He Asked If It Was His Eyes

Cedar Valley News
June 13, 2026
He Asked If It Was His Eyes
By Aisha Khalid

He came in for the usual things. Blood pressure, the refill on his cholesterol pill, the knee aching before rain. He has been my patient for most of the twenty years I have practiced here, and he does not waste my time. So, when he hesitated at the door on his way out, I sat back down.

He wanted to ask me something, and he was embarrassed by it. His grandchildren had come to visit the week before. He had taken them into the backyard at dusk, the way his own father once took him, to catch fireflies in a jar. He remembered the yard of his boyhood full of them, a whole field blinking, more than any boy could catch. He stood out there with his grandchildren, and they waited, and in an hour, the children saw three. The children were not disappointed. They had nothing to compare it to; three was a fine number to them. He was the only one in the yard who knew to grieve, because he was the only one who remembered the field.

He asked me if it was his eyes.

He is seventy-four. His eyes are not what they were, and he knows it. He wondered if he was misremembering, the way the old are accused of doing, painting a childhood brighter than it was. He wondered if the fireflies were still out there, and he simply could not see them. Part of him wanted me to say so. It is easier to lose a little of your eyesight than to lose the thing you carried a child outside to show.

I told him the truth. His eyes are fine. He is not misremembering. The fireflies really are fewer. The people who study them estimate as many as one in three firefly species in North America may be at risk of disappearing, crowded out by lost meadows and the lights we leave burning all night long. He had read none of it. He did not need to. He had counted three where there once was a field, and he was right.

I have spent twenty years learning to notice the things a body does quietly, before it ever announces them. A number drifting a little each year. A weight coming off without anyone trying. The hard things rarely arrive with a knock. They arrive as a small difference from last year, the kind nobody charts until it is already far along. I have sat with patients who came in certain they were well, while a number on a page had been climbing for years in a direction no one was watching. The body keeps a record we forget to read. We call it a diagnosis once it is loud enough to frighten us.

A yard of fireflies going dark is the same kind of loss. It has no single night. No one moment the lights go out for good. It is only ever fewer than last year, and fewer than the year before, until one summer an old man stands in his grass with two grandchildren and counts on one hand what used to fill the whole dark.

The trouble with a slow loss is it never feels like an emergency, so no one is ever called for it. There is no siren the night the fireflies thin. There is only a good man, embarrassed in my doorway, asking whether the failing thing is himself.

It is not him. I want to be careful to say it, to him and to you. When the world dims a little each year, the people who notice first are not imagining things, and they are not too old to be trusted. They are the ones still looking.

I told him to do one thing for me, the next time the grandchildren come. Turn off the porch light. Leave the far corner of the yard unmowed and a little wild. Take the children out at dusk, and wait longer than feels reasonable. The fireflies still left in Cedar Valley are out there, in the dark we have not yet filled in.

His eyes are fine. It is the rest of us who stopped looking up.

Cedar Valley News has a Facebook group. If you have comments and want to join the conversation, you are welcome. Tell us about the fireflies you remember, and whether you still see them where you live. https://bit.ly/40p8jKy

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While the people and town of Cedar Valley are fictional, the decline of North American fireflies described in this editorial is real.

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