BITTER-SWEET.

I have just this minute finished a book, telling the story of someone else who, like me, has owned a guide dog. I wanted to see whether her experiences were anything like my own but as I read the story, it became clear that our paths were to diverge in a way I could never have suspected.

Much later in the story, the author was seen by an eye specialist who operated on her eyes and returned her lost sight to her as a result. She had a genetic disease which blinded her but, like me, could see light at some time but unlike me; she saw colours too which I have never been able to do as far as I can remember for my sight was lost too early for me to recall them.

As I became aware that her operation was going to be a success, I was aware of mixed emotions. I wanted to know how she reacted to sight and seeing the world, herself and family plus colours and how she would learn to see but I was also aware of a deep sense of sadness that I am never to have this experience. Yes it was as I had imagined in that I have always thought that you can’t just open your eyes and see and know what everything was like. No you wouldn’t be able to get up out of a chair and just go anywhere without feeling apprehension and fear because your brain would have to adjust to your new situation and for a while at least you would have to close your eyes and touch things so you could recognise them that way. You’d have also to learn to write in the usual way with a pen and paper but once done, you would be filled with a sense of wonder at the world and all that is in it which is surely what a young child must feel when confronted with the world’s visual imagery for the first time.

I learned things from this story that I never realised and know now that I was quite correct in assuming that there is a great deal of difference between knowing things factually: “The sky is blue or grey”, “roses are red, violets are blue”; “clouds can be like fluffy bits of cotton wool in the sky” etc. and knowing things experientially. She describes how lettuces catch the light, or perhaps it’s the water they’re being washed in as it runs from the tap, and how it creates pools of reflected light which swirl around. I have never thought of this before.

This author was honest enough to talk about the implications of blindness, what it robs you of, how narrow it can make your life and how disconnected from the world you can be because of it and she was fortunate enough to have married a sighted man whilst blind and have many friends who can see.

In other ways I wish I’d not read this book – Not because I am not pleased for her and not just because of sour grapes and horrible feelings of envy, jealousy, rage and frustration but because it has brought to the forefront of my mind the tantalising nearness of a world I live with in parallel to but cannot enter and, yes, I would be telling lies if I said that I happily read this book and thought: “Oh well, never mind! That’s your story I’m happy as I am and never think how good it would be were things different”.

The only area on which I disagree with her is that about when it is “best” to become blind. I don’t think it’s as simple as that. The terrible feelings of helplessness, fear, resentment and longing which often accompany loss of sight later in life are not exclusive to the adventitiously blind. These feelings of knowing what you’ve missed or at least that you have, feeling left out and indeed being so and knowing your life is not going to be the same as it could have been had you not been blind or otherwise disabled for that matter are just as painful in youth and adulthood for those who haven’t seen. It’s like being hit on the back rather than in the stomach. Both hurt and both have to be coped with. Those who’ve lost their sight have a visual memory to take with them and an understanding of a world they are forced to leave – The world of vision – Whereas I have no actual readjusting to do in one way but a cobbled together understanding which makes it hard to choose clothes, find my way by thinking in terms of spatial distances and raised maps and suchlike. I do admit that because I was taught how to cope in the home I don’t “feel blind” at home and can and do cook, know how to identify my tins because I can put Braille labels on them and can do such things as measure cereal out without spilling it everywhere. I neither burn or scald myself and don’t fall downstairs and am not a fire hazard. Older blind people who have seen do tend to do some of these things more often but I am sure that, were I to sleep in the same house with one of them, they would at some time have heard me shedding tears over a horrible journey through a world of nothingness just as I would hear them doing so over things no longer seen by them or possible like their lost ability to paint or read books; see flowers or family.

One thing I do know for sure is that, after I have next slept, I am going to need to employ my happiness strategies all the more rigorously. Just beside me, walking stealthily, is that other “me” which does wonder what the world is really like, why this had to happen in the first place and why something can’t be done to reverse things and, as with monopoly: “get me out of jail”. Sheila, the author, has called this other self from the shadows and it’s a voice I’ve not heard for a long time and a longing I’ve not had for a long time and rarely get now until I hear of someone who has been liberated. It’s going to take all my strength to restrain this other self; to send it back into the shadows because, like her guide dog, mine is ten now as hers was when she wrote the story, and my future is by no means going to be as hers was. However, I don’t know what has happened to her in later life though I have another book here which will no doubt tell me and I don’t know what my future is to be either. I just know that, as it is for the rest of you, it’s got to be a question of one day at a time and playing the hand of cards I’ve been given. However, soon I shall have, for the sake of all these suppressed and now expressed longings, either to escape into fiction – Either reading or writing it and into music in order to divert my thoughts.

What a wonderful reversal of fortune this woman had! At least though, she did, as I hope I would, appreciate it and didn’t, as I don’t, shrug off and play down the enormous impact blindness has on people. The secret now is not to dwell on the difficulties – Easier said than done but I have become an adept at it for it’s something I have to do every day and though I had tears in my eyes when I’d finished this book, I was smiling at the same time. Well then folks, could you call that the facial equivalent of a rainbow?