The street sign was so close, no more than a few feet above her head, but it might as well have been in the next town.  The woman could see only bits and pieces of white characters against a blue background, their images blurred to the ambiguous shapes of clouds floating in the sky, waiting for imagination to give them form.  As a little girl, she had studied clouds high overhead and tried to find secret messages hidden within their billows and swirls, certain that there was something important to be learned from these delicate patterns if only she could detect it. 

Now the woman squinted her eyes and moved her head back and forth, trying to decipher something meaningful from this fuzzy jumble of letters and numbers, something that would tell her what she needed to know.  Since she had begun losing her vision, life had become a relentless series of mysteries to be solved.  Everywhere she went, images with missing parts had to be assembled into whole, identifiable shapes.  Text with broken letters had to be translated into complete, intelligible words.  Faces with indistinct features had to be matched to their proper, recognizable names.  With little central eyesight, the woman had to rely on her peripheral vision to work out these visual puzzles, continually looking right, left, up, or down, anywhere but directly at what she needed to see.

Right now, she needed to see this street sign.  On a two-mile journey by foot, she had let her mind wander from a conscious awareness of her surroundings, and now she was not sure where she was or how much farther she had to go.  Standing directly beneath the sign, the woman felt embarrassed about asking a stranger to read what must be so obvious to everyone with normal vision.  Only a few months ago, these signs had been legible to her as well, at least from this position, but now there seemed to be a greater distance between her and the shadowy symbols.  Had she become shorter or had the signposts become taller? 

Of course, there had been no magical transformation of this sort, only a more gradual change in the back of her eyes, one that lent a faraway quality to her everyday surroundings.  In this visual exile, she was becoming increasingly removed from everything around her, painfully aware of a separation whose dimensions surpassed physical space.  Even at close range, objects that she couldn't see clearly seemed to be miles away from her, as remote and inaccessible as the clouds in the sky.  It was as if she were looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope and she had no way of turning the instrument around.  There was nothing the woman could do to bridge the gap between herself and what was going on beyond her visual grasp. 

This sense of isolation had been reinforced by many of the people she encountered.  Over the years, she had learned that her visual clumsiness set her apart from others, relegating her to the role of spectator rather than participant.  Excluded from many activities because of her blindness, she discovered that other people were more than willing to support this status quo.  She was not expected to want the same things that others took for granted, such as independence, education, or employment.

The fact that she did want these things seemed to upset people very much, as if she were throwing the prescribed social order into chaos by crossing the invisible line that kept blind people at a safe distance from others.  Independence for someone with a visual impairment involved access to public transportation, and she routinely met with rudeness and ridicule from impatient bus drivers who were annoyed at her inability to read the route numbers displayed on their vehicles.  After flagging down the wrong bus one afternoon, she explained to the driver that she was legally blind and couldn't see the sign.  He had waited until she was out of the bus before shouting after her, "Then what are you doing walking around?"  On this and many other occasions she recognized the implicit message that she had no right to be here because her presence was inconvenient to others.  

At school, there were teachers, administrators, and fellow students who expressed this same sentiment to the woman, in different ways.  Professors explained that they did not have the time or resources to provide materials in large-print format, although federal law required them to do so.  Counselors told her that there was no one available to help her in the library, so she would have to approach strangers and ask them to read signs and locate books for her.  The woman had been describing her experiences in tutoring a blind man when another student asked in a shocked voice, "But how can anyone teach blind people?"  The misconception, every bit as widespread as it was absurd, held that blind people could not be taught, so they should stay away from the schools as well as from the buses and trains.

The woman had concluded that people with visual impairments were not wanted in the job market either.  She had visited the state employment agency, only to be told, "We can't help you."  Prospective employers wanted nothing to do with her once they found out that she was legally blind.  This prejudice seemed to be one of degree rather than of kind, as many of the business people who interviewed her also needed glasses to perform their jobs.  They would have been shocked if they were disqualified for a position because they wore spectacles, yet they did not hesitate to use such a ridiculous criterion to judge the woman's suitability.  Of course, her glasses were thicker and odder-looking, with one lens blacked out, and that made all the difference in the world.

This matter of appearance was one more riddle for the woman to unravel.  The very things that helped her to see better, such as glasses and magnifiers, blinded other people.  They could see nothing beyond the unusual items that caught their attention.  She had finally realized that conspicuous visual aids were flashing red lights, warning signs that something was not quite right with the person who needed to use them, and the general reaction to anything abnormal was avoidance.  People would step all over each other to get the last seat on a train, but they would go out of their way to dodge a blind man carrying a white cane and asking for directions.  Over the years, the woman had come to understand society's philosophy regarding the visually impaired community:  Blind people should quietly retire to their dark, empty rooms and live out their lives in seclusion, never to be seen or heard from again. 

The woman reflected on this as she debated whether or not to ask one of the figures hurrying past her for assistance.  She knew that by making such a generalization about people's attitudes, she was guilty of the same prejudice she accused others of harboring.  She did not want to believe that most people were inherently cruel and selfish, so she considered other reasons why they might want to detach themselves from someone who was blind.  It was obvious that persons with such disabilities made others uncomfortable, but why?

To answer this question, the woman recalled episodes in her own life, ones in which she had behaved just as disgracefully as the people who had shown her so little consideration.  She remembered a boy in her sixth-grade class, a heavy-set, slow-moving youngster who suffered from diabetes and other medical problems.  Her most vivid memory of him was one in which she saw him making his sluggish, laborious way up the school steps, struggling to lift first one ponderous leg and then another, while she and her girlfriend ran effortlessly up the same set of stairs.  During her childhood, this boy had engaged few of her thoughts or emotions, but she remembered to this day something that her twelve-year-old friend had said to her about him:  "Every time I see him, I think to myself, why didn't that happen to me?"

As a grown-up many years later, the woman understood that this question was nothing more than an expression of guilt, and she knew how powerful and destructive an emotion this was.  In most cases, there was no logical reason for one person to feel responsible for someone else's misfortune, yet guilt was so entrenched in our culture that many people reacted this way.  

 
Religion was an important element in most societies, and the concept of guilt and atonement figured prominently in many faiths.  The Catholic Church, for instance, had taught the woman that everyone carried the stain of sin, so it didn't make sense that only some people had to suffer through ordeals such as blindness.  Those who escaped these fates felt that they had somehow gotten away with something, that others were carrying their burdens for them.  This feeling of personal blame was an unpleasant one, so it made sense that people would avoid situations that led to this distasteful association of ideas, such as encounters with blind persons.

The woman was jolted out of her reverie by the sudden ringing of bells.  The sound told her that she was a block away from a familiar church, and she re-oriented herself and set off in the right direction.  As she turned to go, she reconsidered the concept of guilt, and decided that it was all too complicated, too convoluted a process to be primarily responsible for the coldness displayed toward herself and other people with visual challenges.  Guilt was not an instinct but a learned response, the result of cultural influences such as religious teachings and ethical codes.  There was a more basic force at work here, the primal fear that was necessary for survival.  Although the question "Why didn't that happen to me?" could provoke guilt, that emotion was nothing compared to the terror produced by the realization, "That could happen to me." 

And it could happen at any time and any place.  Most of the blind people the woman knew had not been born that way.  A friend had become blind at age fourteen when his retinas had suddenly detached themselves for no apparent reason, and a student at school had lost most of his eyesight after being hit in the head with a basketball.  The woman's boyfriend had enjoyed perfect vision until his late thirties, when a hypertensive episode damaged his optic nerve and left him with only forty percent of his vision intact.  The circumstances were less important than the truth they represented.  None of these people deserved to lose their sight, but they all had lost it anyway.  They were living, breathing reminders that lives could be irreversibly changed in a matter of minutes or seconds. 

This was an undeniable but terrifying fact, and there was no point in dwelling on a hard truth if you couldn't do anything to change it.  The woman was as frightened of life's possibilities as anyone else, so she could hardly blame others for not wanting to be reminded that they had much less control over their lives than they liked to believe.

 
She remembered this later as she stood before a counter at a busy department store, waiting for assistance in purchasing some items.  The merchandise she needed was displayed in a locked glass case, in plain sight of everyone with good vision but inaccessible to her because she could not get close enough to see it.   The annoyed salesman was suggesting that people who couldn't see well should have other people do their shopping for them. 
The woman forgave him instantly.