The Final Word
I first met Sanford Greenberg many years ago. It was a cold and stormy night. We, however, were inside, at a party in honour of something or other, and we began talking. The subject of blindness came up, as it does with Sandy. We recalled the days before advanced reading technologies for the blind existed and how difficult it was then to be a student: Although you could have a braille typewriter, you had to rely on the kindness of strangers to read to you. And you certainly had to have an astonishing memory.
As it turned out, we’d overlapped as graduate students at Harvard in the 1960s. Sandy was still negotiating the sudden onset of blindness a few years earlier, and I had been a “reader,” someone who’d answered the call for volunteers to read to blind students. I don’t know why I did this—maybe the stories of my blind great-aunt had stuck in my head, or maybe it was payback for the pleasures of having been read to as a child—but there I’d been, reading away, though not to Sanford. He decided that because of this action I must be a Good Person, at least in a limited way, and we became Instafriends.
There followed the story of my mother, who had glaucoma and finally became mostly blind at the age of ninety; and the story of my father, who had macular degeneration. Thus I had two potential blindness time-bomb scenarios lurking in my genes. (So far so good, I hasten to add.)
Then followed many stories from Sanford, which by now you will have read, and which you will have been as impressed by as I was. How devastating it would have been to be told at such a young age that you would never see again. How easy it would have been to give up. What willpower and hard work it would have taken to paddle upstream against such a strong current. And how encouraging it is to others to hear that it can be done, because Sanford Greenberg did it—with a little help from his friends, but we all need that.
However, this is a life that has not been merely a dogged trudge up the hill. Hard work, yes, but also a list of stellar accomplishments and a great deal of curiosity and joy, and an enormous desire to give back to the world some of the bounty that Sandy feels he has received from it. His challenge contest, End Blindness by 2020, may not have ended blindness completely, but it’s brought that goal closer. To quote Churchill, it is “not the end; it is not even the beginning of the end; but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
Memoirs are what they say they are—accounts of what their writers find good to remember—but there is an implicit hope that the reader will discover something that is good to remember, too. In the case of Sandy Greenberg’s memoirs, the takeaway is surely inspirational. Here is a life well lived, despite a major obstacle that would have stopped a lot of people. It’s not always true that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, but it can sometimes be true, and in Sandy’s case it has been.
Thanks for the memories, Sandy. And for the numerous contributions to the well-being of the human world. Your many friends, and now your many readers, salute you.
—Margaret Atwood
Acknowledgments
No memoir is a solo performance, no matter the teller. We are born out of family histories. We come into a world of cultural influences and are nurtured—or sadly sometimes not—by specific individuals whose influence is inescapable. Teachers leave their imprint on us, as do rabbis, pastors, priests, coaches, mentors, lovers, the entire gestalt of our time and place and the long reach of our traditions. Even if we walk down a road alone, someone else trailblazed the space we travel through.
The blind, though, have a special need for helpers, and for those who have helped me through this life’s journey, the word “acknowledgment” seems far too cold and insufficient to the cause. I prefer “gratitude” because I feel it so frequently and in such abundance—gratitude to those who opened up the world to me while I could still see, gratitude to those who led me back to full personhood once my vision had deserted me, gratitude to those who helped me build an adult life not as a person who could not see but as someone who saw in certain ways even more clearly once his sight was gone, gratitude even to strangers on a train like the compassionate orthopedist who insisted I have a bite of his cookie on that dismal train ride I described in the prologue to this book.
All of which is another way of saying that many hands have been holding the metaphorical pen as I have written this memoir and that my gratitude and reverence are boundless for every one of them: for my grandmother Pauline; my mother, Sarah, and fathers, Albert and Carl; for Sue and Paul, Jimmy, and Kathryn; for Joel, Ruth, and Brenda; for my family past, present, and future; for my college roommates, Art Garfunkel and Jerry Speyer; for my friends, my religious heritage, my community, my education, my readers and teachers and all those indispensable others who have made this accounting possible. You are my sacred litany of blessings.
Perhaps this gratitude is repeated throughout my narrative to a degree that seems excessive to you. If so, I apologize, but it is not excessive to my own heart. However my reflections twist and turn, it is central to the story of my transition as a human being. I return to these people again and again for a simple, unassailable reason: This is a book—and a life—that would not exist without them. I am on every page, true, but no matter what direction I take in thinking about my life, each track invariably circles back to one or more of those who
