It’s rare that we understand the reality of a thing, much less when we are going through puberty. In our youth the world is filtered through emotion, magic and a search for security, through a narrow, constituted gaze. However, eventually the veil falls. The wise man had stories, once simple truths, which take new and sometimes startling shape as layered insights. These revelations, not only are they enlightening, but they are also bringing out very emotional feelings, such as grief, regret, and awe.
One particular story — a heart warming case of memory and rediscovery — proves just how much we are oblivious to as children and how recollections can have new meaning the older we become.
At the age of seven, I would walk my grandfather to his house. It was a simple ritual of which, at the time, only a child could fathom the comfort that children feel and later an adult could come to revere. Offering a cup of grape juice, gently holding my hand, lovingly touching my face, he greeted me with the same small joys. Thus were these gestures nothing more than an act of kindness. As was the custom of youth, I swallowed them whole and accepted them.
He would also sing to me, soft, soothing tunes that seemed to bubble the time out of its familiar ticking. He was just a good man, a warm man, attentive. Nothing further needed to be dug deep to find it. Life though, being a life had managed to keep much more under wraps than I had known.
Years after, I learned of a fact that redirected every memory in my mind about my grandfather. He was blind since 42 due to a workplace accident. I had never seen him— not once. The shock didn’t just redo how we operated, it gave a very big wave of understanding and sorrow.
His way of seeing me was his hands—touching, his hands soft mapping the contours of my face. She was painting the pictures into every gentle caress, making a grandchild vision, to carry in his heart. The grape juice, he gave me was not a drink, it was his way of doing something he could control. His singing was that, yes, a lullaby, but more than that, his voice reaching to me to join him, when there was no sight.
What beautiful and heartbreaking this newfound knowledge was. There is a regret in it: that I didn’t know, didn’t do, didn’t value that quiet courage of loving so fully in the dark.
The thing that this story teaches you is that truth can be stranger than we make it out to be at the moment. Children do not have the context to fully understand the people they are surrounded by: their pain, their sacrifices, their silent strength. We treat gestures as facial, knowing not of the stories that follow. Only with adult eyes do we revisit those memories and shrink away from the full weight that these memories had.
This process can be unsettling. If we realize that someone near us is living with a truth we had never understood, we can witness guilt or anxiety. But it also fosters empathy. It compels us to think again and become more attentive, more fulfilling, individuals.
It was too late for me to realize how I treated my grandfather for his blindness. It was shortly after I learned of it that he died. At times that knowledge haunts me not in terms of wrongdoing, but in terms of missed opportunity. I wish I had known. I wanted to grab his hand with more intent, say words with a greater sense of clarity, and truly show some comfort the way he showed it to me.
In regret there is a strange sort of peace yet. Because now I understand. In a way I couldn’t notice feel the depth of his love I. But his blindness didn’t limit our bond, his blindness enhanced it to something deeper and more profound that I had ever imagined possible.
Child memories are not a stagnant though, but evolution. One day what was ordinary may turn out extraordinary; the other day, what was puzzling may turn out to be sense in a more poignant way. These late turnings can be unnerving, but they are also blessings. By helping us understand who we are not because they knew who we were, they help us to a greater degree of knowing who we were, both in seeing how that which never materialized carried on if not in reality, at least in their sense of failed understanding.
Finally, knowing reality is almost about perception rather than facts. Sometimes, the most clear vision is found in what we do — not in what we see — and only after we start to feel.
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