“Doctor, what operation will you be performing?” I asked.
He replied very slowly and loudly, as though I was not only blind but also deaf or mentally handicapped (a phenomenon I was to experience repeatedly in the future): “Bi-lat-er-al tre-phi-na-tions.” If spoken softly, the words sound rather lyrical. In reality, they are anything but. It had been determined not only that the glaucoma, which had developed aggressively, would very soon effectively destroy my eyes but that the condition had induced an increase in pressure so severe that I would need to have my eyes surgically altered.
In the procedure, Dr. Sugar made holes in my eyes, cutting through the delicate mucous membrane covering the inside of my eyelids and then slashing through the wall of each eye to open a channel until fluid began gushing out and forming pools in the wounds. To accomplish this, he used what today’s surgeons would consider crude instruments. They were like miniature pickaxes, and they mutilated my eyes.
In effect, Dr. Sugar destroyed my vision to save my eyeballs—an irony I live with still. But he had no choice: my condition was too far advanced to correct. Moreover, given what was then the standard treatment, there is some question as to whether earlier surgery would have made any difference. In any event, scar tissue began to form almost immediately on the walls of the holes in my eyes. That tissue—strong, tensile, thick, and fibrous—would eventually clog my eyes’ drainage channels, causing further perilous increases in pressure and necessitating more surgeries.
There is a moment that occurs at least once in just about everyone’s life, and all too commonly several times: the instant just after bad news has been given when you suddenly look back on your life and say, “My God, I did not realize how nice I had it until now.” As I write this, I am trying to think whether that one day at the doctor’s office in Detroit really was my worst day. If death outweighs everything, then the day my father died should claim that dubious honor. But I was very young then and able to get on with a life of normal hopes and dreams. The gods hadn’t yet raised me up so they could bring me low.
What I do know for certain is that the kind of moment I experienced in Dr. Sugar’s office subtracts something from a person. Afterward, you spend the rest of your life building yourself back up, as if the whole of your being had been cut out. And so every heartbeat of life from then on, every millisecond, every hour, every day is a matter of additions and subtractions to that moment. You work and work to get back to the feeling of wholeness, because all the good things—and one always hopes for more good things—allow your net balance of additions and subtractions to run into the black.
I save everything. Always have. Whenever I feel subtracted—just as I did that day in Detroit, completely and wholly subtracted—I can go back to the things I have saved: letters, tapes, videotapes, cards, telegrams, photographs, articles, journals, diaries, catalogues, and receipts. I look at them and feel better. These items are the precipitate of time. The longer you hold antiques, the higher their value. I am into antiquities. And tradition. And memory.
For me, memory is not casual daydreaming; it has been a life-sustaining activity. The process of thinking about my good moments and my bad moments, my good luck and my bad luck, functions for me something like an old-fashioned carpenter’s spirit level. It has allowed me to steady myself, as though it were an extension of my limbic system (which, incidentally, is a bit handicapped for a blind person).
So to be coolly logical: that day in Detroit—Monday, February 13, 1961—was not, as I sometimes find myself thinking, the summation of a life. It does not define me. It was not my destiny—although it seemed definitively to be so at the time. It was just a day. On the day I found out I was going to be blind, people were going about their business as usual. I had to go ahead and discover what the rest of my life would look like.
PART 2
A Bridge
Over Troubled Waters
8
Lights Out
As the effects of the anesthesia receded, I was wheeled back from post-op to my room. My hands rose to rub my eyes but instead encountered metal pads. I sank into the bed and said nothing. For a reason I still do not understand, I was unable to speak. My mother sat in a chair at the foot of the bed; she, too, was mute. Many long minutes later, after I had fallen into a deep funk, my eyes started to hurt. Had ice picks been plunged into them? The pain intensified, and I began to scream. The more I reacted, the worse it got. My hands gripped the metal bars on the sides of my bed as if that would mitigate the pain. The nurses came rushing in and quickly removed the metal pads from my eyes; as they did, tears dropped onto my cheeks. Apparently, the salt in my teardrops had caused the torment. Once the pads were removed and the tears drained, the pain subsided.
I lay exhausted on the bed, unable to express my boiling feelings. There was a great deal of pain not only in my eyes but in my heart. Surprisingly, the most significant pain was not about me but from knowing that my mother had just witnessed her son lose his eyesight. That thought made the emotional
