At the support group last night, I heard for the umpteenth time about [...]]]> I am going blind. As much as everyone would like to convince me that I will acquire some kind of new, metaphorical vision—a gift, really, an inner sight, a heightening of the other senses, blah, blah, blah—the fact remains: I am going blind.

At the support group last night, I heard for the umpteenth time about adaptive technologies, reading Braille, about people and machines and organizations that can help me. I am trying to help myself. The thing I’m most afraid of losing is my independence.

This morning, I made a trip to buy groceries. I had no trouble going down the three flights of stairs with my eyes closed. I had to peek when I got to the bottom landing. How many steps to the door? Where is the door handle if my right hand starts out on the banister and I take the five steps straight forward to the door?

Out the door, across the tiny porch, down eight stairs to ground level. Here it gets tricky. I close my eyes and shuffle my feet along the sidewalk, counting the cracks, measuring the irregularities with my toes, making a note of curbs and driveways. I am learning to use audible inputs to cross the street. I only have to cross one street to get to the next block, where Leland’s Grocery is.

I cheated some more along the route. I need visual cues to associate with the other sense data that I’m trying to memorize. The smell of coffee, flowering plants, and garbage. The sound of the traffic, of course, and of conversation coming out of open doors; the wind, a leaf-blower somewhere near by—must be the park, since there are no lawns in this neighborhood. I study the texture of the pavement and of the faces of the buildings I pass on my way.

After I arrived at the grocery store, I kept my eyes open. I don’t know if I will be able to learn the layout of the store, even though it’s a small one. So many products, so much complexity! I have experimented here before, and I get lost just trying to find my way around the produce aisle. How will I ever navigate the rows of boxes and canned goods? There’s not much point in wasting my energy here; I will have to have someone else do my grocery-shopping, or at least to accompany me here.

I don’t kid myself that I will ever be completely independent again. I won’t be able to shave my own face. I won’t be able to polish my shoes, or pick out clothing, or cook or travel without assistance. I’m fortunate to have Saul to help me with many of these things. Today he’s working until 3:00, and then he will come over to help me with some of the routine tasks that I’m learning to accomplish in new ways.

He will read the things I have written. He’ll fix my typos, correct my misspellings, add accents and the punctuation that I have trouble finding, and then he’ll read my articles back to me, and I’ll decide what to keep, what to rewrite, how to revise the order of the sentences and paragraphs.

While we sit close together in front of my computer screen, I will try once again to memorize his face. I know that a time will come soon when I can’t see it any more. I will stare at the mole below his left eye. I will examine his freshly cut hair, how thick and black it still is on the top and the way it fades to almost nothing at the hairline in the back. I’ll try to associate these images with the sound of his deep voice, his slight accent (Argentina, but a long, long time ago), the nasal quality. Will I be able to recall all of the details of his face, his neck, his body?

What other tricks can I use to bring the image of him to mind? There’s a jar of hand cream that he bought for me. I don’t use it because it makes my hands too slippery, and I worry about leaving a film of grease all over the apartment. But Saul rubs it into his callused palms, and so I will think of his hard, dark hands when I smell the beeswax and lavender.

We were boyfriends for a while, and I thought that we might be again some day, and then I received my diagnosis. Saul had worked as my assistant and proofreader, and so he was a natural choice to assist me in this transition from sighted to blind. I suspect that we will never have a romantic relationship again, and that realization hurts more than the thought of many of the other things that I’m losing. (I can’t ask Saul to read what I am writing here.)

Even though I’ve known the change was coming for a while now, I am mostly unprepared for a future in the dark. I purchased a reader—an amazing little machine that will let me hear the text of books, magazines, and newspapers. It’s not the same thing as reading the words myself, but I’ll get used to the strange, mechanical voice, and I guess I’ll learn to ignore the peculiar cadence and rhythm. It’s like learning a new language, in a way. I know that there’s as much meaning as was there in the words before, but for a while, the eerie form they take is a distraction.

I hear Saul’s truck in the street outside. While I still can, I go to the window to watch him get out of his little pickup and climb the steps to the porch. Then I return to my chair. I keep my eyes closed and listen for the sound of the front door. I count his footsteps on the stairs. I hear his key turning in the lock. The sound of his sneakers crossing the hardwood of the living room floor. I wait for the touch of his hand on my arm and the feeling of his stubble on my cheek. Then I open my eyes and we go to work.

Today I added a fresh dimension by taking Max’s suggestion to write with the monitor brightness turned all the way down. But when I turned it back up at the end to give this text a read, I decided that the mistakes didn’t contribute much to the verisimilitude of the piece; they were more distracting than interesting. So I edited them out.

© 2008 Edward F. Gumnick

In April 2007, I decided to sell my house so I could run around the world and play. I didn’t reach this decision lightly; it was the culmination of a lot of agonizing and soul-searching and talking with friends and coaches about [...]]]> My first night at David’s house was the day we sold his coffee pot.

In April 2007, I decided to sell my house so I could run around the world and play. I didn’t reach this decision lightly; it was the culmination of a lot of agonizing and soul-searching and talking with friends and coaches about what it would take to give up the old bungalow where I’d lived for 16 years and housed my business for the last eight.

I asked my friend David how he’d feel about having a roommate. With his consent, I started plans to make his spare bedroom my pied-a-terre in Houston—a home base for whatever globe-trotting playboy lifestyle might come next. And I went to work on getting my house ready to sell.

It took eight frantic weeks to empty the house. With the help of my future roommate, my sister (Anne), my ex (M.), a professional-organizer friend (Gayle), and an underemployed new friend who was willing to work cheap (Julie), I buried myself in the process of sorting through 16 years’ worth of accumulated stuff.

Julie took away a couple of pieces of furniture to dress up her sparsely furnished apartment, and Anne took custody of a few family-heirloom pieces for which I wouldn’t have room. M. took some of the mementos and decorative objects that wouldn’t fit in my smaller space. We pared the contents of two overloaded filing cabinets down to three file drawers. Anne and Julie and I hauled load after load of paper and cardboard to the recycling center. I culled my thousands of books to keep only the ones that I could reasonably say I was still eager to read in the next year or two—a few hundred. The rest went either to friends or to the Half-Price Books store. The spare bookcases went to the former tenant of my garage apartment, who’d bought a house soon after I told her that the place would be going on the market. David and I made a couple of trips to the city dump, the back of his pickup truck loaded down with debris.

Gayle and I worked long hours sticking labels on everything that couldn’t easily be stuffed into a box: “Moving,” “Garage sale,” “Craig’s List,” “Freecycle.” We assembled goody bags for a dozen or so of my friends—items they’d lent me and never retrieved, or things that I thought they might like to have. One evening, David and M. tore through my kitchen to identify appliances and gadgets and cookware that were duplicated in David’s kitchen, and we either gave the duplicates to M. to stock his apartment kitchen, or we put them aside for a garage sale.

As the sorting proceeded, we packed boxes and bags and hauled them one car- or van-load at a time from my house in Brookesmith to David’s place in Timbergrove. As we emptied the old place, we started setting up my new space. The new bedroom wasn’t large enough for my king-size bed, so a friend offered me a queen-size one that he’d recently replaced. (After the move, I gave the old bed away to a grateful Freecycle member. It was pouring rain the day I helped her cram it into the back of her ancient Suburban.)

Near the end of the process, we disassembled the office and reconstituted it in a leaner, cleaner form in David’s giant living room. The supplies and paper and equipment and furniture that had taken over most of three rooms in the old place were reduced to a large, well-organized supply cabinet and one tidy, efficient desk in the new digs.

When the purge was nearly finished, we made plans for a mammoth garage sale. All the help she’d given me had inspired Anne to do some downsizing, too, so she brought a load of stuff to sell, and David shuttled over a couple of dozen boxes of surplus material that we tucked away in the garage to await the sale.

With all the work to be done and decisions to be made about what to keep, what to give away, what to throw away, what to sell, I never gave much thought to when I would make the “official” move—on what day I would wake up in my old house and go to sleep in my new place.

Then on the morning of the second day of the garage sale, David brought his coffee maker to my house. “We’re keeping yours, so we can go ahead and sell this one,” he explained. As soon as he said those words, the reality struck me: if we sold David’s coffee maker, mine would have to go home with him at the end of the day.

And so would I.