Kia ora koutou, I’ve been thinking about eyesight, about clarity and mist, about grey chiffon curtains, about darkness and I realise its the same process of learning as it was when nearly 92 years ago I began to recognise faces, hands, toes and feet, those first glimmerings that spark an interest, the need to find out more, the desire to look for concrete answers. Getting the only answer available, which turns out to be, ‘Get used to it Renée. There’s nothing to be done – live with it’.
As Mary McCallum says in her poem Magificence (XYZ of Happiness, Makaro Press) ‘These bodies of ours, they are magnificent, and they fail us.’ I love the ‘and’ in that line, so clever, a lot of us would have put ‘but’ – yet the ‘and’ speaks of the inevitable reality of our body giving way to the onslaught of illness and/or age. No ifs or buts about that.
Any big change always seems like its only happened to me. When I got the original diagnosis I didn’t believe it, I could see perfectly well with glasses and even without them it wasn’t too bad. I looked it up. I understood the process, what I didn’t accept was that it meant me. Intellectually I knew that thousands of people (not just old people either) got macular degeneration but it still didn’t sink in. I know there’s always an initial human disbelief that this can be happening. It seems impossible. Don’t they (whoever they are) know I need my sight?
I was completely selfish about it – it was quite okay for others to have it, but it was not okay for me. There didn’t seem to be an understanding of this obvious truth by the powers that hand out cancer, arthritis, diabetes, kidney stones, whatever they have in their kete… and in any case I’d had cancer, twice – it just did not seem fair.
But, as we all know, or if we don’t, we learn that the concept of ‘fairness’ is not, well, fair. There is no such thing. Fairness in the sense of the doling out illness or disabilty is a joke, albeit a sick one. (Sorry for that).
Why should I not develop macular degeneration anyway? Who am I to think I can automatically go on reading print forever? What I can say is that of all the things I thought might happen to me when I got old, not being able to read easily never entered my head. In fact I never thought I would get old. I was convinced I would die well before that. Once I realised that yes, I was going to live past 42, I considered physical changes – not being able to walk so far perhaps? Not being able to dig the garden, carry bags of groceries, hold a great grandchild in my arms? I already knew that one day I would decide not to drive any more. I think I told you that a good friend of mine said, ‘I wanted to be the one who made that decision.’ Like her I didn’t want to go on until I had an accident or until I was told, ‘You are not allowed to drive.’
The one thing that I never considered in all this prospective physical decay process was losing my sight. Or losing most of it. I am impatient, I have to learn not to be so… well there’s a joke for a start.
I can’t read labels, the magnifying glass is useless, I have to wait for someone to read it to me. I can’t read receipts, except if they’re online, so when Kim brings my groceries she writes the total in big black print (with my fine black felt tip) so I can easily see what I owe and stick it through online banking. Thank you technology for that.
Last week I got the news that there is no sight left in the retina of my right eye, the only sight in that eye is peripheral. So following my decision some time ago you might remember, not to hide things because I don’t want to be a nuisance and bore people, I am, as I told you I would, taking that risk. I wish someone had talked about such things when I was younger but no–one did. So I came to old age completely unprepared. I discovered that old age is, like the rest of life, a learning time. All the things I never knew which I’ve had to learn ‘on the hoof’ as it were, would fill many pages.
But for the moment, my friends, I have to seriously consider using a voice option on my computer. Word has one I discovered and I can get a techie to teach me the first basics.
I will keep putting off that decision but in the end I will do it. I do not like the idea and that is probably because of fear and the thought that if I give in to that what will be the next thing? I know the inevitability of one thing following another and we are all well aware of our resistance to that inevitability. ‘Why me?’ is our cry. Until the moment comes when we have to say, ‘Why not me?’
Renée
