The column was about how life so often turns in the split-second of a mundane moment. Sirrayne Loving was an 8-year-old Roxbury boy who set out on a brief journey to the corner store for a bag of chips and juice. He returned home with a shard of commercial window glass sticking out of his left eye.
When I spoke to Carolyn Loving on a November afternoon some 10 years ago, her son was about to undergo his second emergency surgery at Massachusetts Eye & Ear Infirmary. Doctors offered little hope of saving her son’s eye.
"The pupil is destroyed," Carolyn told me." And the doctors say Sirrayne’s cornea has been split just about in two."
It was an accident, but one born out of a malignant indifference. The owners who had abandoned a Pep Boys (auto parts) franchise at the edge of the Washington Square Mall never bothered to board up the windows. Sirrayne drifted into the range of older kids who were hurling chunks of display window at each other.
"How come all that glass was just left lyin’ all around out there?" Carolyn asked, "just waiting to mess up our lives like it did." Chronic illness prevented Carolyn Loving from being at her little boy’s side, so she delegated her 20-year-old daughter, Senchona, to keep watch over Sirrayne. The day their picture appeared in this newspaper in 1998, the shattered glass outside that vacant store disappeared.
And life inevitably moved on. There were other columns, other quick glimpses into a host of fateful moments. But every once in awhile, a moment in time will find its way back to you.
"My name is Senchona Loving," said the voice on the phone message, "you wrote a story back when my brother, Sirrayne, was small and almost lost his eye. We were going through some of our mother’s things and we came across the story in the newspaper. We just wanted to say hello."
The gracious young man will become 18 come July. "I’ve had eight more surgeries on my eye since the time you wrote the story," Sirrayne Loving said. "They were able to save it and I’ve got some vision in it. I think I’ll be able to drive one day."
In the aftermath of that simple trip to the store, Sirrayne said he’s been forced to grow up "different and mostly alone."
"When I went to elementary school wearing a patch over my eye, every other kid in the school just kept on teasing me and calling me a pirate," Sirrayne recalled. "Things only got worse later on, when I stopped wearing the patch and they gave me a thick pair of eyeglasses like Coke bottles. So, I pretty much kept to myself."
As his mother’s health continued to deteriorate, the bond between Sirrayne and the older sister who watched over him would grow stronger. "My mother and my sister, they were the reasons I was able to find my way and not worry about what other kids would be saying.
"My mother was everything to me," Sirrayne said, "and when she died of cancer almost two years ago, I kind of lost it for awhile. I didnt see any kind of future for myself. It wasn’t that I lashed out or anything like that, it’s more like I lost the will to go on. I just didn’t seem to care about anything for a long time.
"Then, my sister, Senchona, she came down with kidney disease and needed a transplant, which she got, thank God. It was the same exact thing with my older brother, too. His kidneys failed ... As a family, I guess you could say we’ve been through a lot.
"But we’re going forward, just the same," Sirrayne said. "Senchona is studying to be a nurse. I’m looking forward to going on to college. Right now, I’m tutoring middle-school kids in math, working for [The Young People’s Project] which my aunt is the director of. A lot of things have happened since that afternoon I went to the store.
"Sometimes I think that all the stuff I’ve gone through with my eye has helped me to be the person I am. I was bitter for a while. Still, I was lucky enough to have people who cared, doctors who cared. I’m mature enough now to see just how that’s helped me to become the person I am."
Article Source: http://www.bostonherald.com/news/opinion/columnists/view.bg?articleid=1077131
