I was reading today on BBC.com, a very poignant discussion of one blind man’s experiences dealing with his mother’s death. To sighted people it might not be obvious that the experience brings with it extra challenges and difficulties for the blind.  What particularly touched me was the comment:

“Sighted people are able to look at old photos and letters to help the grieving process. My photography skills leave a bit to be desired, and Mum could see so didn’t write to me in Braille.

I have ended up with: some old crockery, a couple of sound recordings and lots of memories. It doesn’t feel enough. Can my sighted friends and colleagues tell from my face when I am thinking of Mum, I wonder?”

We have previously discussed how photographs serve as time capsules, enabling us to bridge the time dimension.  This not just enables us to “interact” at some levels with people from a hundred years ago, but often they are all that remains for us of loved ones.  Vision is such a dominant sense for humans.  It is a sense denied blind people and they must rely on other sense and cues: letters perhaps or snippets of recorded voice. That is their perception space, and it is from perception that we form memories.

Of course, old photographs are never really enough either.  They are icons, often idealized ones, of what the person was or should have been.  They are poor substitutes indeed.  They endure the ages, offer some small level of immortality but in the end fall short by virtue of the fact that they are flat and two dimensional.  They do not breathe and worse they do not love us back.