Waiting To Go Blind
by Laura Burkhart
Day 1
“We’ll have to hire a cook when I’m blind,” I blurt, against my better judgement.
Darwin looks up from his oatmeal. “You’re not going blind,” he says.
“The thing is ”—I can’t stop myself now—" when I can’t see I won’t be able to tell if any insects get in the food.”
Darwin maneuvers a raisin from his oatmeal with the edge of his spoon and chews while he stares at me. “What you don’t know can’t hurt you,” he says.
“Can you imagine anything worse than crunching a cockroach in your salad?”
He carries his bowl to the sink and rinses it. “Ellen,” he says, “You’re not going blind.”
Darwin doesn’t want to talk about my impending loss of sight. He would prefer to ignore things that scare him. A few years ago he quit watching the news and claims he sleeps better now. He has a point, I think, but then so does the man I saw in the post office the other day pontificating on terrorism to the clerk. She was trying to sell him his stamps as quickly as possible. He told her in a voice that echoed off the walls, “If you’re not afraid it means you don’t really care.”
That’s the whole dilemma isn’t it? Ostrich-ism vs. fear. Both immobilizing. Both claiming to be right. And do either of them really care about what they’re denying or afraid of? Or are they just two bad choices to keep us stuck in misery?
I wonder: is that my fear about Darwin? If he’s not worried about me going blind, does that mean he doesn’t care about me? Or does he just not care whether or not I’m blind?
After I clean up the breakfast dishes I stand in front of the bathroom mirror and stare at my eyes. Eyes looking at eyes looking at eyes looking. I could make myself crazy watching for clues, for changes, for small indications that my vision is about to disappear completely. I know better. From experience I know there might be even less warning than a brilliant yellow headache.
Still, I find myself in front of the mirror several times a day, searching for signs that my eyelid is more droopy than usual, or that my eyeball has started to bulge. I’m also on high alert for signs of double vision, even though I had none of these migraine-type symptoms when the meningioma stole the vision from my other eye. Darwin remains convinced that lightning never strikes twice in the same place, and claims that even the headaches I’ve been having have nothing to do with a tumour growing in the optic nerve sheath of this eye that can still see.
Chi gong Chinese herbs
massage diet
homeopathy meditation
other people’s prayers past life regression
psychotherapy reflexology
Reiki Tai chi
vitamins vibrational acupressure
visualization Yoga
I’ve tried it all. I’m not passive, waiting to go blind, sunbathing while I await the tsunami that will wash away my sight. I’m not some Fox News addict who has only fear and prejudice to protect her from potential terrorist attacks. No, this list is what I’ve done, besides the usual medical interventions and pharmaceutical anointments, to keep my remaining eye functioning as long as possible.
About the only thing I haven’t tried is acupuncture. Something about the puncture part unnerves me too much to let anyone, no matter how skilled and well meaning, poke needles into me. I say that now, but my opinion might change, if acupuncture really would help preserve my vision longer. I need to do more research on that.
Lists. I find them comforting. I’ve started a list of what I’ll need help with when I can no longer see. My hunch is that climbing Mount Kilamanjaro is not going to remain a priority for this lifetime. Especially given Darwin’s bad knee. Some days life feels like a series of disappointments strung together like dying plumeria on a lei. Once alive and vibrant, now faded and losing zest. When I feel melancholy like this, I find making lists helps.
This morning, while I was thinking about what to put on the list, I balanced all the checkbooks—mine, Darwin’s, the farm, our joint account. Darwin’s a wonderful man in so many ways, but working with figures, or even pencil and paper, has never been his strong point. Hand him a broken toaster and he’ll have it working again in time for breakfast. And even though he rents out most of our land since we retired, he spends a lot of time fixing the neighbors’ farm machinery. Still he looks at a calculator like it’s part of a species from another time.
So, on to my list of things we’ll need help with, I mean, besides the cooking/insect patrol. Once I’ve written it, I’ll figure out who to call on. It’s a good thing I worked all those years in the office at the high school. I soon got to know every student and eventually their kids too. So I’ll have a pretty wide labor pool to trawl when the time comes.
So far this is what I’ve come up with, in no particular order of importance:
balance checkbooks and do banking
clean the house
wash windows
file income tax
I was going to add “make travel arrangements” but I may not be able to convince Darwin to travel any more. Even now, when I can still see, he comes along reluctantly, more to keep an eye on me than from his own sense of adventure. But maybe I’m not being fair. Once we arrive at our destination he’s generally pretty happy to go exploring with me.
I seem to be stymied at a list of four. Are these the only things I do that can’t be replicated by my husband? I suppose he can even clean the house and windows, since I won’t be able to see whether or not they’re up to my preferred standards. So that just leaves the financial stuff, banking and taxes. What have I contributed all these years? Anything indispensable? Anything that can’t be hired out?
Perhaps I’m not ready to do that tally yet.
Day 2
Before I lost the vision in my first eye, when I thought both eyes might go blind at the same time, a book had just come out that I wanted to read, by Alice Munro. I forget the title just now. It had to do with a list, a long list that included friendship, hate, courtship, love, marriage. I was impatient to devour it, like a last supper of good writing before I was forced to rely upon tapes recorded by volunteers for the Blind Library.
You’d think that impatience to read everything would be heightened now, but surprisingly that’s not the case. Eventually most of the good new books will come out on commercial audio. I can wait, more or less patiently. I’ve lost that sense of urgency I had when I was younger and panicked at the thought of not being able to read. Now I have a better idea of what that is like. I’ve even explored my options to learn Braille. It might be an interesting project to take on when I can’t do most of whatever it is I spend my time doing now.
I fold bright yellow origami doves while a sink full of dinner dishes waits. I’ve filled it with water and I can sense the soap bubbles popping in the stillness of this summer evening. I make sure each angle of folded paper is crisp and sharp.
I’ve heard your other senses heighten, especially hearing, when you lose your sight. I think about that while I make table decorations for Amber’s and Don’s thirtieth wedding anniversary. Darwin is going to be the MC and I offered to help Rainbow decorate. She’s making chocolate truffles for each guest and the doves will perch atop their little net bags. She thought the sweet and peaceful theme was appropriate for her parents’ celebration, especially since they were in their hippie phase when she was born.
Of course I know it wasn’t always peaceful between them, especially when Susan changed her name to Amber and joined the Church of Universal Light while Don still went every Sunday to the Presbyterian service.
The party favors are a surprise for Amber and Don. I taught myself how to fold origami from a large-print book I ordered through the library. No one had any idea Rainbow could make truffles. The last time she came home for the weekend she brought some samples for us to try. Darwin told her she could be a very successful chocolatier if she decided to drop out of art school.
I suppose there’s a lot people don’t know about each other, even if they’ve been married for thirty years. In fact, I heard something the other day that I would never tell Darwin. It wasn’t even about anyone I know personally, but it’s been on my mind ever since. It’s one of those things Darwin would find unpleasant, so I’m keeping it to myself, fascinating though it is.
It was about the Halifax explosion of 1917, when two ships collided in the harbor and caught fire. When the TNT-loaded ship exploded, every window in the town shattered. Immediately, thirty-seven Halifax residents were blinded by the window glass. Imagine—one minute you’re standing at your living room window watching the biggest bonfire ever, and the next you can’t even see the reflection of the flames flicker against your retinas. Somehow, I find thirty-seven people suddenly losing their sight more astonishing than the several hundred who were killed outright. Then there were the two hundred and fifty more that had to have eyes removed, from being pierced by flying glass shards or other debris I suppose. Can you imagine the poor doctor who had to take on that job? And what would a town do with so many disabled people? What would they have in common, I mean besides the curiosity that drew them to their windows when they heard the crash and explosion? How did they satisfy their curiosity after they couldn’t see? Did some view their blindness as divine retribution for nosiness? Did others develop phobias about windows? It makes me wonder, sometimes, how differently Darwin and I might see each other if we both went blind at the same time.
I hear him in the kitchen washing the dishes. I don’t have any answers to these questions, so I go dry the plates.
Sometimes when I wake in the night and can’t get back to sleep – because I’ve had a strange dream, or Darwin’s snoring too loudly, or I’m thinking too much about blindness – I come downstairs and make a cup of peppermint tea. If there’s a moon I sit by the living room window and watch the light play over the lawn and flower beds. Tamale usually sits on my lap for a while, until she answers the siren call of night-time prowling. Sometimes I yearn to have a cat’s night vision too, to see the world from her perspective for a time.
Even when it’s raining I open the window to let in the cool humid smell. Tonight it’s clear. I listen to the wind brush through the palm trees; it seems to whisper those secret fears that only emerge in the middle of the night when most of the world is asleep.
I especially like the stillness after 3:00 a.m. I like knowing that only hospital workers, police, new moms and insomniacs are awake. I tell myself even the teenage partiers have turned in, and what’s left of the night belongs to those of us who embrace the darkness and allow it to surround us, a private space that sleepers and dreamers don’t know.
Tonight I stand at the window and watch the neighbor’s dogs run across the yard in the light of the nearly-full moon, I wonder how my experience of night will change when I live in darkness all the time. Perhaps my sleep will be less disrupted. Or I may not need to sleep as much. If I don’t have light to tell me when it’s daytime, will my circadian rhythms adjust to a different schedule? Will I become like those fish Darwin and I saw in Kentucky’s Mammoth Caves that evolved to need neither pigment nor eyes?
The wind is picking up. I hear what sounds like the crackle of firecrackers in the distance. Might be a storm moving in.
Day 3
This morning I wake at first light, a pale blue-grey that could foretell a hot cloudless day or storm later on. I take my eye shade and close the bedroom door on Darwin’s even breathing.
Sometimes I think I’m absurd to practice being blind. I tell myself I should store every sighted memory and texture close to the surface for easy retrieval once I have only memory to rely upon. But other times it feels good to practice, so it won’t be such a shock when it’s permanent.
I told Amber about this practice once, and she told me I was like a woman who got a preventive mastectomy, just in case she might get breast cancer some day. I told her it wasn’t the same at all, since I already lost vision in one eye, and it was likely the other eye would follow. Sometimes Amber is a lot like Darwin. They share that “lightning never strikes twice in the same place” theory.
I count the steps from the house to the chicken coop, sixty-seven, and feel the heavy dew soak into my garden shoes. After I let the hens out I move my hand from nest to nest and feel for each egg. I am tempted to pull off the mask long enough to make sure there isn’t one broody hen still on her nest who will peck me when I reach for her egg. But I resist. What’s the point of doing something if you’re not going to do it right, do it all the way?
I leave the pail of eggs hanging on the nail by the door for Darwin to bring in later. I’m not willing to jeopardize the few dollars they’ll bring at the Saturday market by tripping over something unexpected on the way back to the house and smashing them all.
Next I walk down the lane to get the paper. I’m still wearing my eye shade, so I can learn each dip in the road, practice for when I can’t see at all. I chuckle to myself when I think that if any of the neighbours are up early and see me, at least I won’t see them.
The sun is starting to warm the air. After their initial cacophony of dream sharing, the mynahs are now silent while they go about their food-gathering chores.
I find the morning newspaper in the post box. I’ll miss the paper. I really will, even though the news is never good and the ads aren’t usually worth skimming. Listening to the radio or TV isn’t the same as smelling the freshly-inked newsprint and scanning the headlines while I walk back up the lane to my morning tea. Of course, when I’m wearing the eye shade, I can only guess at what the headlines might be.
When I get back to the house, I hear Darwin filling Tamale’s dish with dry cat food. The kettle starts to whistle on the stove. I shove the eye shade into my pants pocket before I open the door. Once, when Darwin caught me wearing it during the day, he told me I was morbid. It’s easier to keep the peace than try and convince him of something he doesn’t want to know. He’ll find out soon enough.
The truth is I wish my eyes were a large skin that absorbed every other sense and played back a symphony. I am greedy for visual sensation. I memorize images—the way the afternoon light slants across the oak rocking chair on the lanai, the almost-human guilty expression on Tamale’s face when I catch her chasing a baby bird across the yard. I want to train my memory to become a photographer, a painter, even a sculptor of this ever-changing beauty that surrounds me.
When I come in Darwin is pouring boiling water over tea leaves. “You were up early,” he says.
I put the paper on the kitchen table. “I’m going into town today,” I tell him, “to pick up paint for the fence. Do you need anything?”
“I might come along.”
“It’s only Wednesday,” I remind him. He never goes into town before Thursday, when he can be sure the container has come and the Co-op shelves will be mostly full.
“Uh huh.” He pours tea into two mugs and hands me mine. “A bit of a change never hurt anyone,” he says. “No need to get in a rut just because you’re retired.”
I carry my tea to the table and open the paper. “Hardware store’s having a sale,” I say. “Maybe we can stock up on paint brushes and rollers.”
I want to paint the fence while I can still see, make sure it looks good, as if a normal family lives here. I don’t want anyone to think we can’t take care of ourselves, keep up a nice house and yard. I guess I could add that to my list:
notice when things need fixing
Sometimes Darwin doesn’t seem to see, or maybe he still sees things the way they used to be, not the way they are now.
I let him drive into town. I practice riding with my eyes closed, to figure out where we are by the sounds we pass and the turns the car makes. I do pretty well, only get confused once when I think we’re passing the Somervilles’ because I hear the rooster, and it’s really the wind blowing the crowing all the way from the Perry’s. An honest mistake. Could even be made by a sighted person who wasn’t paying attention to how long it takes to get from one place to another.
Darwin likely thinks I’m napping because of my early start to the day. I’m just as happy not to talk. After more than thirty years there’s not a lot to say that hasn’t been said a hundred times already.
In truth, we do have some secrets. Maybe all married couples do. Or maybe they just pretend not to know what the other person is hiding. For example, I know Darwin buys sailing magazines and stores them in his workbench. I don’t know why he doesn’t just bring them inside and leave them in the magazine rack or on the coffee table with the other books and magazines. But, for whatever reason, he keeps them in his workshop and prefers to read them on the sly. No skin off my teeth, as the old saying goes, and there are sure a lot worse ways he could be spending his time and money.
My latest secret isn’t so benign. I think I may have started seeing double. Only for a second or two, not even long enough to be sure if it’s really happening, or is just a trick of my sighted eye to make up for the loss of vision in the other. It’s been happening more frequently lately, so it’s becoming harder to pretend, harder to ignore.
I try to keep quiet about it. I know my list of remedies won’t make any difference. And I’m not prepared to let anyone shoot radiation into my head, much less let them poke my eye with needles and scalpels.
I haven’t said anything to Darwin. I don’t want to upset him. I know he’d feel helpless to do anything, then he’d get angry and dig up half an acre of pasture to plant taro. Or buy a red riding mower from Sears, which we don’t need and can’t afford. I know he’d do something foolish, something to make him feel as if he was doing something practical, something useful, something he could control.
Maybe I haven’t said anything to him because then I would have to take some action. And for whatever reason I don’t seem to be ready to do that yet.
blind alley or corner
blind hatred or stupor
window blind
blind date
blind spot
to blind—darken, deprive of sight, good sense, reason or judgment
Blind can be a noun, a verb, an adjective, an adverb. A versatile set of letters strung together that leads only to darkness.
The blind—those wretched people who wear mismatched socks and wrongly-buttoned shirts with dried egg yolk on the front, who shuffle down the street, being pulled by a dog or tapping a white cane, eyes half-closed or squinting or covered with out-of-style dark glasses. If they’re really pathetic they sell pencils on street corners—is there any irony there? Is it like crippled people selling shoes? or deaf people harmonicas? I do not want to be one of those pitiable blind people.
I’m thinking this while Darwin and I eat lunch at the Co-op cafeteria. He asks me what I’m frowning about. I tell him there’s too much mustard on my sandwich.
Later this afternoon when I go into the bedroom to change into my painting clothes I find a looking glass next to our wedding photo on the dresser. I can’t really call it a hand mirror, although technically I suppose that’s what it is. Heavy silver filigree twisted around a plate glass oval. I pick it up and see my perplexed frown reflected.
I find Darwin in the garage, changing oil in the car. “Where did this come from?”
He pokes his head from under the hood and smiles. “I found it in the antique store while you were getting the paint mixed,” he says. “I thought you’d like it.”
“I do, very much.” A lump suddenly threatens to stop my words. I clear my throat. “In fact, I’m going to clean off some of this tarnish as soon as I find the silver cleaner.”
Day 4
It’s the waiting that’s hardest, the not knowing when. I heard about a study that found 98% of people would not choose to know the day they’ll die. That may be so, but if I had a specific blindness due-date, I’d know how much of this paint to slather on the boards each day to be finished in time. I’d know when to plant another row of lettuce to replace the one that will soon go to seed.
While I’m working on the origami doves this afternoon, the phone rings. It’s Amber and she’s hysterical.
“I can’t see! I think my retina’s detached! I was weeding the bamboo and suddenly I couldn’t see anything out of my right eye!”
“I’ll be right over,” I tell her. “Don’t poke at your eye.”
All the way to the optometrist’s office Amber chants, “I know just how you feel. I know just how you feel.” I can tell she’s really upset because she doesn’t even argue when I tell her I’m taking her to see my eye doctor. Normally she would insist on trying some kind of Universal Light ritual, or at the very least go to see her homeopathic doctor.
When I park the car I think I see the man from the post office standing across the street, but after I help Amber out of the passenger’s side, I look again. The sidewalk is empty. I guide her up the stairs to the office, since, as she points out, “with only one functioning eye, I have no depth perception.”
I have perfectly adequate depth perception even with mono-vision, but she’s in no mood to hear my opinion on the relationship between vision and memory. I keep my mouth shut and open the door when we get to the top of the stairs. I want to say something about the blind leading the blind, but when Amber’s afraid she loses her sense of humor.
They rush her in right away, more, I speculate, to keep her hysteria from upsetting the other patients in the waiting room than from any real emergency. It turns out she’s scratched the cornea.
“Your vision might be blurry for a day or two,” I overhear Dr. Frederickson tell her. “Use these eye drops four times a day, and call me in a week if your vision’s not totally back to normal.”
“Of course I’m glad it wasn’t anything serious,” I assure Amber over a cinnamon bun and cup of decaf at the coffee shop, “especially since your party is tomorrow. I’m just not as exuberant as you are.” To be honest, Amber’s intuition is correct: a small part of me wonders why she gets the use of two full eyes (even though one is blurry at the moment), while I’m waiting to lose all my vision. But I do love Amber, and the larger part of me is relieved and happy for her.
“You’ll need both your eyes when I can’t see at all,” I remind her, “so you can check my food for unwholesome elements when we go out for lunch.”
She laughs a bit, a good sign, and we move on to discuss the final plans for the party.
Day 5
Sometimes when I wake up in the night and can’t get back to sleep I make a list of everything I’m grateful for. I start with the usual—Darwin, of course, and Tamale, and this island where we’ve lived all these years. Then I add more immediate items, like Amber’s and Don’s anniversary party, and getting to see Rainbow again.
But today when I wake in the early morning hours I feel overwhelmed by a physical rush of thankfulness, like a warm and gentle wave washing over me. After a couple of minutes I’m able to pin it down to this: I am so glad I’m not an artist.
I know Beethoven went deaf and handled that with equanimity, but I think if I were an artist about to lose my primary sense I’d be more Van Gogh-like, more tormented. I don’t know if I could deal with knowing I would never again be able to find the perfect palette to duplicate on canvas the exact slant of sunlight against the pasture in early morning. I think the pain of losing the ability to express my creativity would be too much—so I am very happy not to be an artist. There will be less to grieve, since as the old saying goes, you can’t miss what you never had.
I finally fall back asleep. As the sun rises I wake from one of those pre-dawn dreams that are so vivid it takes a moment to realize it isn’t real. In the dream the man from the post office is standing outside the hardware store, handing out leaflets with the words “Fear of Terror” sprawled across the front in large black upper-case. When I walk by I try to ignore him but he grabs my arm and shoves a leaflet into my hand. This time when I look at it, the letters of the words all run together like drops of blood. They drip off the page. When they hit my shoes they turn into cockroaches and scuttle away.
I shudder. I have an impulse to wake Darwin and ask him to explain the dream and make my heart stop pounding. But when I turn toward him, there are two of him beside me in the bed. In spite of, or maybe because of, my distorted vision, I realize there is another side to my husband that I seldom recognize. Or maybe I don’t take time to pay attention, prefer to rely on my assumptions built over three decades of marriage. For a moment I can see the Darwin who notices things and responds in his quiet way to what he sees, like buying me the hand mirror. I watch his double image breathe evenly, his mouths partly open.
Darwin hasn’t signed up for a blind wife. Is that why I’m protecting him from the truth? Am I afraid he will sail off somewhere without me?
Or am I afraid to find out whether he’s willing to help me through this, capable, as the motivational speakers say, of ‘rising to the challenge.” Will he be willing to take over some of my lists? I try to remember: has he ever asked to be moved when we were travelling and he was seated in an exit row on the plane?
I decide to go downstairs and think about it while I finish the doves. I hope the double vision will go away if I don’t pay it too much attention.
Even though I stand up slowly, I’m overcome with dizziness and stagger against the dresser, knocking my looking glass off. I hear a sharp crack when it lands on the floor. I feel really sad about that. They don’t make plate glass mirrors any more so I’ll have to find a modern replacement. I leave it where it fell. I don’t want to see multiple fragments of myself if I look in it. Or try to clean it up when I’m so dizzy and nauseous.
It takes a long time to walk downstairs. The landscape of the house I’ve lived in for nearly thirty years has changed. I can’t tell what’s real and what’s only an echo of reality.
It takes a long time, with lots of resting in between, but eventually I make an ice compress and find the sofa to lie on. Tamale rouses herself long enough to see what I’m up to. When she realizes an early breakfast isn’t on my list she curls into a golden ball and falls back to sleep.
I must have dozed off too because when I hear Darwin coming downstairs I can see normally again and the compress is only a sodden facecloth. I’ll finish making the doves while Darwin cooks the oatmeal. After breakfast I’ll make a list—this one related to my eyes—to tackle as soon as the party is over.
Or maybe not. Maybe I’ll start now. As soon as her office opens, I’ll make an appointment to see my ophthalmologist. While we’re eating our oatmeal I’ll talk to Darwin, really talk. I’ll tell him I can finally see that no matter what I decide to do about my vision, and whether or not he wants to help me, it’s all OK. I remember the pre-dawn dream that woke me up, the hysterical man from the post office, his leaflets, the cockroaches. I may or may not go completely blind, today, next year, ten years from now. And really, whatever happens, it’s OK.
I have a sudden thought I almost dismiss as banal. Then I reconsider. Maybe banal thoughts camouflage the real truth. Maybe the truth is that we are all—me, Darwin, Amber, and yes, even the man in the post office—maybe we’re all doing the best we can. And that’s good enough.
Darwin pours me a cup of tea and I make my way to the table.
“We’ll have to hire a cook when I’m blind,” I blurt, against my better judgement.
Darwin looks up from his oatmeal. “You’re not going blind,” he says.
“The thing is ”—I can’t stop myself now—" when I can’t see I won’t be able to tell if any insects get in the food.”
Darwin maneuvers a raisin from his oatmeal with the edge of his spoon and chews while he stares at me. “What you don’t know can’t hurt you,” he says.
“Can you imagine anything worse than crunching a cockroach in your salad?”
He carries his bowl to the sink and rinses it. “Ellen,” he says, “You’re not going blind.”
Darwin doesn’t want to talk about my impending loss of sight. He would prefer to ignore things that scare him. A few years ago he quit watching the news and claims he sleeps better now. He has a point, I think, but then so does the man I saw in the post office the other day pontificating on terrorism to the clerk. She was trying to sell him his stamps as quickly as possible. He told her in a voice that echoed off the walls, “If you’re not afraid it means you don’t really care.”
That’s the whole dilemma isn’t it? Ostrich-ism vs. fear. Both immobilizing. Both claiming to be right. And do either of them really care about what they’re denying or afraid of? Or are they just two bad choices to keep us stuck in misery?
I wonder: is that my fear about Darwin? If he’s not worried about me going blind, does that mean he doesn’t care about me? Or does he just not care whether or not I’m blind?
After I clean up the breakfast dishes I stand in front of the bathroom mirror and stare at my eyes. Eyes looking at eyes looking at eyes looking. I could make myself crazy watching for clues, for changes, for small indications that my vision is about to disappear completely. I know better. From experience I know there might be even less warning than a brilliant yellow headache.
Still, I find myself in front of the mirror several times a day, searching for signs that my eyelid is more droopy than usual, or that my eyeball has started to bulge. I’m also on high alert for signs of double vision, even though I had none of these migraine-type symptoms when the meningioma stole the vision from my other eye. Darwin remains convinced that lightning never strikes twice in the same place, and claims that even the headaches I’ve been having have nothing to do with a tumour growing in the optic nerve sheath of this eye that can still see.
Chi gong Chinese herbs
massage diet
homeopathy meditation
other people’s prayers past life regression
psychotherapy reflexology
Reiki Tai chi
vitamins vibrational acupressure
visualization Yoga
I’ve tried it all. I’m not passive, waiting to go blind, sunbathing while I await the tsunami that will wash away my sight. I’m not some Fox News addict who has only fear and prejudice to protect her from potential terrorist attacks. No, this list is what I’ve done, besides the usual medical interventions and pharmaceutical anointments, to keep my remaining eye functioning as long as possible.
About the only thing I haven’t tried is acupuncture. Something about the puncture part unnerves me too much to let anyone, no matter how skilled and well meaning, poke needles into me. I say that now, but my opinion might change, if acupuncture really would help preserve my vision longer. I need to do more research on that.
Lists. I find them comforting. I’ve started a list of what I’ll need help with when I can no longer see. My hunch is that climbing Mount Kilamanjaro is not going to remain a priority for this lifetime. Especially given Darwin’s bad knee. Some days life feels like a series of disappointments strung together like dying plumeria on a lei. Once alive and vibrant, now faded and losing zest. When I feel melancholy like this, I find making lists helps.
This morning, while I was thinking about what to put on the list, I balanced all the checkbooks—mine, Darwin’s, the farm, our joint account. Darwin’s a wonderful man in so many ways, but working with figures, or even pencil and paper, has never been his strong point. Hand him a broken toaster and he’ll have it working again in time for breakfast. And even though he rents out most of our land since we retired, he spends a lot of time fixing the neighbors’ farm machinery. Still he looks at a calculator like it’s part of a species from another time.
So, on to my list of things we’ll need help with, I mean, besides the cooking/insect patrol. Once I’ve written it, I’ll figure out who to call on. It’s a good thing I worked all those years in the office at the high school. I soon got to know every student and eventually their kids too. So I’ll have a pretty wide labor pool to trawl when the time comes.
So far this is what I’ve come up with, in no particular order of importance:
balance checkbooks and do banking
clean the house
wash windows
file income tax
I was going to add “make travel arrangements” but I may not be able to convince Darwin to travel any more. Even now, when I can still see, he comes along reluctantly, more to keep an eye on me than from his own sense of adventure. But maybe I’m not being fair. Once we arrive at our destination he’s generally pretty happy to go exploring with me.
I seem to be stymied at a list of four. Are these the only things I do that can’t be replicated by my husband? I suppose he can even clean the house and windows, since I won’t be able to see whether or not they’re up to my preferred standards. So that just leaves the financial stuff, banking and taxes. What have I contributed all these years? Anything indispensable? Anything that can’t be hired out?
Perhaps I’m not ready to do that tally yet.
Day 2
Before I lost the vision in my first eye, when I thought both eyes might go blind at the same time, a book had just come out that I wanted to read, by Alice Munro. I forget the title just now. It had to do with a list, a long list that included friendship, hate, courtship, love, marriage. I was impatient to devour it, like a last supper of good writing before I was forced to rely upon tapes recorded by volunteers for the Blind Library.
You’d think that impatience to read everything would be heightened now, but surprisingly that’s not the case. Eventually most of the good new books will come out on commercial audio. I can wait, more or less patiently. I’ve lost that sense of urgency I had when I was younger and panicked at the thought of not being able to read. Now I have a better idea of what that is like. I’ve even explored my options to learn Braille. It might be an interesting project to take on when I can’t do most of whatever it is I spend my time doing now.
I fold bright yellow origami doves while a sink full of dinner dishes waits. I’ve filled it with water and I can sense the soap bubbles popping in the stillness of this summer evening. I make sure each angle of folded paper is crisp and sharp.
I’ve heard your other senses heighten, especially hearing, when you lose your sight. I think about that while I make table decorations for Amber’s and Don’s thirtieth wedding anniversary. Darwin is going to be the MC and I offered to help Rainbow decorate. She’s making chocolate truffles for each guest and the doves will perch atop their little net bags. She thought the sweet and peaceful theme was appropriate for her parents’ celebration, especially since they were in their hippie phase when she was born.
Of course I know it wasn’t always peaceful between them, especially when Susan changed her name to Amber and joined the Church of Universal Light while Don still went every Sunday to the Presbyterian service.
The party favors are a surprise for Amber and Don. I taught myself how to fold origami from a large-print book I ordered through the library. No one had any idea Rainbow could make truffles. The last time she came home for the weekend she brought some samples for us to try. Darwin told her she could be a very successful chocolatier if she decided to drop out of art school.
I suppose there’s a lot people don’t know about each other, even if they’ve been married for thirty years. In fact, I heard something the other day that I would never tell Darwin. It wasn’t even about anyone I know personally, but it’s been on my mind ever since. It’s one of those things Darwin would find unpleasant, so I’m keeping it to myself, fascinating though it is.
It was about the Halifax explosion of 1917, when two ships collided in the harbor and caught fire. When the TNT-loaded ship exploded, every window in the town shattered. Immediately, thirty-seven Halifax residents were blinded by the window glass. Imagine—one minute you’re standing at your living room window watching the biggest bonfire ever, and the next you can’t even see the reflection of the flames flicker against your retinas. Somehow, I find thirty-seven people suddenly losing their sight more astonishing than the several hundred who were killed outright. Then there were the two hundred and fifty more that had to have eyes removed, from being pierced by flying glass shards or other debris I suppose. Can you imagine the poor doctor who had to take on that job? And what would a town do with so many disabled people? What would they have in common, I mean besides the curiosity that drew them to their windows when they heard the crash and explosion? How did they satisfy their curiosity after they couldn’t see? Did some view their blindness as divine retribution for nosiness? Did others develop phobias about windows? It makes me wonder, sometimes, how differently Darwin and I might see each other if we both went blind at the same time.
I hear him in the kitchen washing the dishes. I don’t have any answers to these questions, so I go dry the plates.
Sometimes when I wake in the night and can’t get back to sleep – because I’ve had a strange dream, or Darwin’s snoring too loudly, or I’m thinking too much about blindness – I come downstairs and make a cup of peppermint tea. If there’s a moon I sit by the living room window and watch the light play over the lawn and flower beds. Tamale usually sits on my lap for a while, until she answers the siren call of night-time prowling. Sometimes I yearn to have a cat’s night vision too, to see the world from her perspective for a time.
Even when it’s raining I open the window to let in the cool humid smell. Tonight it’s clear. I listen to the wind brush through the palm trees; it seems to whisper those secret fears that only emerge in the middle of the night when most of the world is asleep.
I especially like the stillness after 3:00 a.m. I like knowing that only hospital workers, police, new moms and insomniacs are awake. I tell myself even the teenage partiers have turned in, and what’s left of the night belongs to those of us who embrace the darkness and allow it to surround us, a private space that sleepers and dreamers don’t know.
Tonight I stand at the window and watch the neighbor’s dogs run across the yard in the light of the nearly-full moon, I wonder how my experience of night will change when I live in darkness all the time. Perhaps my sleep will be less disrupted. Or I may not need to sleep as much. If I don’t have light to tell me when it’s daytime, will my circadian rhythms adjust to a different schedule? Will I become like those fish Darwin and I saw in Kentucky’s Mammoth Caves that evolved to need neither pigment nor eyes?
The wind is picking up. I hear what sounds like the crackle of firecrackers in the distance. Might be a storm moving in.
Day 3
This morning I wake at first light, a pale blue-grey that could foretell a hot cloudless day or storm later on. I take my eye shade and close the bedroom door on Darwin’s even breathing.
Sometimes I think I’m absurd to practice being blind. I tell myself I should store every sighted memory and texture close to the surface for easy retrieval once I have only memory to rely upon. But other times it feels good to practice, so it won’t be such a shock when it’s permanent.
I told Amber about this practice once, and she told me I was like a woman who got a preventive mastectomy, just in case she might get breast cancer some day. I told her it wasn’t the same at all, since I already lost vision in one eye, and it was likely the other eye would follow. Sometimes Amber is a lot like Darwin. They share that “lightning never strikes twice in the same place” theory.
I count the steps from the house to the chicken coop, sixty-seven, and feel the heavy dew soak into my garden shoes. After I let the hens out I move my hand from nest to nest and feel for each egg. I am tempted to pull off the mask long enough to make sure there isn’t one broody hen still on her nest who will peck me when I reach for her egg. But I resist. What’s the point of doing something if you’re not going to do it right, do it all the way?
I leave the pail of eggs hanging on the nail by the door for Darwin to bring in later. I’m not willing to jeopardize the few dollars they’ll bring at the Saturday market by tripping over something unexpected on the way back to the house and smashing them all.
Next I walk down the lane to get the paper. I’m still wearing my eye shade, so I can learn each dip in the road, practice for when I can’t see at all. I chuckle to myself when I think that if any of the neighbours are up early and see me, at least I won’t see them.
The sun is starting to warm the air. After their initial cacophony of dream sharing, the mynahs are now silent while they go about their food-gathering chores.
I find the morning newspaper in the post box. I’ll miss the paper. I really will, even though the news is never good and the ads aren’t usually worth skimming. Listening to the radio or TV isn’t the same as smelling the freshly-inked newsprint and scanning the headlines while I walk back up the lane to my morning tea. Of course, when I’m wearing the eye shade, I can only guess at what the headlines might be.
When I get back to the house, I hear Darwin filling Tamale’s dish with dry cat food. The kettle starts to whistle on the stove. I shove the eye shade into my pants pocket before I open the door. Once, when Darwin caught me wearing it during the day, he told me I was morbid. It’s easier to keep the peace than try and convince him of something he doesn’t want to know. He’ll find out soon enough.
The truth is I wish my eyes were a large skin that absorbed every other sense and played back a symphony. I am greedy for visual sensation. I memorize images—the way the afternoon light slants across the oak rocking chair on the lanai, the almost-human guilty expression on Tamale’s face when I catch her chasing a baby bird across the yard. I want to train my memory to become a photographer, a painter, even a sculptor of this ever-changing beauty that surrounds me.
When I come in Darwin is pouring boiling water over tea leaves. “You were up early,” he says.
I put the paper on the kitchen table. “I’m going into town today,” I tell him, “to pick up paint for the fence. Do you need anything?”
“I might come along.”
“It’s only Wednesday,” I remind him. He never goes into town before Thursday, when he can be sure the container has come and the Co-op shelves will be mostly full.
“Uh huh.” He pours tea into two mugs and hands me mine. “A bit of a change never hurt anyone,” he says. “No need to get in a rut just because you’re retired.”
I carry my tea to the table and open the paper. “Hardware store’s having a sale,” I say. “Maybe we can stock up on paint brushes and rollers.”
I want to paint the fence while I can still see, make sure it looks good, as if a normal family lives here. I don’t want anyone to think we can’t take care of ourselves, keep up a nice house and yard. I guess I could add that to my list:
notice when things need fixing
Sometimes Darwin doesn’t seem to see, or maybe he still sees things the way they used to be, not the way they are now.
I let him drive into town. I practice riding with my eyes closed, to figure out where we are by the sounds we pass and the turns the car makes. I do pretty well, only get confused once when I think we’re passing the Somervilles’ because I hear the rooster, and it’s really the wind blowing the crowing all the way from the Perry’s. An honest mistake. Could even be made by a sighted person who wasn’t paying attention to how long it takes to get from one place to another.
Darwin likely thinks I’m napping because of my early start to the day. I’m just as happy not to talk. After more than thirty years there’s not a lot to say that hasn’t been said a hundred times already.
In truth, we do have some secrets. Maybe all married couples do. Or maybe they just pretend not to know what the other person is hiding. For example, I know Darwin buys sailing magazines and stores them in his workbench. I don’t know why he doesn’t just bring them inside and leave them in the magazine rack or on the coffee table with the other books and magazines. But, for whatever reason, he keeps them in his workshop and prefers to read them on the sly. No skin off my teeth, as the old saying goes, and there are sure a lot worse ways he could be spending his time and money.
My latest secret isn’t so benign. I think I may have started seeing double. Only for a second or two, not even long enough to be sure if it’s really happening, or is just a trick of my sighted eye to make up for the loss of vision in the other. It’s been happening more frequently lately, so it’s becoming harder to pretend, harder to ignore.
I try to keep quiet about it. I know my list of remedies won’t make any difference. And I’m not prepared to let anyone shoot radiation into my head, much less let them poke my eye with needles and scalpels.
I haven’t said anything to Darwin. I don’t want to upset him. I know he’d feel helpless to do anything, then he’d get angry and dig up half an acre of pasture to plant taro. Or buy a red riding mower from Sears, which we don’t need and can’t afford. I know he’d do something foolish, something to make him feel as if he was doing something practical, something useful, something he could control.
Maybe I haven’t said anything to him because then I would have to take some action. And for whatever reason I don’t seem to be ready to do that yet.
blind alley or corner
blind hatred or stupor
window blind
blind date
blind spot
to blind—darken, deprive of sight, good sense, reason or judgment
Blind can be a noun, a verb, an adjective, an adverb. A versatile set of letters strung together that leads only to darkness.
The blind—those wretched people who wear mismatched socks and wrongly-buttoned shirts with dried egg yolk on the front, who shuffle down the street, being pulled by a dog or tapping a white cane, eyes half-closed or squinting or covered with out-of-style dark glasses. If they’re really pathetic they sell pencils on street corners—is there any irony there? Is it like crippled people selling shoes? or deaf people harmonicas? I do not want to be one of those pitiable blind people.
I’m thinking this while Darwin and I eat lunch at the Co-op cafeteria. He asks me what I’m frowning about. I tell him there’s too much mustard on my sandwich.
Later this afternoon when I go into the bedroom to change into my painting clothes I find a looking glass next to our wedding photo on the dresser. I can’t really call it a hand mirror, although technically I suppose that’s what it is. Heavy silver filigree twisted around a plate glass oval. I pick it up and see my perplexed frown reflected.
I find Darwin in the garage, changing oil in the car. “Where did this come from?”
He pokes his head from under the hood and smiles. “I found it in the antique store while you were getting the paint mixed,” he says. “I thought you’d like it.”
“I do, very much.” A lump suddenly threatens to stop my words. I clear my throat. “In fact, I’m going to clean off some of this tarnish as soon as I find the silver cleaner.”
Day 4
It’s the waiting that’s hardest, the not knowing when. I heard about a study that found 98% of people would not choose to know the day they’ll die. That may be so, but if I had a specific blindness due-date, I’d know how much of this paint to slather on the boards each day to be finished in time. I’d know when to plant another row of lettuce to replace the one that will soon go to seed.
While I’m working on the origami doves this afternoon, the phone rings. It’s Amber and she’s hysterical.
“I can’t see! I think my retina’s detached! I was weeding the bamboo and suddenly I couldn’t see anything out of my right eye!”
“I’ll be right over,” I tell her. “Don’t poke at your eye.”
All the way to the optometrist’s office Amber chants, “I know just how you feel. I know just how you feel.” I can tell she’s really upset because she doesn’t even argue when I tell her I’m taking her to see my eye doctor. Normally she would insist on trying some kind of Universal Light ritual, or at the very least go to see her homeopathic doctor.
When I park the car I think I see the man from the post office standing across the street, but after I help Amber out of the passenger’s side, I look again. The sidewalk is empty. I guide her up the stairs to the office, since, as she points out, “with only one functioning eye, I have no depth perception.”
I have perfectly adequate depth perception even with mono-vision, but she’s in no mood to hear my opinion on the relationship between vision and memory. I keep my mouth shut and open the door when we get to the top of the stairs. I want to say something about the blind leading the blind, but when Amber’s afraid she loses her sense of humor.
They rush her in right away, more, I speculate, to keep her hysteria from upsetting the other patients in the waiting room than from any real emergency. It turns out she’s scratched the cornea.
“Your vision might be blurry for a day or two,” I overhear Dr. Frederickson tell her. “Use these eye drops four times a day, and call me in a week if your vision’s not totally back to normal.”
“Of course I’m glad it wasn’t anything serious,” I assure Amber over a cinnamon bun and cup of decaf at the coffee shop, “especially since your party is tomorrow. I’m just not as exuberant as you are.” To be honest, Amber’s intuition is correct: a small part of me wonders why she gets the use of two full eyes (even though one is blurry at the moment), while I’m waiting to lose all my vision. But I do love Amber, and the larger part of me is relieved and happy for her.
“You’ll need both your eyes when I can’t see at all,” I remind her, “so you can check my food for unwholesome elements when we go out for lunch.”
She laughs a bit, a good sign, and we move on to discuss the final plans for the party.
Day 5
Sometimes when I wake up in the night and can’t get back to sleep I make a list of everything I’m grateful for. I start with the usual—Darwin, of course, and Tamale, and this island where we’ve lived all these years. Then I add more immediate items, like Amber’s and Don’s anniversary party, and getting to see Rainbow again.
But today when I wake in the early morning hours I feel overwhelmed by a physical rush of thankfulness, like a warm and gentle wave washing over me. After a couple of minutes I’m able to pin it down to this: I am so glad I’m not an artist.
I know Beethoven went deaf and handled that with equanimity, but I think if I were an artist about to lose my primary sense I’d be more Van Gogh-like, more tormented. I don’t know if I could deal with knowing I would never again be able to find the perfect palette to duplicate on canvas the exact slant of sunlight against the pasture in early morning. I think the pain of losing the ability to express my creativity would be too much—so I am very happy not to be an artist. There will be less to grieve, since as the old saying goes, you can’t miss what you never had.
I finally fall back asleep. As the sun rises I wake from one of those pre-dawn dreams that are so vivid it takes a moment to realize it isn’t real. In the dream the man from the post office is standing outside the hardware store, handing out leaflets with the words “Fear of Terror” sprawled across the front in large black upper-case. When I walk by I try to ignore him but he grabs my arm and shoves a leaflet into my hand. This time when I look at it, the letters of the words all run together like drops of blood. They drip off the page. When they hit my shoes they turn into cockroaches and scuttle away.
I shudder. I have an impulse to wake Darwin and ask him to explain the dream and make my heart stop pounding. But when I turn toward him, there are two of him beside me in the bed. In spite of, or maybe because of, my distorted vision, I realize there is another side to my husband that I seldom recognize. Or maybe I don’t take time to pay attention, prefer to rely on my assumptions built over three decades of marriage. For a moment I can see the Darwin who notices things and responds in his quiet way to what he sees, like buying me the hand mirror. I watch his double image breathe evenly, his mouths partly open.
Darwin hasn’t signed up for a blind wife. Is that why I’m protecting him from the truth? Am I afraid he will sail off somewhere without me?
Or am I afraid to find out whether he’s willing to help me through this, capable, as the motivational speakers say, of ‘rising to the challenge.” Will he be willing to take over some of my lists? I try to remember: has he ever asked to be moved when we were travelling and he was seated in an exit row on the plane?
I decide to go downstairs and think about it while I finish the doves. I hope the double vision will go away if I don’t pay it too much attention.
Even though I stand up slowly, I’m overcome with dizziness and stagger against the dresser, knocking my looking glass off. I hear a sharp crack when it lands on the floor. I feel really sad about that. They don’t make plate glass mirrors any more so I’ll have to find a modern replacement. I leave it where it fell. I don’t want to see multiple fragments of myself if I look in it. Or try to clean it up when I’m so dizzy and nauseous.
It takes a long time to walk downstairs. The landscape of the house I’ve lived in for nearly thirty years has changed. I can’t tell what’s real and what’s only an echo of reality.
It takes a long time, with lots of resting in between, but eventually I make an ice compress and find the sofa to lie on. Tamale rouses herself long enough to see what I’m up to. When she realizes an early breakfast isn’t on my list she curls into a golden ball and falls back to sleep.
I must have dozed off too because when I hear Darwin coming downstairs I can see normally again and the compress is only a sodden facecloth. I’ll finish making the doves while Darwin cooks the oatmeal. After breakfast I’ll make a list—this one related to my eyes—to tackle as soon as the party is over.
Or maybe not. Maybe I’ll start now. As soon as her office opens, I’ll make an appointment to see my ophthalmologist. While we’re eating our oatmeal I’ll talk to Darwin, really talk. I’ll tell him I can finally see that no matter what I decide to do about my vision, and whether or not he wants to help me, it’s all OK. I remember the pre-dawn dream that woke me up, the hysterical man from the post office, his leaflets, the cockroaches. I may or may not go completely blind, today, next year, ten years from now. And really, whatever happens, it’s OK.
I have a sudden thought I almost dismiss as banal. Then I reconsider. Maybe banal thoughts camouflage the real truth. Maybe the truth is that we are all—me, Darwin, Amber, and yes, even the man in the post office—maybe we’re all doing the best we can. And that’s good enough.
Darwin pours me a cup of tea and I make my way to the table.
