Of Mirrors and Tears

We turned to go, to leave the cramped quarters of my parents’ downsizing, their unwanted relocation, for our long drive home. I knew I would steer the car without seeing the road as I reflected on their age, their fragility, the increasing ghostlike quality of their presence. The traumas and restrictions of aging are like a tightening noose to them, and their enjoyments are few. But just then the strains of a violin began on the television, and I said, “Is that something from Brigadoon?”

Without hesitation, my Father, who at 90 is finding it harder to express what he means these days, said with certainty, “No, Phantom of the Opera.” Then he pulled us back into the room and urged, “Let’s just listen to the end of this before you go.”

And so we stood there, we four, two couples in a line, watching a man do what so few of us can these days. With the one musical instrument most like the human voice he communicated fully, clearly with my Dad and Mom, through faulty or forgotten hearing aids, right past the latest medical tests, past the corridors of boredom or helplessness they live in. The message found them, like cups of cool water to their perfectly matched pair of parched and grey souls, an oasis found while crawling through the desert that precedes paradise.

As we listened it slowly dawned on me that we were standing in front of the mirror that had made the trip with them in their move. The added angle put me face to face with them, allowed me to witness the power of that melody as it pulled from their frozen faces something I didn’t recognize at first. It was astonishment and awe.

I felt my own breath leave. Was it the glimpse of them at 87 and 90, standing together in their respective infirmaries, together for more than 65 years? Was it the thought that this could be the last time I see this picture? Was it the absolute pathos of the music? Yes, all these things. But slowly, in that regal reflection, I came to know that it was the immensity of the gift that this image was to me that made we weep. That angle allowed me to see them not as my parents but as a man and wife, propping each other up, stiffly, painfully, for nothing but the reward of beauty. It was a too-late realization of how music, and anything true and beautiful, really, was like food to them, and especially if there was someone to turn to afterward and exclaim, “A perfect end to the day.” It was a too-late realization that it had always been that way for them, I had just not understood it in my childhood. It is that way in me as well, but never until this moment in front of the mirror, have I known why I feel it so deeply in my soul. Time is ruthlessly, lovingly, and as a gift to me, insisting that they reach their end with their truest selves on display.

My tears lasted for the first hour of our drive home, silently rolling from under my dark glasses to soak my collar. After a while, I turned to the radio for rest from the poignancy. But it was not to be. It was now my own turn to be astonished – for my own wet face, stiff with the attempt to conceal my tears – to be caught up in amazement by the program I had randomly selected. The strains of Phantom of the Opera had just begun, the melody instantly flooding the car with the images of my parents’ true selves, and peeling back the layers to reveal something of my own, my own equal need for the true and beautiful, and the similar journey I am now on.

The Giver of this gift, the one who spontaneously gathers an audience around a television concert, the one who arranges the right angle in front of the mirror, the one who beckons a driver to turn on the radio at just the right moment, this Giver wants to give only what matters most -- the gift of knowing who we are, the gift of knowing why we are the way we are, the gift of his beauty and truth, the gift of a journey.

The mirror makes their small place seem larger; I am glad we decided to hang it there. But today it expanded my soul as well as the room, and helped me glimpse a reflection of the Giver – the One who planted the soul’s taste for the truth, the One that grants regular feasts of it, the One who causes one traveler to say to another, “a perfect end to the day.”