which is when I see myself reflected in the glass of the patio sliding doors and realize how large I must seem to them, large, though clearly not authoritative, as the youngest starts spacing the boards again behind my back, and I lift one and point to the rings in the grain, and say, see, this too was once alive, how, though rooted, it turned it leaves to the warmth of the sun and drew water from the earth, its limbs not unlike yours when you lift the hems of your skirts to hop through puddles, or wave to me from the treehouse we are building together, a project begun before the passing of their grandmother though intersecting now with her loss as grief permeates all things, and they ask the questions one would expect (if she looks down on them from above just as they, from the tree, look down on me) and the questions one doesnt expect about how the tree feels holding the remains of another tree in its limbs, transformed, though it is, to a house, and I tell them trees arent capable of abstract thought or have feelings like we do, though what do I know, thinking of Michelangelos Pieta, and Mary, though stone, holding her deceased son, and how the body is itself a house of memory and love and loss, as my wife and I explained to our daughters, that the sadness they feel is sadness, yes, but also love transformed, that grief is love for the one who was lost, just as my wife expressed on the day before her mother died, after a month of hospice at her mothers home and the gift, my wife said, to be there with her, to measure and administer the morphine when the great pain came, when any touch, even a blanket, became unbearable, to honor the effort at the end for her to stand, holding to the walker, and request what would be her final bath, and my wife, afterwards, drawing a comb through the fineness of her hair, never more beautiful, my wife saying that night, and again the next day even after the workers had come so quickly to take her, to gather and remove any remaining meds, count every pill as her final breath still hung in the air, and our daughters cried unceasingly so that when, that night, we drove away, the trees that lined the road seemed to bow to the car, to lift their limbs in the breeze, the undersides of their leaves lighter than the backs, like the palms of hands, which, I believed, if they could, they would place on our car, on the shoulders of my wife, or interweave their limbs as a canopy above us, their petals below, and the road would no longer be a road but a tunnel, to where it ascended I did not know, only that we were like breath released at last from the throat, becoming the words we were unable to say
Health Technol Assess (Rockv)
Smoking increases your risk of developing various eye conditions, including: Cataracts Cataracts occur when the lens of your eye becomes cloudy, leading to blurred vision and eventual vision loss
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