision. Five years later, the second retina detached, and he underwent a series of surgeries—five in all—in an attempt to save some part of his vision. The surgeon was a star doctor who had pioneered retinal surgery. He was passionately concerned with his patient’s retinas, but not concerned with the person who was attached to the retinas. After the first surgery, my father had to sit up in bed for a week with his eye bandaged. He was allowed to rest his chin on a board, but that was it. All he wanted was to lie down. He developed such a bad headache that he thought he had a brain tumor. And after all that, when they took the bandage off, he still couldn’t see.

  At about that time I had a series of dreams in which my camera broke: I dropped it and the lens shattered; the shutter got stuck and wouldn’t open; sand got into the gears, and I couldn’t advance the film.

  At last my father gave up and decided to go about the business of being blind. He went to a residential training program for newly blind adults, where he learned how to get around with a cane and how to read Braille.

  After he went blind, my father had two more children with his young second wife—children he never saw. He became a familiar figure in his neighborhood, walking the children to nursery school with his white cane in one hand, his older child’s hand in the other, the baby in the carrier on his back. Or he would walk their dog, Alfie, a rambunctious Siberian husky who was sometimes mistaken for a seeing-eye dog but was quite the opposite. Alfie pulled vigorously on his leash while my father stood at the curb, deciding with his ears when it was safe to cross.

  When I was sixty-five, I had another bout of seeing nonexistent flashing lights and imaginary flocks of birds, just as I had in Mexico, this time in my left eye. I was home in California, and I went immediately to the eye doctor, who told me the retina was thin but OK. He sent me home, saying the symptoms would probably go away, but if they didn’t, or if anything changed, I was to let him know right away. If a little rupture developed, he said, he’d be able to tack the retina right back down in his office with a laser beam.

  The imaginary birds and the flashing lights departed the next day, but the day after that I noticed a dark blot across the lower left corner of my visual field. This time it didn’t drift across my eye like a floater. It was like the shadow that appears in the corner of a photo when your finger is obstructing the edge of the lens. Because it only covered a small part of the visual field, it didn’t interfere with my vision in any practical way.

  I noticed it with my body more than my mind. I drove to a Japanese restaurant for a lunch meeting with an acquaintance, and all during the meal I watched the shadow lift and shift like a curtain in a light breeze. I didn’t mention it to my lunch companion, but while I was eating my sushi, it became clear to me that this was different, and I knew that the next thing I needed to do was go to the eye doctor. I seemed to see myself through the wrong end of a telescope, small and far away, eating a dragon roll. I was calm and afraid at the same time.

  After lunch, my nephew, who was staying with me at the time, drove me to the eye doctor’s office and then went to park the car.

  “You have a detachment,” the doctor said.

  “Are you going to sew it back down, like you said?”

  “It’s too big for that,” he said. “I can’t do this one. You need to go right to surgery. You’re lucky that the excellent Dr. Jones is still here. She can take you right now.”

  I called my nephew on his cell phone to tell him the news, but he didn’t answer, so I left him a message saying, “It turns out I do have a retinal detachment and they have to do surgery.” I must have been in shock, because I added, with an inappropriate casualness, “You don’t need to wait. Go on home and I’ll call you when I’m ready to be picked up.”

  The surgeon was an attractive blonde in a stylish blouse and skirt and high heels, whose office was down the hall. It was the end of the workday, and she had been about to go home, so she’d taken off her white coat. She looked stylish, not like an eye surgeon. No one was left in the ophthalmology clinic but the two of us. As I sat in her chair, there was a banging at the outer office door, now locked, and my nephew’s voice calling me. “Sue, are you in there?”

  The doctor let him into her office.

  “I’m not going home!” he said. “If you have a detached retina, I think I should stay here with you.”

  He sat on a stool, a quiet comfort. The doctor explained that although I saw the shadow in the lower left corner of my eye, it was really in the upper right, at about ten o’clock, since the brain reverses everything we see. (We are actually standing upside down on the surface of the earth. How fortunate that the force of gravity is strong enough to keep us from falling into the sky!) She explained that it was as if a flap of wallpaper had come loose and lifted off the wall, and water had gotten in behind it. She was going to inject a gas bubble into my eye that would float upward, pressing the torn retina against the back of the eyeball where it belonged. The following day I would come back for the laser surgery.

  When she stuck a needle through my lower lid to anesthetize my eyeball, I was glad Max was there. It wasn’t so much the physical pain of the injection that bothered me as the idea of having a long needle stuck into my eyeball. I squeezed hard on the arms of the chair until she pulled the needle out again.

  In a few minutes the anesthetic took effect, and I couldn’t feel it when the doctor injected the gas bubble into my eye, but I saw it right away—not one big one, but several middle-sized silvery balloons and lots of little ones, bumping together like balls of mercury. She put a bandage over my eye and told me to come back the next day for the laser surgery.

  Until the gas bubble dissipated, which would be in about a week, I had to keep my head cocked sideways, so that ten o’clock was at the top, and I couldn’t lie down. That night I slept, or tried to sleep, in an armchair, with my head propped up on pillows.

  Max took me back to the hospital the next day for the laser surgery. “Do you want him to come in with you?” asked the doctor.

  “Yes please,” I said.

  This time there was no anesthesia, because you can’t anesthetize against the light. Each stitch
of the laser gun produced an explosion of light and a sudden ache inside my eye. The laser beam burns the tissue of the retina with its heat, and it is the scarring itself that binds the retina back to the wall of the eye. How odd that the eye, the organ of light, is healed with a beam of light.

  The surgeon was kind and kept telling me how well I was doing. At one point I asked her for a rest, and she paused between stitches. The whole procedure took no more than ten minutes, but it was ten minutes with enough light for a decade.

  I didn’t need the eye patch anymore. I could see a little bit with my left eye, around the gas bubbles, and I could see fine out of my right eye, but I took Max’s elbow anyway to walk back to the car. I was lucky to have his help. If he hadn’t been staying with me at the time, I probably could have found a friend to take me, and failing that, I could have taken a cab. But the older you get, the more often you have to go to the doctor, and the more you want someone you love to take you there.

  At night, I propped myself up in an armchair, my head to the side. By day, I walked around with my head tipped sideways, or sat at my desk with my head propped on my hand. I watched the gas bubbles merge into one big one with lots of tiny ones around the circumference, like a setting of precious stones in a ring. When I moved my head they rolled around at the bottom of my vision, like marbles in a bowl, though of course they were really rolling around at the top. Each day I was happy to see that they were smaller; when they were all gone I’d be able to hold my head up straight, and lie down to sleep at night.