Counselors settled the spat itself to the kids' satisfaction, but within minutes one girl wandered to bed in a huff. Before long, she was in silent tears under the safety of her covers, but her only explanations seemed to be issues originating outside camp. As her cabin-mates cheered her up, we found that her opponent had curled up in a quietly weeping heap on her own bed across the cabin. Counselors and campers alike moved to divide and conquer.
I sat with the second girl, who whimpered, "I miss my mom," and perhaps like Counselor Robot I sprang into action: "You'll see her in just a few days, and then you can tell her about all the cool stuff you've done." But Counselor Robot was not prepared for her reply: "She died when I was two."
Suddenly I realized that there was more to this puzzle than the image that I had superimposed on the box. I had sometimes envisioned there trenches of allies and enemies - cooperating and battling teens; campers who had unique and likeable personalities but were often in need of rules, guidance and constant reminders not to exclude someone or touch other people's stuff.
Somehow, their lives beyond camp - at least to such a "human" extent as familial death - had not crossed my mind or expectations. It was easy to arrive at a "camp for the blind and visually-impaired" and assume that vision loss, with its unfathomable physical and social complications, was the toughest meat on their plates.
As the cabin once again came together to comfort one of its own, the girl disclosed that she had never known her father, explaining that he'd misunderstood her albinism and had believed, despite his daughter's full black heritage, that she, with her fair skin and bright eyes, was perhaps not his child. My heart shattered as each trivial nuisance in my life disintegrated to nothingness.There was little to be said or done to ease any of this, let alone to allow her curious peers to fully understand her sorrows, but finally an idea arose. Days later, she and a cabin-mate wrote letters to their deceased loved ones to toss into the closing campfire. Though I cannot tell to what extent this makeshift solution affected them, I hope that they have derived some healing and strength from their courageous step and in the future can find it a moment of growth in their youth. If nothing else, I wish for them to remember the efforts of their friends to comfort and reassure them that night; the night that several preteens put aside their egos and took up a torch of sincere empathy that I've so rarely witnessed in the age group.
This experience, most specifically, has caused me to realize that blindness is no more an impairment than a death ends the lives of beloved survivors. Each one is an obstacle; it may come in the form of a tragedy, but it has the potential to fortify. Blindness needn't be the death of sight, but a chance to overcome the loss or absence of vision. Where there is life, death cannot end all. Hope, at the very least, remains.
It is the hope that I see in a child who closed a letter to her deceased mother with the words: "See you later."
The gorgeous image used above was found here.
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