On Contemplating Blindness Part II: The Backstory
I don't remember when my grandmother's macular degeneration began. I do remember her as a seemingly normally sighted person.
I have memories of riding in the front seat of her tank of a Ford Fairlane car while she was driving -- I was five, maybe six, sitting in the middle where there was no seatbelt, and she cautioned me that if we were to crash or stop suddenly, I was to keep myself from flying out the front window by bracing my hand and arm against the dashboard.
She was a master seamstress -- I'm not quite sure when I got my first store bought dress -- I remember my other grandmother taking me to the Big N and buying me one when I was in first grade or so, probably feeling terribly sorry for me. But Grandma Whitman's sewing skills were second to none, and our dresses were top quality. We had dresses that were hand-smocked. Even in her day, no one did that by hand -- other than her. And her work was exquisite. On my first day of kindergarten, Big Sis and I wore matching sailor dresses made by Grandma. We loved those dresses.
She knitted nearly non-stop. She made gorgeous sweaters with intricate Scandinavian designs, and every year we each got a new pair of wool mittens -- knitted so tightly that they blocked any cold New England wind from blowing through to our little hands. And then there were her needlepoint projects and the colorful braided rugs she made for each of us plus one a year for the church bazaar. It was fun to look at the rugs and see our outgrown wool skirts and coats, after they had been handed down as much as possible.
I don't remember her doing a lot of cross stitch herself -- I think she enjoyed needlepoint was more -- but I spent many hours under her tutelage sitting on her couch with a blunt needle making small X's that formed curving and flower-shaped designs on a table runner.
Grandma played cards like a fiend. She patiently taught us Go Fish and Old Maid and worked us up to Spite and Malice, Cribbage, and eventually Canasta. She met the "girls" at church once a week for an afternoon of Canasta, and they especially looked forward to when it was her turn to bring dessert. Thinking of her living with a "card games are sinful" Baptist family while serving as the rural Appalachian hill town community's teacher makes me laugh, given her fondness for a good game, even if it was Solitaire.
Everything seemed normal, until it wasn't, and even then there wasn't a defining moment between her being sighted and not. I don't remember how I learned that she was going blind. She started needing to use the magnifying glass for her handiwork and reading, and I remember buying her playing cards with large numbers so she could see them. She voluntarily give up her driver's license -- but when was that? I remember her saying she couldn't see well enough to feel safe anymore. She signed the Fairlane over to my parents and we became a two-car family for the first time. Maybe I was ten?
I've asked my mother and she's vague about it. She thinks her mother was in her 70s. She said her first hint of trouble was struggling to pin clothespins to the clothesline -- she couldn't see the line clearly enough to get the pins on the line. Later in life she decided that her older brother -- 20 years her senior -- had probably also had macular degeneration, although it was never officially diagnosed, and he was gone before the disease struck her.
What I remember about her blindness was that she couldn't see in the center of her vision, but could see peripherally. I always thought she saw a round black spot, but now I realize she just saw nothingness where she couldn't see. As she grew older, the area of blindness grew larger. We were told it was hardening of the arteries in her eyes, but I don't think that's the current prevailing wisdom.
Her handiwork deteriorated as she did more and more by feel. We just recently found the beginnings of a sweater she was working on just before she died. "Look at all the dropped stitches," my mother commented. I think it's a treasure. Blindness took her sight, but not her determination and desire to make beautiful things. Even legally blind, she continued to make a braided rug each year for the church bazaar. It was always the hottest item on the block.
Blindness, even though it started during my childhood, was -- in my child's eyes -- just part of who she was. Even though it hadn't been for the first 70 years of her life, and not how I knew her until I was at least eight or nine. It seemed like she took it in stride, although I know she was frustrated with difficulty reading. These were the days before audio books. I thought she should learn Braille, but now I realize I would have about zero motivation to do so myself, and I'm 15 years younger than she was then. When I wrote to her, I printed in very large letters with lots of space in between lines to make it easier for her to read.
On a Monday afternoon I was on my way home from my ophthalmologist's office four days after my symptoms first began, with an appointment to be seen by a retinal specialist in two weeks. Call your eye doctor's office and tell them you can't see your central vision and watch how fast they get you in. After an extensive examination, he'd said he didn't think it was macular degeneration -- more likely a macular pucker or wrinkle, but that loss of central vision was likely permanent. It was only in my right eye though, so he expected my left eye would become my dominant one and the vision loss would be less noticeable. Meanwhile, I absolutely could not read the eye charts with just my right eye. The line would appear and I would think, "Oh yeah, I can read those letters," and then I would try to look at the first one and it would just….disappear. And so I would move to the next one and it would disappear. And so on down the line.
Driving home while scanning around to compensate for that area I couldn't see, I realized I had a zillion questions for my grandmother. We never talked about her vision loss much; it was just a fact of her life, but now there was so much I needed to know. And a very painful sense of needing her -- not just to answer questions -- but to talk to someone who would understand what I was going through.
"How old were you when you first noticed something wrong? How did it start? How much could you see? It wasn't blackness, was it? How hard was it to know it was irreversible and would only get worse? How did you manage to get along alone so well for so long? Were you ever angry or scared? Why didn't I know this runs in families? Why didn't it ever once cross my mind that it could happen to me?"
"How will I work? How will I watch my son play soccer and lacrosse and run? Will I know what he looks like as a grown man? If he has children, will I see their faces?"
"What's it like to go blind?"
(to be continued…)
I have memories of riding in the front seat of her tank of a Ford Fairlane car while she was driving -- I was five, maybe six, sitting in the middle where there was no seatbelt, and she cautioned me that if we were to crash or stop suddenly, I was to keep myself from flying out the front window by bracing my hand and arm against the dashboard.
She was a master seamstress -- I'm not quite sure when I got my first store bought dress -- I remember my other grandmother taking me to the Big N and buying me one when I was in first grade or so, probably feeling terribly sorry for me. But Grandma Whitman's sewing skills were second to none, and our dresses were top quality. We had dresses that were hand-smocked. Even in her day, no one did that by hand -- other than her. And her work was exquisite. On my first day of kindergarten, Big Sis and I wore matching sailor dresses made by Grandma. We loved those dresses.
She knitted nearly non-stop. She made gorgeous sweaters with intricate Scandinavian designs, and every year we each got a new pair of wool mittens -- knitted so tightly that they blocked any cold New England wind from blowing through to our little hands. And then there were her needlepoint projects and the colorful braided rugs she made for each of us plus one a year for the church bazaar. It was fun to look at the rugs and see our outgrown wool skirts and coats, after they had been handed down as much as possible.
I don't remember her doing a lot of cross stitch herself -- I think she enjoyed needlepoint was more -- but I spent many hours under her tutelage sitting on her couch with a blunt needle making small X's that formed curving and flower-shaped designs on a table runner.
Grandma played cards like a fiend. She patiently taught us Go Fish and Old Maid and worked us up to Spite and Malice, Cribbage, and eventually Canasta. She met the "girls" at church once a week for an afternoon of Canasta, and they especially looked forward to when it was her turn to bring dessert. Thinking of her living with a "card games are sinful" Baptist family while serving as the rural Appalachian hill town community's teacher makes me laugh, given her fondness for a good game, even if it was Solitaire.
Everything seemed normal, until it wasn't, and even then there wasn't a defining moment between her being sighted and not. I don't remember how I learned that she was going blind. She started needing to use the magnifying glass for her handiwork and reading, and I remember buying her playing cards with large numbers so she could see them. She voluntarily give up her driver's license -- but when was that? I remember her saying she couldn't see well enough to feel safe anymore. She signed the Fairlane over to my parents and we became a two-car family for the first time. Maybe I was ten?
I've asked my mother and she's vague about it. She thinks her mother was in her 70s. She said her first hint of trouble was struggling to pin clothespins to the clothesline -- she couldn't see the line clearly enough to get the pins on the line. Later in life she decided that her older brother -- 20 years her senior -- had probably also had macular degeneration, although it was never officially diagnosed, and he was gone before the disease struck her.
What I remember about her blindness was that she couldn't see in the center of her vision, but could see peripherally. I always thought she saw a round black spot, but now I realize she just saw nothingness where she couldn't see. As she grew older, the area of blindness grew larger. We were told it was hardening of the arteries in her eyes, but I don't think that's the current prevailing wisdom.
Her handiwork deteriorated as she did more and more by feel. We just recently found the beginnings of a sweater she was working on just before she died. "Look at all the dropped stitches," my mother commented. I think it's a treasure. Blindness took her sight, but not her determination and desire to make beautiful things. Even legally blind, she continued to make a braided rug each year for the church bazaar. It was always the hottest item on the block.
Blindness, even though it started during my childhood, was -- in my child's eyes -- just part of who she was. Even though it hadn't been for the first 70 years of her life, and not how I knew her until I was at least eight or nine. It seemed like she took it in stride, although I know she was frustrated with difficulty reading. These were the days before audio books. I thought she should learn Braille, but now I realize I would have about zero motivation to do so myself, and I'm 15 years younger than she was then. When I wrote to her, I printed in very large letters with lots of space in between lines to make it easier for her to read.
Grandma Whitman, legally blind by this time, playing solitaire
while wearing a sweater she had knitted.
while wearing a sweater she had knitted.
She made the needlepoint seat covers for the dining room chairs too.
On a Monday afternoon I was on my way home from my ophthalmologist's office four days after my symptoms first began, with an appointment to be seen by a retinal specialist in two weeks. Call your eye doctor's office and tell them you can't see your central vision and watch how fast they get you in. After an extensive examination, he'd said he didn't think it was macular degeneration -- more likely a macular pucker or wrinkle, but that loss of central vision was likely permanent. It was only in my right eye though, so he expected my left eye would become my dominant one and the vision loss would be less noticeable. Meanwhile, I absolutely could not read the eye charts with just my right eye. The line would appear and I would think, "Oh yeah, I can read those letters," and then I would try to look at the first one and it would just….disappear. And so I would move to the next one and it would disappear. And so on down the line.
Driving home while scanning around to compensate for that area I couldn't see, I realized I had a zillion questions for my grandmother. We never talked about her vision loss much; it was just a fact of her life, but now there was so much I needed to know. And a very painful sense of needing her -- not just to answer questions -- but to talk to someone who would understand what I was going through.
"How old were you when you first noticed something wrong? How did it start? How much could you see? It wasn't blackness, was it? How hard was it to know it was irreversible and would only get worse? How did you manage to get along alone so well for so long? Were you ever angry or scared? Why didn't I know this runs in families? Why didn't it ever once cross my mind that it could happen to me?"
"How will I work? How will I watch my son play soccer and lacrosse and run? Will I know what he looks like as a grown man? If he has children, will I see their faces?"
"What's it like to go blind?"
(to be continued…)
A photo of my handsome and very much missed cat, Tache,
with the 1964 Ford Fairlane featured prominently in the background.
I thought we would drive that car until it officially earned antique status,
but sometime during or shortly after my college days it was deemed
structurally unsound and began a new life as a demolition derby car.
structurally unsound and began a new life as a demolition derby car.
It screams "Grandma car" though, doesn't it? Or maybe "Mad Men."
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