Her eyes reminded me of animals I've seen who died. 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: I want to live. I am filled with terror. I am resigned to my fate.
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 is 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 perhaps, some magic mantra to steal the cancer from her body and banish it to hell where it belonged. I saw the wide-eyed terror.
"The hardest part is dragging myself every other morning to the clinic for chemotherapy," she said.
I imagined her laying awake most nights wondering if she had the strength to get dressed, climb into her Buick and navigate across town to lay on a stretcher with in IV plugged into her veins. I pictured her as the first signs of dawn began to steal into her bedroom arguing with herself whether or not it would just be better to simply quit going back. To raise the white flag and throw in the remaining cards in her hand.
"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, they weren't so haunted.
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