Getting Old, Continued 2...

After Pop Pop came home, my mom brought him for new cloths. Twenty-five pounds lighter meant he 'swam in his old threads,' as my mom said. She went to JCPenny and they bought new pants, shirts, and belts. 

"I had to help him in the dressing room," she said, eyes watering. "We grew close then. We spent so much more time together.

One morning in June of 2008, nine months after he got home, Pop Pop woke up blind. Blood seeped below the macular in his right eye, causing irreversible damage to his retinal cells: macular degeneration, his doctor called it. Pop Pop's other eye had already suffered the same fate, and from that point on, he couldn't see a thing. 

Pop Pop was scared, his father had suffered through blindness when he grew old.

"Goin blind's the worst," he'd say as we sat on the back swing and talked about his father. "Never get old Jonny."

We had hope at first, that something positive would come out of it, that somehow the blood in his eye would clear up, at least to the point where he could distinguish when it's dark or light, or make out basic shapes. If he was lucky, I imagined it would be like opening one eye underwater: one dimension of dulled colors, smudged outlines, and stretched fissures of darkness at night. We prayed but nothing changed. 

It was apparent pretty quick that Grandma wouldn't be able to take care of Pop Pop on her own. He stayed at our house for a few days, but only another three weeks passed before he was checked in as a patient at The Summit in Plantsville, the nursing home facility not two miles from Autumn Drive. 

 Pop Pop did live a 'better quality of life' for those nine months. His heart was fixed, he had suffered through a hell I could never imagine, learned to breath, swallow, and talk again. And after being back home for the winter, gearing up for the tomato plants and summer that he was so eager to get back to, his eye, of all things, was his downfall. Neve again would he wake up to see his red-numbered radio, watch baseball games, spy on squirrels and birds from the swing or kitchen window, sit at his workbench and meticulously work on some new project. Never again would he look into the eyes of his wife, or see his grandchildren grow any further than the last images he remembered of them.