Queen of my Heart -- My mom's eyes

Yesterday, I posted something I wrote five or six years ago about Tessie Santiago's eyes (mostly because I did not want to lose that information and this seemed like a safe place to keep it). Tessie played the character "Queen of Swords" in the syndicated TV series of the same name back in 2000-2001.

In the post, I metioned that I should post about the eyes belonging to the other Queens (and I mean that in a nice way) in my life. That would be like the Blessed Virgin Mary who is Queen of Heaven and my mom who is Queen of my Heart.

As you may have read in an earlier post, my mom died a year and one year and nine months ago, today. When I think of her, I still have a warm feeling of comfort......and loss, but I have trouble remembering her eyes. My memory is like that. I forget how things look. That is why I took up photography--in order to help me remember how people look.

There was a 3-part TV movie in the late 1990's starring actress Bobbie Phillips from MURDER ONE. The films were called CHAMELEON. Bobbie played a hybrid-kind of human. She had been genetically altered in a test tube at conception, so that she had cat and human genes. Bobbie became very good at working with child actors. They really made her shine. In the last film of the series, she was working with an older teen ager whose character was supposed to have lost her parents. In the official "touching" scene of the film, I recall Bobbie explaining to the teenager that she had trouble recalling how the caretaker she loved as a child looked, but, she said, "Once I've got the eyes, I have her." I think that maybe how it is with recalling my mom and her eyes. Once I FINALLY remember her eyes, then I have her.

When I first reflected on her eyes, I remembered the trouble my mom had had with them. She often asked me if she should wear an eyepatch, because she thought her eyes bothered other people when they looked at her. My mom had some of the first catract surgeries ever performed in which they implanted artificial lenses, so the patient did not have to live life with pop bottle lenses. She had to stay in the hospital two days after the first surgery. After the second surgery, she would say that she was awake and she heard the doctor say "Oops" during the operation. The eye operated on the second time had a misshapen pupil for the rest of her life. Even so, the surgery worked wonders. Whenever my younger brother and I needed to see something far away, as when we were driving somewhere, we would ask her to use her "bionic eye" and tell us what was up ahead.

Before my mom's older sister died in 1998, my mom started to develop a large brown spot around her left eye. We did not know what it was until a year or two before she died. We thought it was a freckle.......a big freckle. I remember my mom told me that her sister had commented about it on a visit to the northern states. By March of 2006, it had officially become malignant melanoma (a very bad cancer). When she had a lung x-ray to make sure she could have the surgery to take the cancer off of her eyelid, the doctors found a large cancerous tumor in her kidney. We tried to fight it, but when she had her stroke, they found that the cancer had started to creep into her lungs and brain also. If the stroke hadn't gotten her, the kidney cancer would have.

So then I have to think about what life was like before the cancer. (I hate cancer, by the way.)

I remember that my mom's eyes were blue--a clear , expectant blue. They were like a lake in Minnesota or North Dakota in the fall just before winter comes and ice forms on the lake. Mom always knew that something better would come along for her and anyone else. She did not fight for it or work for that change, she just went about her daily tasks caring for her family and waited for the "better" which, as I recall, always came.

My mom's eyes could be serious like when I brought home a bad report from my 7th grade English teacher. At other times they would twinkle with glee like at Christmas or when we would have our mother-child shopping trips. Up to the end, she wanted to enjoy those little outings with me. I remember New Years Day of 2006, the year she died. I took her to a quiet mall and we went to the Calendar store to get a 2006 calendar. She happily looked at everything in the store with me. Then, at one point, I was off doing something, but eventually came back to her side. She had been sitting down in front of a display, because she was tired. I didn't get it, though. I didn't get it until the end. The cancer does that to a person......makes a person tired.

Her eyes still gleamed after the first stroke. She never complained. She seemed to be able to look at the top half of her field of vision, but not the bottom. None-the-less, still she smiled and tried to comply with everyone's wishes. The priest at her church told me, "She is still there" when I commented about the fight to get a feeding tube for her and that she was still "there, sort of." I will never forget his comment. I am glad he made it. I would have forgotten the truth of it all, if he hadn't.

Mom finally looked tired as death started to creep up on her. The deep breathing that accompanies the dying process, may have affected that. (It is called Cheyne-Stokes breathing, according to the Hospice Nurse who cared for my mom.) As she passed away, she let out a big sigh of relief. She still looked tired, but then she develped a great big smile with eyes that had not been bright for a long time because of vision problems related to surgeries for the eyelid cancer. It was as if she saw Heaven. Maybe she was finally seeing the Queen of Heaven, but that is another story.

Well, for now, that is what I remember of my mom's eyes. Maybe I will remember more another time.

I hope you are all well and that you kiss your loved ones tonight or at least say a prayer for them and thanking God for putting them in your life.

See ya,
IRamat2