The Eyeball That Rose from the Dead

My mom is fun and funny and a bit warped. I inherited those traits. I can only imagine how boring our lives would be if we were not twisted in our own special way.

Mom has lived most of her life with only one eye. She was in elementary school when she was struck by a bullet in a careless mishap. The bullet entered through her right eye, barely missed her brain, and exited through the back of her skull. Wearing a prosthetic eye became her normal.

I am glad she embraced the philosophy, “Sometimes we need to laugh to keep from crying.”

As an adult, she enjoyed doing silly things with her glass eye, using her sense of humor to make people more comfortable with it. When my cousins or friends of my little brother, Eric, would visit, she would tuck the eye in her navel, pull up her shirt just enough to reveal it, and then wait for them to notice. After the initial shock, they were always amused.

One time, Eric snuck her old glass eye into his bookbag and took it to school for show-and-tell. She was not amused.

When he was in middle school, he used the eye to create a gruesome Halloween costume at school. He rigged a pencil to appear to be jammed in his faux bloody, bandaged eye and put the glass eye in his mouth. He had figured out how to use his tongue, so he could open his mouth and make the eye appear to be looking around. I am sure my parents punished him, though he was their baby boy – 10 years younger than I – so I doubt it was more than a hand-slap.

The eyeball adventures continued, even into the next generation. My daughter Angela used to hold out her hand, palm-side up, with the precious eye balanced in the middle. In her creepiest ghost-story-telling voice she would chant, “This is the eyeball that rose from the dead.” My eldest, Denise, and my nieces enjoyed chiming in with her.

Mom’s last prosthetic eye did not fit well and brought her discomfort, so eventually, she stopped wearing it and opted to wear a disposable eye patch instead. Later, she hired someone to frost the right lens of her glasses to hide her empty eye socket.

Her glass eye served its purpose for her over the years and gave our family a way to share its twisted sense of humor. Now if someone asks what happened to her eye, she either tells them a wild concocted story or gives them a dirty look and tell them they are rude. Wouldn’t you?

The eyeball that rose from the dead is tucked away in a jewelry box, but I know our family can still share its story.