And so what did the rest of that week look like? If you eliminate everything—the bed like a skeleton, the chair my mother sat in, the pale curtains on the windows, the nozzles and intravenous tree and monitors, the little table on which they placed my food (bland and soft), the bed sheets, the safe toiletries, the towels in the bathroom, the telephone—if you take all that away, what have you got? Or what is there to be remembered? Nothing except the misery.
As terrible as that week was, though, it gave me some time to begin to figure things out—what we would now call a workout, something one does for a distressed company. Instead of being a distressed company, I was a distressed person, and I was in the earliest stirrings of setting out to turn myself around.
Much of that necessarily occurs in one’s head, and by an ironically beneficial twist, a blind person is left largely with only that: the conscious life within his or her head. One then realizes how much of one’s mental life had been anchored in the world one saw. This is something that you, the reader, must contemplate, if you are sighted, in order to understand much of what my account is about.
Nothing was ever said straight-on between my mother and me about my being blind, so nothing can be said of her thoughts on it now. We had hardly ever spoken about the Holocaust when I was growing up. Why would we speak about my blindness now?
Only once did it come up even tangentially before her passing, as hard as that may be to believe. Many years later, in Maryland, on my sister Ruth’s porch, I made some kind of joke, common for me, about how I had misplaced something or knocked something over, and unbeknownst to me at the time my mother started to cry. She did not make any noise, just started shaking, I was told later, and then crying. Afterward, my sister told me that I ought not to act that way—it was too painful for Mother.
Still, nothing I write or say now can come even close to the deep emotional reality of that week in February 1961, when my mother sat with me in my hospital room. In a way, my mother and I were living in separate worlds that week; we were not, despite our physical proximity, beside each other. I do not remember what we said to each other, but it was definitely not about my blindness. Beyond any doubt, she was submerged in her own anguish that week. Anguish from seeing me in pain but also, surely, anguish because of all that I might have done with my life.
She was probably also thinking of the practical burden that had been placed on her. How was she going to take care of me? She had been living a difficult life. She had kept her family together after her first husband died, when it would have been easier to let them go to foster homes. On top of that, she had been taking care of her own mother, who at the time of the ordeal in Detroit had only recently passed away. She was now mother to four, or even five, if we count all she did for her second husband—cleaning, making dinner, doing the laundry, and all the things a woman of that era was expected to do.
Perhaps she saw my blindness as just the next in a long line of hardships. Maybe she was even comfortable with it in some way. Not comfortable that it had happened to me, but maybe it confirmed that her life was always to be an unrelenting burden. She was a pessimistic optimist, finding stability in her pessimism. Maybe, as well, there were other versions of the unsaid that hunkered down somewhere in other corners of her life, ones of which I would never know. I am certain that the horror of what had happened to friends and relatives in Europe was festering in one or another of those corners.
These days, there are support groups for every diagnosable ailment and condition, as well as for some that are not. Even if we wanted to maintain silence, it would be difficult. In all likelihood, a social worker at the Detroit hospital today would drop by to offer some kind of pamphlet, and we would have had a consultation with him or her, closely followed by our enrollment in an outpatient support group. A jumping-off point would have been provided for us. But my blindness arrived then, not now—in 1961, not in the twenty-first century—and in Detroit, in that hospital room, my mother and I spoke not a single word about it.
After four dismal days and nights, I was discharged from the Detroit hospital. It was a Saturday morning. I walked out and felt fresh air on my face; I took deep breaths. That moment remains the most glorious memory of my life—the first little push toward regaining my life—and my brain gave me a further break by not allowing itself to imagine the struggles ahead.
It was a bitterly cold day when we arrived in Buffalo. Sue was waiting for us at the station. I took hold of her and said, “Your hand is freezing.” We kissed and hugged, and I could tell she had lost a lot of weight since December. I had been so focused on my mother’s anguish that I had almost forgotten there was another woman who loved me.
The homecoming was awkward. My siblings stumbled through the next few hours, talking from time to time, but without their usual ease. That evening I returned
