One day it dawned on me that the people around me were all going to die sooner or later. I wasn't worried about myself – I was 3 or 4 years old – far too young to die. But I grew seriously worried about my parents, who were at the “venerable” age of 30 and therefore already in the high-risk group. I decided to devote my life to stopping them from dying.
The solution to the problem was crystal clear – I had concluded (I don't know why) that a person can only die while their eyes are closed. Consequently, my highest mission in life from then on was to thwart every single attempt by the parental body to close its eyes. Unluckily for her, my mother fell within range of my do-gooding at the very moment she had surrendered to a sweet afternoon nap…. Quiet as a panther, I crept up to the sofa she was sleeping on and carefully prised open one of her eyes. I held it open by keeping the lower and upper lids stretched apart with my fingers. That way she physically wouldn't be able to close it again. For one brief but terrifying moment, all I could see was the white of the eye I had forced open. She looked like a zombie. I froze! Had my life-saving mission come too late? Was she already dead? ……..
I will never forget the warm wave of relief that washed over me when the brown pupil finally surfaced from somewhere onto my mother's eyeball and focused on me. Instead of gratitude, however, what streamed from that staring maternal pupil was overwhelming annoyance and a poorly concealed desire to strangle her rescuer. The whole thing was repeated 2 or 3 times over the next half hour. Despite the rows that followed, the explanations, the pleading and, in the end, the pulled ears, I didn't give up. Through tears and snot, in spite of explicit prohibitions, I carried on selflessly prising her eyes open the moment she closed them.
COULDN'T THIS WOMAN SEE THAT I WAS DOING ALL THIS FOR HER OWN GOOD?
