When I was 23 years old, my grandfather asked me if there was anything I could to do help him. I was just out of college, and working at a research lab. The National Eye Institute. It seemed like a big deal at the time.
By then he had started losing his vision about two years back. First, it was just the edges, but after a few months, he couldn't see distinct shapes, and a few months after that, not even the difference between light and dark.
I told him I didn't know of anything, that I was just a lowly lab assistant, mostly there to clean some beakers, stock some solvents, or perhaps make some graphs that someone one day might use. He accepted that, but with a barely perceptible half-sigh half-chuckle, told me to let him know if I heard of anything new.
We went back to sitting in the quiet. The stillness of the hot wet air of Zhuzhou hung outside the window. The damp musk of my grandfather's economy-brand cigarettes hung inside the room. The stickiness of the vinyl table covering pressed against my forearm and wrist, as I flipped a 5 yuan coin between my fingers, desperately avoiding the gaze of a man who, at this point, had none.
My grandfather passed away about eight months ago now. At the end of his life, he was fully blind, relying largely on my grandmother to be able to leave the home safely. He'd had a lifelong love for bonsai cultivating, but with his sight gone, the bonsai had lost their beautiful shapes with time and had a look as if they belonged to another time, or perhaps to another world.
My grandfather likely would never have told me if he had felt any emptiness or loneliness after losing his sight, but in those last few years I would imagine him, or sometimes even dream of him, sitting alone in a pitch-black room. Him without his bonsai, without my grandmother, just by himself, surrounded by the dark.
Since his death, I think about his bonsai trees, without their caretaker, and I think about the time he asked me for help and I feel swallowed by that darkness.