Miriam Blank | Kingsview & Co

“Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn, whatever state I may be in, therein to be content” –Helen Keller

My brothers have been taking Dad out for breakfast a few times a year for the last 5-10 years. Recently my sisters and I noted a longing to also connect with Dad in a meaningful, intentional way.

So we began to meet through group conference calls. We each came with questions for Dad about our early years together as a family, and how he experienced various events, like the birth of each child.

Then we talked of my sister Carol’s early diagnosis with retinitis pigmentosa when she was only about 7. Beverly and I were diagnosed in our early twenties, so it did not impact our early years of growing up.

We noted how we each responded to Carol’s early loss of sight. For Dad, there was the shock of being told he should send his daughter off to a school for the blind. Beverly noticed how she didn’t want to ever look clumsy like her younger sister did, stumbling into things or sweeping her hand across the floor to find something she had dropped. As for myself, just a toddler at the time, I had no conscious clue of this shadow that had fallen across the face of us three sisters who would all go blind slowly across the decades to come.

Mom combing my hair surrounded by my two sisters, in the log cabin where we grew up in rural Oaxaca, Mexico.

Now our conversations with Dad have begun to trace the early days of lives altered by blindness. My heart has been pierced as I note that my sister Carol in some ways had to carry her blindness alone as a little girl. She didn’t know what it was to see better. She only knew she tripped into things when others didn’t. She knew she was somehow different.

But emotionally, where do you put the stigmatization of having to run around the outskirts of the sport field while your classmates play and look at you oddly? Mom and Dad obtained exemptions like this for her gym class. But no one could know all she had to navigate as she bumped into other students in the dark hallways, trying to find her locker. She put her head down and pushed forward. She just did the next thing, plowing through the best she could.

It is a consolation to re-collect these memories as we gain new insights. We are listening together to our unique but similar life vignettes:

How we tried to hide or minimize the effect of our waning sight.
How we pushed ourselves to not feel different.
How we colluded with denial.
The sadness of feeling helpless.
The sorrow of not being the one who can help others in practical ways.
The insights gleaned from being an outsider; being the different one.
The pain of the sharp furniture corners.
The electrical current running through my gut as I hear, for the first time in detail of Carol being knocked unconscious from a bike crash.

And now we can’t stop. It is like, loop by loop, we are knitting a sweater together. We are connecting stories and gaps in our own memories and experiences. I think there were ways that our lives ran on different tracks, and our blindness didn’t join us together as much as it could have. But now, a doorway has opened and something sweet is happening as we listen.

This work of excavation is turning on lights of understanding and compassion. All three of us currently see less than five percent of what a sighted person sees. Yet what we actually can see can be confusing to both us and others.

The retina of the eye is an extension of the brain, and where there are gaps in vision, the brain tends to fill in that gap, making the person with retinitis pigmentosa think they can actually see more than they can. We navigate in familiar settings with relative ease, so that at times others think we see more than we do. Beverly’s daughter, who lives with her, once said, “Mom, I keep forgetting you can’t actually see.”

So, our experience is one of feeling “normal” and yet sometimes not normal at all. As John M. Hull says in Notes on Blindness: A Journey Through the Dark, “It is so hard to be a normal person when one is not a normal person.”

For example, for practical reasons we have to limit the number and types of things we would like to do. Everything, including social interactions take more energy for us. Our days can be interrupted in hundreds of unexpected ways where a solution require sight. Just now I asked one of my housemates to come and deal with a yellow jacket in my kitchen.

Our path is often hindered. Our lives are not marked by efficiency in the physical world.

I am drawn to the words of Henry David Thoreau, “Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.” It is now an unexpected goodness to be walking in a new way with my two sisters in our “less than normal” lives, with reverence and love.

–Miriam Blank, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, is a professional counselor, spiritual director, and certified life coach. In the past Miriam worked 15 years as a registered nurse and certified nurse-midwife. She is author of the prior post, “Body Fading, Essence Soaring.”

This morning, kneeling beside my mother on the deck, I was gripped by the fleeting treasure of her fragile resilient life. The process of dying, I believe, is a holy space, just as is birth.

This morning, like every morning, I went over to ask her how her night was. Dad had her out on the deck surrounded by bird song and five flowering baskets from mother’s day.

She sat quietly, a little queen in her corner. I asked her how she slept and she got a mischievous smile. She had a dream, she said, that she was pregnant. She was a little worried that people might think, “Crazy old lady, what is she doing pregnant?”

But in her dream she was happy to be pregnant. She said, “It was my baby.”

I thought of the days my mother was young. There is a photo of Mom at about 31, holding my oldest brother Nelson while pregnant with her next child. No one can doubt how full of new life she is, standing quietly holding it all.

MaryLouBlank — Mary Lou Blank, mother of author Miriam, holding her first child and pregnant with her fourth in this photo taken during the Blank family’s missionary years in Mexico. Mary Lou went on to bear six children over nine years.

I told her, “Maybe it is a sign that even in this season of things breaking down, you are full of new life.”

We talked about how she is experiencing great joy, peace and love each day. She said she liked my interpretation of her dream; that it fit. Mom is more expressive of her love for everyone than she has ever been. She seems at relative peace with her losses in this season of endings. “Everyone has to die,” she has said, with a little smile. She laughs often. Her body so frail is spilling over with beauty.

I know others might not see it as I do, and I don’t always see it this way either. But I am bending over her being each day and am taking in each moment with new eyes, knowing more than ever that each day with her is a gift. Like parents who can’t stop talking about their little child, and can’t get over the miracle growing in their arms, I can’t get over her growing beauty.

Mary Lou, Lester, and Miriam Blank — Mary Lou and Lester Blank with author Miriam Blank

Others may see her listing to one side of the wheelchair, stuttering over a word, drooling, or looking distantly across the room and wonder at my delight in this season. I don’t deny the sadness. It is there, and I take my turn with tears. Her tiny body seems to be shriveling up and disappearing. She is so small now in her recliner; it seems to fold in and hide her away. She sleeps more, eats less, forgets more, and words are harder to say.

But as her body fades and fails, her essence soars. Her spirit flames. She shakes with the fullness of her life and the rich stories of love layered within. She can’t get over the flowers and the blue sky. To her they are a new wonder every morning. She is full of new life. She is quietly holding it all.

–Miriam Blank, Gap, Pennsylvania, is a professional counselor, spiritual director, and certified life coach. In the past Miriam worked 15 years as a registered nurse and certified nurse-midwife.