There’s a mirror on the wall of my office. It’s at least eighty years old, maybe more. It has stood watch over my life, a silent sentinel.

It was at my mother and father’s little stone house by the swamp. In its reflection has been every significant person and event of my life. My father’s father, born 1882, looked into its glass. My youngest grandchild, born 2016, has smiled into it and laughed a child’s giggle.

The mirror watched as my sister tried to get me to dance like Elvis. It reflected the tiny black-and-white TV screen when Cronkite said JFK was dead.

It was there showing us the sadness of the day my father died, and the disbelief and crushing heartbreak in his brother’s faces, in his mother’s face.

We took the mirror off the wall and took it with us when my mother had to move away from the swamp to a small apartment a few miles up the road. I didn’t want to leave his house. Ma couldn’t survive there. It was a haunted house, but I wanted to stay near the ghost. The mirror hung in that living room, too. It reflected the emptiness and sadness of a little boy who just wanted to run away to his uncle’s farm and hated the place with the mirror.

We took it to the first house Ma bought on her own. It reflected pride and struggle with sadness. Ma never fully recovered from my dad’s early exit. Canadian rye whiskey seemed to help her some, though not enough.

Somehow the mirror came to me in the late 1980s. It reflected a semi-suicidal drunken drug addict stumbling and reeling through a rapidly collapsing life. I’d sometimes gaze at the image and have no idea at all who was that person staring back at me. It reflected the red-faced, blood-eyed vomiting demon that night in 1993 when I had to decide to cut that life loose or die.

It watched a messy divorce unfold in all its raw and perfect ugliness. The looking glass watched my daughter grow up and become a good woman and fly away, but she comes back sometimes, and the glass sees her again and that makes me smile. It has reflected the light of a much better marriage this time around and it watched me grow fat and happy, until I realize it is time to step on the scale to reel it back in a mite, again. It’s watched a son from that new marriage become a good man in a world where it’s challenging to be a good man.

The mirror stood there as Ma moved into my house and fell to the insanity of Alzheimer’s. It shined back to us at my sista Donna’s mile-wide smile, and her cancer emaciated face. It has watched Da Ace scheming, and me and Mark laughing our asses off, and Bobby and me trying to figure stuff out, and the ages old battle, Ford versus Chevy, and Carlos trying to explain how the world works to me.

Now, the mirror is on my office wall. It reflects an aging man trying to work and write to come to terms with a confounding, terrible world. It reflects me and the grandboy building models while I try to explain life, as I understand it, to him.

Sometimes I look into the glass, and I see all those faces, smiling and crying and laughing and screaming. Some faces I miss so desperately; it physically hurts. People have told me they are in a better place. I’m not sure how much I buy into that. I’d prefer it if they were still here, reflecting back to me.

My life has literally played out in the reflection of this four-foot by four-foot piece of glass, some art deco reject from the 1930s Ma somehow inherited, and now it’s mine. One day I’m sure it will fall from the wall and shatter into a million pieces. I hope I don’t live to see that. The part of me that believes in such silliness likes to think the mirror holds just a bit of all of us who’ve ever gazed into its shiny light and when it breaks will be the day when all of us, living and dead will be scattered finally and then no more.