On Screens

Will Your Eyes Be Opened?

I really did once find a highway at the end of the earth

When you die will you have your eyes open or closed? My mother died with them open. She spent her entire life, it seemed to me, with the television on, drifting in and out of depressions, dark spells, at times, great joy and enthusiasm at others.

I held her with my eyes partially open. Awake but not yet sober. I watched the year of her death happening as one watches a grainy movie. I felt so broken that I eventually learned to feel nothing.

The floods in Pakistan are of apocalyptic proportions. Thirty-three million people are affected. Over a thousand have died. In some provinces one-half of all crops have been lost.

I stare at screens because the real meaning of this is far too complex or weighty for me to truly hold with my little brain. I don’t even know the real meaning of this. But as an act of eyes-wide-oppenness let me here try to grasp it.

It means that something like this is probably coming for many of us.

It means that we have authored our own suffering so completely that it almost seems like there was no other way it could have gone.

It means that everything we have created and clung on to in order to separate us from the undeniable, unremarkable, unavoidable truth of our lives: that they end, that there is pain…