A couple of months ago I woke up with significant vision loss in one eye. As someone in his seventies I was probably overdue for a health crisis, and there is nothing like losing eyesight to focus you on your mortality. I was terrified that my writing days might be over and I was in grief at the prospect of a shrinking world. Worse, the type of optic neuropathy I was diagnosed with sometimes claims vision in the remaining eye. After a month, life is returning to normal. I’ve made adjustments, learned to see without the headaches I initially experienced, and I’m taking driving a step at a time.
But needing to take as much control over my situation as I can, I resolved that if I lost the other eye I would be prepared. The Hadley Institute has many resources for blind and low-vision people, including the Braille lessons I have started “just in case” the worst happens. Another of Hadley’s many resources is a podcast where I first heard an interview with New York Times columnist Frank Bruni, whose experience with non-arteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy (NAION) was identical to mine.
Bruni is also the narrator of the Audible version of the book “The Beauty of Dusk” and I was of course eager to see how he negotiated his own adjustment to vision loss. However, “The Beauty of Dusk” is not merely about Bruni’s experience of sudden partial blindness but is more a meditation on mortality, our ability to meet challenges head-on, to transform our ways of doing things, to change our thinking and even ourselves — as well as the satisfactions of meeting those challenges and discovering strengths and possibilities we never imagined were within us. In confronting all his own fears and questions, Bruni managed to write a wise and generous meditation on what it means to be human and vulnerable.
The title of Bruni’s book is apt and comes from this passage: “[…] my story isn’t about dawn. It’s about dusk. It’s about those first real inklings that the day isn’t forever, and the light inexorably fades. It’s about a rising and then peaking consciousness that you’re on borrowed and finite time.” Exactly. Those of us “of a certain age,” for whom “old age isn’t for sissies,” may prefer more humorous characterizations of our silver years. But dusk is a perfect reminder that our day is almost over and there’s just so much light to be snatched before it all ends. It’s a sobering but a brutally honest and even actionable metaphor.
Bruni’s meditation explores almost every aspect of his medical experience as well as much in his own life. But it is far from a medical memoir. Most of “Dusk” is devoted to stories from the many friends he has — as we all have — whose burdens are far greater than his. These are tales of people who met unthinkable challenges that most of us imagine would have stopped us in our tracks.
But it doesn’t work that way. Buried within each of us is the capacity to adapt, to change, to look at the world differently. Bruni draws from the work of numerous psychologists and neuroscientists to remind us that our brains and our personalities are far more elastic than we imagine. Bruni also pokes fun at the comic irony of how he was forced to “see the world differently.” As he half-jokes, “when one eye closes, another one opens.”
Bruni reminds us of the polite caution, if not disinterest, we show those with disabilities. After his own experience with disability Bruni started asking every one he knew about how they navigated the world, what their challenges were. Many of their answers surprised him. Their desire to talk about their struggles initially surprised him.
“The Beauty of Dusk” is a triumphant book, a slightly sentimental book, and occasionally a tedious book of things (like his dog) that only some readers will find engaging. But it is also a book about the hard realities, both good and bad, of aging and disability. As I listened to Bruni narrate, barely a month after my own opthalmological adventure, I at times found myself weeping. There were naturally tears of sadness for what is lost, but also tears of triumph over my initial terror, despair, and grief. There were also tears of recognition — felt more fully now than ever before in my life — that I am finite, that life is finite, that what is left to us of each day is not to be wasted. That vulnerability and disability are waystations that each of us will visit sometime in our lives.
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