Living in the Dark
My story is her story.
Words on a page she
will never see.
Marjorie Wood –
visionary, far-sighted, blind. The woman with the softest gaze and the most
piercing perception has had her sight stolen from her. It happened slowly at
first, letter by letter, and then cruelly in a sickening rush. Once the Queen
of observation, memory is now her only liberator. The grip she has on her world
loosens as her grip on the walking stick tightens. Her hands, now a personal
navigation device, carefully take in life’s contours.
Marjorie is my
mother’s mother. My truly grand mother.
Blind. Handicapped.
Vulnerable. If that is too hard to say, then ‘vision impaired’ may be more
comfortable for you. Whichever label, she has been robbed of her most precious
sense. Marjorie – and please do not spell that name as Margery or somehow she
will know – lives alone in the black and white of her blindness amongst a riot
of colour. The maintenance of her house and garden might now be the job of others,
but Marjorie remains the artistic director of their strong tones, a reminder of
the days when she could see in all the shades of the spectrum. Always impeccably
dressed, the perfect shade of pink lipstick applied meticulously - her lips’ doll-like
shape etched into her memory after 70 years of this daily ritual. No need yet to wonder if she has drawn a
snarl where a smile should be. Her memory is her mirror.
Even though her
undeniable determination is so evident in our every encounter, I can’t help but
feel she is increasingly lost to the swirling world around her; the one I
belong to. When will I receive my last handwritten birthday card? Her once
perfect cursive is now a spidery guessing game. She is a fighter - fighting
against the perception others have of her. She refuses to disappear. I can see
she is fighting now to make even her 30 x magnifier help in her painstaking
crawl through beloved newspapers, the tiny sector of blurry vision at the very
corner of one eye bearing this load.
Her lips move as she talks to herself. You see, she needs to repeat the words she has deciphered as
she adds each new word, a bit like stringing beads onto a wire. The process is so tortuous that those
without her fine powers of recollection would have forgotten the earlier words
by the time the later words are added. Her much-loved movies are a thing of the
past. Audio books have given her a range of stories back again, but have stolen
the luxury of that special process reading brings you and me – the words of our
favourite authors personalised by our inner voice.
For an elderly, blind
woman, living alone means she loses more than just her sight. Her personal
safety, guarded by the systematic routine of carers three times a day, plucks
away at her privacy. Yet surrendering this privacy is the price she pays for a
different kind of freedom. A freedom that only the familiar can bring. Decades of vivid memories are stored
carefully in each room of her house, with her mind map never failing her. It illuminates all she can’t see and
guides her as she performs the small tasks she can still undertake. I can see
that these tasks provide comfort beyond the obvious now. They are a reminder to Marjorie of ‘before’
– of the days when her home sang with large family gatherings and the mingling
of friends. She stood proudly at
the epicentre of this happy chaos, cooking and serving and directing the
traffic. It is quiet in the house
now as she moves deliberately along the hall, but for her, these crystal clear
memories fill the rooms, burst outside and sweep towards the ocean just as they
always did.
Old age, the winter of
our years, can be so unpoetic. In
Marjorie’s case a flurry of health problems have meant the years after 80 have
been a series of cruel medical diversions from the business of living
life. Each event has meant a new
recalibration, and although her superpower has always been her resilience,
blindness has proven to be her Kryptonite. Bit by bit we are losing her to her
inner world, that inner world made all the more seductive to the blind. If you can’t see, then do the things you
can’t see even exist?
She has lost her
sight. We, her family, continue to lose indefinable pieces of her. Her
dependence robs her of sharing our perspective. Marjorie now has a different perspective. Her endless love,
curiosity and fascination for the world has been bruised by the dark veil
blindness casts over her. She must decide now how she will craft her own
ending. For all the urgency she feels to live life as she always did, her
acceptance of these limitations grows. Now we are being challenged to
adjust. We need to manage our
rising panic over her acceptance, while celebrating her feisty refusal to be
the acquiescent little old lady she so dreads becoming.
We need to be more
like her.
Lucinda Grant (s4291365) 27th April 2012
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