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.
Note: The assignment was to “write blind”—to find a way to compose without being able to see the paper or computer screen, in the interest of accessing “a deeper part of your creativity and/or intelligence.” I use a variation on this approach in my daily writing exercises. My near vision is very poor, so when I take off my reading glasses, I can’t see much of what I’m doing. A little blindness helps keep my inner editor on his leash until I’m ready to turn him loose.
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
So you wrote blind about going blind. That is an unusual way to treat the topic. Funny, as I read I didn’t think about the blindness so much as the narrator’s sadness about going blind. The poignant sense of loss described or implied was touching.