My optometrist told me I needed bifocals just as I turned forty. Right on schedule, he said. Your eyes will keep changing for a while, but by fifty, they’ll settle down. I winced. The prospect of new glasses didn’t bother me. At age three, I’d been diagnosed with astigmatism and juvenile farsightedness and bore the nickname “four-eyes” well into my teens. What did was the welcome into middle age implied in the optometrist’s words. My lips twisted; I would deal. I had no choice.

TThe prescription changed by small degrees but frequently enough that I needed new bifocals every few years. Fifty came and then fifty-one. And still my eyes continued to change. Then, around my fifty-sixth birthday this past October, I noticed something else besides the routine re-blurring of my world: small rogue particles that flitted across my field of vision. Worried that my eyes had entered an unforeseen phase of decay, I turned to Google and self-diagnosed the problem as floaters.

The vitreous in my eyes had begun to liquefy. Tiny collagen fiber bits were now floating free and clumping together, casting shadows on my retina. And that meant seeing the optometrist again to make sure I didn’t also have a matching set of detached retinas to start 2022. Then I remembered something my father had told me about a cataract diagnosis he received the not long before he died. It’s like looking through a veil. I laughed. Papa had seen his world through gauze. I was seeing mine through fine gray snow.

Perched on his rolling stool, the optometrist tested my eyes. They were healthy, except for the fact I was now in the early stages of cataract disease. Can I stop it? He shook his head. One day, perhaps in the next decade, I would need surgery to stop the white moons of full blown cataract disease from eclipsing my vision. Until then, I could only slow their development by wearing anti-glare lenses, maintaining a healthy lifestyle and wearing sunglasses outdoors. He didn’t need to school me on the benefits of shades. I wore them all the time already, mostly for the pleasure of feeling hip and young and only incidentally for the way they softened sunlight.

Though cataracts can develop at any age, they are one of the more predictable ills of those fifty and older. Live into your eighties and the chance of developing them becomes one in two. But when the disease runs in families, the risk of developing them is higher. My father never knew his birth parents nor did he know the predispositions of the genes he inherited from them. Even if it wasn’t in his DNA, I was convinced he had set himself up for cataracts. He loved the sun as much as I did. But he rarely protected his blue-white eyes from its damaging rays.

Papa didn’t live long enough to tell me what else to expect—blurry vision, decreased ability to focus and see color brightness, increased sensitivity to light—as the disease progressed. But I never forgot that veil. For years, there had been so much in his life he had refused to see. That his second marriage could not be saved. That his body and heart were failing him. That he needed a will to tell his family what to do with his belongings. That veil was his metaphor, the thing that revealed his denial. Snow was mine.

Like my father, I dislike the thought of my own finitude. But I have no veil to shield me from that fact. Instead I have snow—and my still-immature cataracts—to remind me that I am mortal. They clarify rather than obscure, reminding me how much I loved my youth, my former ability to withstand the changes and shocks of life with ease. While also forcing me to look at the truth. The snow is starting to fall; winter is coming. Though not old, I am nearing the precincts of age.

Psychology teaches that bodies often offer clues—physical metaphors—that hold the key to understanding the causes of emotional ailments. Alternative health practitioners take this idea and go one step further, claiming that all illnesses—not just psychological ones—are produced by negative emotions. Louise Hay, for example, famously claimed that everything from colds to cancer had precise metaphysical causes, which she listed in Heal Your Body. Curious, I looked up an online version of Hay’s book. Cataracts, she claims, are the product of an “inability to see ahead with joy,” the belief in a “dark future.”

Papa never tried to look beyond his veil. I think he wanted it that way, just as I believe he died willingly, no longer wanting to fight the weak heart that had nearly failed him so many times before. So yes, he had been unhappy. But would I say that this unhappiness caused his cataracts? Probably not. Or not entirely, anyway. Just as I cannot say that my own too-frequent pessimism did the same to me. I had no empirical proof, only the ambiguity of bodily metaphors.

What I can say is this. The January day I was diagnosed, I did not feel upset. I could not; outside, the day was sunny as a promise. Whatever the cause of my disease I had a chance my father did not. One day my lenses would be replaced and I would once again be able to see with crystalline clarity. All I had to do was embrace the snowfall and my cataracts. And walk into the light.