“What’s wrong with your eye?” a student asked as I was giving my introductory spiel on the first day of class over Zoom. It’s a question that still stumbles me—makes me pause, unsure of how to address this query from a tongue that is probably younger than the reason for the question.
I stopped. “I’m sorry, what did you say?”
If it had been a stranger I would’ve kept on walking or given a non-answer, but my immediate thought was that this was a student whose evaluation could crush my chances at another three-year contract.
The student hadn’t thought this as a chance to rescind the question; they repeated it louder, turning on their camera and leaning closer to their mic: “What’s wrong with your eye?”
“Oh,” I said. “I had brain surgery many years ago, and the surgery damaged my eye, unfortunately. Let’s look at our website for this class.”
As I guided students through the website, I regretted my response. Had I sounded too harsh? Too defensive? After all, there’s something about Zoom classes that makes students ask questions they would otherwise save for after class. I suppose it’s the false privacy the black box after black box with only names that pushes an unearned intimacy.
I made sure to affirm other comments this student made at least twice to assuage any feelings of hurt. “That’s right, Student,” I said. “Yes, what Student mentioned is a great idea.”
“I see the milestones dwindling / toward the horizon / and the slow fires trailing / from the abandoned camp-sites, / over which scavenger angels / wheel on heavy wings.” - “The Layers,” by Stanley Kunitz
***
A month before my brain surgery, scheduled for September 11, 2001, I visited New York City for the first time. There’s a picture of me—possibly in the West Village—that’s the last photograph of me with both eyes open. I’m wearing a button-down shirt I bought at a thrift store in Kansas, baggy jeans, a scarf around my hair, and carrying a bag repaired with giant safety pins.
I look tired and hot at that moment, but I was happy, beneath it all. Happy that I was going to be living here soon—or so I thought—once all this tumor nonsense was behind me. Even though I knew my eye was going to be temporarily paralyzed, or so my neurosurgeon said, I didn’t think that it would be permanent, because I believed—I needed to believe—that a doctor wouldn’t lie to me, or at least be on the positive end of a lie.
After all, I was twenty-two. Barely older than most of my present students. Grownups were still all-knowing to me, the kid. A kid, forced to be an adult. Around the time of this photograph, I’d arranged for an apartment for my father and boyfriend to stay while I was in the hospital in Fairfax, Virginia. I finished paperwork—all actual paperwork in this pre-online world. Made sure I paid my rent for the little apartment I shared with a college friend. Received money from my church to pay for food and buy essentials. Arranged to start my job in New York a few months later than originally planned. My boyfriend, Tom, was planning on moving to Detroit with other college friends.
Kids thinking that this was just a bump in our plans for a world that seemed huge but conquerable at twenty-two.
***
I wish I could remember seeing the World Trade Center Towers on that trip to New York. I’m certain I saw them, noted them, but that memory has been erased like so many other memories. We took the train to the city, which I’ve taken enough times since to know the Towers would’ve been visible as we approached. Tom remembers using them to navigate Manhattan in a time before iPhones and GPS. “I knew we were heading south when I saw the Towers,” he says.
There are things we see and have that we never count until they are gone. This is human. Although one thing I’ve certainly learned the hard way in the last twenty years is to appreciate the common abilities of life, I know that there are things I’m missing, not counting, not being thankful enough for, and that there will be a day when I note their absence with regret.
I remember little of the trip to New York past the photos we took with disposable cameras. This may be a side effect of the brain tumor, or just time taking its toll on memory matter. Aside from the West Village photo, I remember sitting in the shade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, taking a photo of Tom in the Village as he was laughing, me sitting in the little loft of the room we stayed in—a room that faced a brick wall—laughing as well.
***
Yesterday, on September 10, 2021, I wandered a bit around Union Square. The day was gentle and almost cool—a respite from the intensely hot summer we’ve had. I watched people talking and walking with their dogs. An elderly man in black socks and sandals talked incessantly to a young woman who clearly just wanted to read her book. The pigeon woman was standing in her spot, covered in the feathers of visiting birds. A young man in yellow pants played his heart out on his violin. The farmer’s market was in full swing. A small band played near the Gandhi statue.
I imagined this was similar to the September 10 of twenty years ago. I sat on a bench near the dog park and wished I could freeze this moment for everyone. To stop whatever horrible thing is going to happen tomorrow from happening.
On September 10, 2001, I had to come into the hospital to have a technician shave a part of my groin so they could put an IV that shot dark matter into my veins and arteries. I was partially sedated, but I could hear a technician wonder out loud about my tumors. I shocked them into silence by responding to their disgust.
I wish I had decided to forgo the surgery on September 10, 2001, based on the banal behavior of those whose oath they’d violated. I wish I’d walked away and faced the consequences of the action.
Several months later, when my neurosurgeon suggested a second surgery to remove the rest of the tumor and said I’d need surgery to attempt to regain control of my eye, I did just that. I said no and walked out, very politely, of course. I waited to weep in the stairwell of the clinic.
I don’t remember the exact conversation, but later, when I got the neurosurgeon’s notes on that visit to convince my health insurance to pay for proton/photon therapy, I saw that the doctor—or probably his assistant—noted that I vehemently refused a second brain surgery. I doubt I was that visibly angry, since I was raised to be quiet and polite in all circumstances, but perhaps the assistant saw something behind my one eye that said something beyond what was exchanged.
I never saw the neurosurgeon again. Two years later, I received a survey from the doctor’s office, stating that he was moving to an office on Long Island, and the new office was interested in hearing about my experience as his patient. My tinnitus was raging after my proton/photon therapy by this point. I remember sitting on the shag carpet in our bedroom, filling out the survey. I was honest. I was cruel.
I never mailed the survey.
***
My memories of that September 11 are few and jumbled, so that I still have to sit and think about what I’m remembering, as if I’m riffling through a drawer and not sure, for a second, what I even opened the drawer to locate. Tom, a college friend, Bethany, my father, and I spent the night in the apartment I’d found a few miles from the hospital. I remember removing my contacts the night before and looking at my eyes, thinking that this would be the last time I’d wear contacts in my left eye for a while. A while.
When we left the apartment, someone asked me if I needed the MRI scans I’d brought to the hospital earlier. I said no, no one said anything about needing to see them. I assumed they had copies.
I remember seeing the sky ever so briefly as we drove to the hospital. The sky was blue without any clouds—a beautiful day, by all accounts—but I don’t know if that’s a real memory, or if it’s been said so often about that day that I have ingested it with everyone else. Perhaps it’s an American mythology now; the world was perfect until it wasn’t any longer. I do remember when we went into the parking garage, and how it seemed like a monster, waiting to devour us forever.
I remember my neurologist asking me for my MRIs, and how he yelled at me when I said I didn’t have them. It was later learned he thought I’d left them in Virginia, not that they were only minutes away.
What I don’t remember was my response.
It was only weeks later, when I sat in my apartment on my tiny, ragged sofa with Tom that he shared what I’d said to the doctor.
“Fuck you,” I’d said.
Apparently, Tom had immediately left to retrieve the MRIs. That upset me even more.
“Fuck you,” I’d said. “Where’s Tom? Where’s Tom? I wanted to say goodbye.”
My father ran to find Tom. He drove Tom back to the apartment.
I think I remember saying it now, but again, I don’t know if that’s because it’s been stamped into my memory, or if I’ve finally retrieved the memory, just as Tom and Dad procured the MRIs.
I do remember the anesthesiologist talking to me before they gave me a shot: “He shouldn’t have done that,” he said. “It was wrong.”
My next memory is hearing the television reporting planes crashing into buildings. I remember someone saying Chicago had been attacked. Maybe San Francisco as well. That six-thousand people were dead. For months after, I figured that was a dream talking. I later learned that there was that much confusion immediately after.
I’ve been told that when they thought I should know about what had happened, that I’d said, angrily, “I know already.”
I am easily angered when drugs are in my system. The mask is removed. The anger of my personality is revealed. This is why I’m so careful with responses to anything when I am sober.
The rage behind the mask is unpredictable and frightening.
***
These are the memories that rise when any stranger—a child, an adult, a student—asks me about my eye. I cannot share these memories, because often I know they don’t want a real answer, or, as the situation that recently occurred, I literally don’t have time to get into it, so I say something close to: “I had brain surgery. It was damaged.”
I’m not upset that the student asked what was probably on the tip of so many tongues, and I hope to give a better answer as time goes by, since I’m sure it will come again from other sources, but to be honest, I wonder if I’ll ever get used to the query.
***
Life clearly changed, post-surgery. I realized that moving to New York so soon after brain surgery was out of the question, whether the Towers had been destroyed or not. My insurance would only pay for seven physical therapy sessions. The hospital began calling me, demanding I pay the difference between what the insurance company paid and what the hospital was owed. I tried—and failed—to give my parents’ phone number to the hospital because my aphasia was so severe.
Tom and I decided to get married and move together to New York, where my job miraculously remained. He eventually found a job that he still has (after a furlough and moves) nearly twenty years later. We’d agreed to get married years before but had always put it off because we thought we were too young, too poor to do so. After the surgery and all that happened after, we decided being young and poor was a small barrier.
Again, on that shabby little sofa we proposed to each other, and giggled when it was decided. Still kids, even with grownup decisions
***
Twenty years on, I still wonder if it was the right decision—to remove a benign tumor that was simply growing, or if I should’ve talked to more doctors about other routes—but I can’t return to that moment before. I can only continue. I can’t forget the good things that have happened because of that day. I wonder if life had happened the way I’d planned when I was twenty-two. How my life would be—and not be—as it is now. If Tom and I would be together. If I’d be writing this in an apartment in Brooklyn. If I’d have made the friendships that have sustained me through the past two decades and ongoing Pandemic. I’d like to think all those things would be set in stone, but I know enough that little decisions change the course of a lifetime.
There’s a Stanley Kunitz poem, titled “The Layers.” According to Kunitz, the following lines came to him in a dream, when he’d been grieving about the deaths of friends, as well as the end of his own life: “‘Live in the layers, / not on the litter.’”
I’ve probably read this poem dozens of times, but those two lines caught me when they came up in my Facebook feed a few days ago. What does that mean, to “live in the layers”?
As I’ve approached my forties and now begun them in earnest, since I’ll be forty-three in less than a month, I’ve found myself regretting things that I assumed would be readily within my grasp if I wanted them when I was in my early twenties: children, multiple successful books under my belt, to name just two.
I’ve been unconsciously living in the litter, not the layers. I’ve been living in the regret of moments forgotten, not the enjoyment of moments I’ve been granted. I won’t pretend to be immediately successful at living in the layers of life—the grace of a Saturday afternoon, the smile I’ll form when I see Tom’s stride before I recognize it as his, the warmth of a cup of coffee and toast—but I will work on appreciating those memories that might be forgotten, but because that is the nature of the brain, not a failing on my part.