Yesterday's visit to Prairie Ridge Home

Pardon my pride, but if you look into those beautiful blues eyes, what you'll see, mostly, is a big black form. That's me. At this very moment, I am all of what she's seeing.

Not for long, of course. In a second or two, I disappeared. But right here, at this very second, the old guy with the camera--a camera pointed at her--was just about all of what she saw.

That Olivia is a beauty goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway, given the fact that I'm her grandpa, which grants me a license of bray so. Besides, I'm sure that's what the old folks thought when we brought her to see her great-grandpa yesterday. The whole bunch was getting ready for some kind of activity, sitting around tables, when I brought this darling child around, showed her off to all of them. For a moment, a brief moment, she filled their eyes the way I filled for a couple of seconds this morning.

Lois's wig comes down an awful long ways over her forehead. It's parted in the middle and sculpts her thin face, dominates it really. She is not in her room for most of the day because she needs to be watched, lest she steps out of her wheelchair. She doesn't say much, but she loves the cookies the staff serve up after chapel, sometimes helps herself to two. No one is worried about her weight.

I'm not aware of her getting visitors. She seems more alone than almost any of the residents. If she feels sorry for herself, feels the kind of lonesomeness she might feel, you really don't know it or see it or feel it. She's quiet, sort of stoic maybe. She'll smile if you address her. Like so many others in the home, she waits--sometimes patiently, sometime not--for death, mostly alone.

The smile that broke across her face when I brought this cherub around broke over her like a perfect summer dawn, like no smile I'd ever seen on her face before. For a moment or two, her eyes were filled with this adorable child. It could have been Christmas and I couldn't have given any better gift.

The only one to miss this darling little girl, it seemed, was her great-grandfather, who, in the language of the home, is failing. If you add this sweetheart's 16 months to his 99 years, the two of them would soar over a century. But yesterday she couldn't fill his eyes because he couldn't see her. 

And he couldn't hear her either. She jabbers, speaks in tongues, can fill the room with nonsense that I'm confident makes all sorts of sense to her. But her great-grandfather couldn't hear a silly syllable, even with a mike and headphones.

Someday soon, his historical record will be no more than we can say about him--an Iowa farm boy who grew up speaking Dutch, left school after eight grades, plowed and planted and harvested with a work horses, lived through the American Depression without really knowing his family was poor, spent years of his life at war in Europe, returned, fell in love, had a daughter and a farm--pigs, cows, chickens, some row crops--lots of life and love to fill his eyes and soul. Yesterday, in a way, he met a great-granddaughter from Oklahoma. Sort of.

This morning, I'm sure he won't remember. 

So many versions of what comes after this life exist that it's hard to know exactly what to believe. What I do know is that I do--believe, that is--enough to rest in the confidence that someday he'll see her again; and that someday, more quickly than he could believe, this little Livvie will fill his eyes so full he'll smile hugely, like Lois. 

Even bigger. Even more--a great-grandpa's smile.