Those Otherworldly Eyes

A couple of weeks ago, my mom’s eyes started to change. It was around the time that she suffered another TIA. If you don’t know what a TIA is, it’s a mini stroke, a little lightning storm crackling through her brain leaving her with a garbled tongue and an aversion to food. She’s had a few TIAs over the years, and we’ve become accustomed to them, but I noticed after the latest one that her eyes were changing. They were deeper and sadder. When I looked at her from across the room while we were eating dinner, she seemed to be peering out like a curious little owlet from her one good eye. The other eye is a whole other story involving a failed laser cataract procedure and a dozen trips to various specialists to try to save it. Alas, it ended up with a triangular pupil that has slowly morphed into a regular round pupil. But she can no longer see out of it anymore, just shadows.

Mom’s strange new eyes reminded me of my baby’s eyes the first time I held her in my hospital bed after a cesarean delivery. It was the first time I spent time alone with her. She opened up these deep, dark, bluey, fathomless eyes and looked at me from another world. That’s where Mom’s eyes were looking at me from, another world. I love that otherworldly thing, but of course my mother doesn’t believe in any other world than this one we’re on, rotating like a banshee around the sun, faster and faster these days. Mom only believes in this world. She’s clinging to it hard and fast.

Last year around this time, Mom said it would probably be her last summer. She wouldn’t mind dying in the fall, around the time of her 94^th birthday. Now it’s almost summer again, and she’s still here, still looking out at the garden and wondering why I’m not out there tending it like she would be. She doesn’t believe me when I say I’m too busy inside looking after her.

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If today’s essay connected with your heart, you might enjoy one of my novels. They aren’t all the same flavour, but they all come from the same brain: curious, wry, emotionally nosy, and very interested in what people do when life gets life-y.

Start with Odd Mom Out if you like bad best friends, terrible mothers, bratty daughters, aging, reinvention, and the humiliating business of being human in public.

For a darker and more emotionally intense story in which a man must go back to his hometown and face the music while his girlfriend is left behind to figure out what’s happening on her own: Where the Night Winds Wail. (Ebook on sale for $0.99 until Monday June 1, 2026.)