Elderly Woman’s Sight a Perplexing Gift

If Eva Suggs could, she would paint the world purple. She would live in a purple house and sleep on a purple pillow and drive a purple car. Sometimes, she would permit other colors into her world, but they would have to be bright, really bright, like the cherry-red barns that dot the Vermont countryside, so pretty beneath the great blue sky and the green hills that seem to roll forever.

Eva, 79, chuckles. She knows the most she will ever have is a purple dress. But an old lady can dream.

And now she can see.

Eva was born blind, victim of a rare genetic corneal defect that was passed on from her paternal grandfather, and that she, in turn, passed on to her children and their children and their children. A year ago she received what she calls her great gift--an operation that gave her sight.

After nearly 80 years of fumbling about in a colorless world, Eva can march down the pale yellow corridors of her rest home without touching the walls. She can revel in the twirl of a blue and gold dress. She can thrill at the way Felix the cat turns drowsily toward her when she calls his name. She can sneak delicious glances in the mirror to fix her hair.

“My sight,” Eva says joyfully, “is a gift from God.”

God’s gift has already fulfilled her most treasured dream--to see photographs of her parents before she dies. And it has let her gaze into the beautiful brown eyes of 2-year-old Renee, who, at 4 months, had the same eye surgery as her great-grandmother.

But Eva’s gift came with its own set of obligations and questions and worries. The world seems to expect so much now that she no longer leans on her red and white cane. Eva expects so much of herself.

Her vision is far from perfect. By most standards she is nearly blind--a notion that seems ridiculous to Eva as she proudly reads aloud the biggest letters on the doctor’s chart, or points out the color of a car.

Eva knows that blindness has sheltered her from more than the light. It shut her off from decisions, such as what clothes to wear or where to hang pictures on the wall. It shut her off from an education, from a cluttered mind.

She worries about falling. She worries about losing her gift and being suddenly thrust back into darkness. Most of all, she worries about her place in this dazzling world of daylight, where reds and yellows and golds glisten in the sun.

Sights for Sore Eyes

Eva is nervous. She fusses about her room, straightening her dress, touching up her hair, lingering in the comfort of the drawn shades. Finally, she takes a deep breath and steps into the light.

This sunny afternoon is a big one. Eva is taking her first stroll down Main Street. Her steps are labored, her gait hesitant. At times she looks frightened and lost. “It’s exciting,” Eva says gamely, her pale greenish-blue eyes watering in the glare.

She refuses to wear the thick black glasses the doctor gave her. Not here, not on Main Street, not where she might meet someone she knows. No, Eva wants to walk down the street and nod at neighbors and smile her good mornings to the world.

But every step brings confusion.

Eva has no idea why there are so many cheerfully decorated banners flapping outside the stores. Sure, they look pretty, but aren’t they supposed to signify something, like a parade or a holiday? Surely store owners don’t just hang them out for decoration.

“There must be something on,” she concludes.

The clothes store is enticing, but there are three wooden steps outside. Steps are a crisis. They swirl before her, a blur of crisscrossing lines. She has no idea how high they are, how low, how far apart. She misses her cane.

In the window of a children’s store, her eyes settle on a poster of Winnie the Pooh. Eva grew up on an isolated farm near the Canadian border. The only bears she knows of are wild ones. She has no idea what to make of this tubby little creature with his honey pot. Disconcerted, she moves on.

A yellow sports car screeches to a halt at the stop sign, its radio pounding loud enough to make the pavement pulse.

“Just like a band,” Eva says, beaming at the two youths inside. They throw bored, disdainful glances her way. Eva is thrilled. She can’t get over the ever-changing expressions on the faces of strangers.

The youths roar off and return a few minutes later. Eva smiles at them again.

*

Eva grew up on Isle La Motte, a tiny island on Lake Champlain, dotted with cornfields and apple orchards, drenched in a beauty that as a child she could only feel.

Eva doesn’t need her eyes to find her way to the small brown farmhouse where her parents reared 14 children. The smell of the shore, the rustle of the trees, the feel of the road tell her she is home.

“Isn’t it pretty,” she says, her eyes confirming the image she always carried in her head.

It’s her first trip back in years, and for now, memories are stronger than sight: the sound of her sisters teasing her for being afraid of cows, the gentle touch of her mother guiding her hands as she teaches her to bake a cake, the worried tone of her father as he tells her she cannot go to school.

Her family was poor. Her father worked another man’s farm, milked another man’s cows. Eva would help, herding cows, picking raspberries, scrubbing floors while her brothers and sisters went to school. Eva, the sixth child, was the only one born blind.

“Pa protected me,” she says. “He didn’t let me leave the house. No boyfriends for me.”

When her father died, her mother moved the family to Alburg, a tiny town on the Canadian border about seven miles away. Eva met Ward Washburn when he came to deliver wood one day.

Eva talks of their marriage as one of convenience: She needed someone to take care of her, and Ward had just built a house. They lived together for about 30 years, rearing two children, Lawrence and Shirley. The children went to a boarding school for the blind in Boston when they were 7, and Eva rarely had contact with them after that.

Today Lawrence’s daughter, Michelle Willard, lives in Eva’s old house, along with her husband, Shawn, and their daughters, Danielle, 4, and Renee, 2.

Michelle inherited her grandmother’s spunk along with her bad eyes. It was she who persuaded Eva to undergo corneal transplants at the age of 78. The surgery, a relatively simple procedure, had been available for years. But no one had ever told Eva about it, and at first she was afraid.

Little Renee convinced her. If the baby’s eyes could be opened up to the world, why not those of her great-grandmother?

Eva is mesmerized by Renee. She follows the toddler everywhere, soaking up every expression, every glance.

“Look at her, she’s so cute,” Eva cries, as she hugs the wriggling child and wonders, for the first time, what her own children looked like at that age.

Renee’s eyes, perfect brown buttons, fascinate Eva most of all. Months after the child was born, her corneas, the transparent tissue that covers the iris and pupil, began rapidly turning a dull gray. The family curse. The medical term for their blindness is congenital corneal dystrophy. Doctors say they have rarely seen anything like it.

In the kitchen, Eva and Michelle talk about the child, about the chances she will have, about their own eyes and the rogue gene in their family gene pool.

Michelle produces photographs of her father and Eva’s son--Lawrence--a strong, handsome man with crooked eyes and a shy smile. Eva pores over them sadly. It’s hard to look at pictures of her children and not feel guilty.

“Grandma, there were good times too,” Michelle says.

Eva shakes her head. She worries that she wasn’t a good enough mother, worries that is why Shirley died in her late 30s and Lawrence killed himself at 43.

The suicide came seven years after the operation that gave him sight, and the family has always wondered: Did he choose to die because he couldn’t cope? Others, overwhelmed by the sudden gift of vision, have made that choice.

Eva is vague about these and other details of her life she doesn’t want to talk about. She left Ward in the early 1970s and spent the next two decades in a home for the blind in North Carolina. There, she learned skills for the first time: Braille, typing, crochet. And she was married again, to a blind resident named Frederick Suggs, who died of cancer shortly after their wedding.

In 1995 her sisters paid for her ticket back to Vermont. Two years later Michelle took her to Dr. William Eichner for the first time.

Operation Opened Her Eyes

The nurses teased Eva about how it was “love at first sight” when they removed the bandages and she gazed into Dr. Eichner’s eyes. In fact, Eva remembers a dizzying confusion of light, more brilliant than she could have imagined.

“Daylight,” she thought. “So this is what it looks like.”

Gradually the light gave way to shapes, to a world that was far more cluttered than she had believed. The operations--one on each eye--took place six months apart, in July 1997 and January 1998. During the surgeries, which each lasted about an hour, Dr. Eichner removed the bad corneas and stitched in new ones from an eye bank. He describes it as replacing windows that were blacked out with ones that are clear.

Eva spent a night in the hospital after each operation. Then she was driven back to the rest home.

Alone in her room, Eva tried to sort through the emotions and colors swimming around in her head. I’m not handicapped anymore, she kept thinking. I can see like a normal person.

But what was normal? Was this the way others viewed the world, this chaotic jumble of doors and windows and colors and cars? Eva was given no brochures to guide her, no advice on how to cope.

But Eva knew exactly what to do. She knelt before the crucifix above her bed and said a prayer of thanks. Then she took out photographs of her parents and stared at them for a long, long time.

Her father looked skinnier than she had imagined, her mother heavier.

And her own reflection: That was the most intriguing image of all. In a hand-held mirror she examined her face, touching her soft brown curls, tracing her fingers over her lips when she smiled, stroking her cheek. She liked what she saw. Except for the wrinkles. “My skin was much more smooth before the operation,” she says.

Even Dr. Eichner is surprised by the relative ease with which Eva has adjusted to sight. Tests had shown her to be totally blind, not able to distinguish any difference between light and dark. Today she can read if the print is large enough.

Eva says it is not hard to master letters after learning the alphabet by touch. Distance is much more difficult. She doesn’t understand foreground and background. She is startled by the constant shifting of her shadow.

From the window in her room, Eva can see a river and a farm at the other side. But she has no sense of how far away they are. She sees cows in the field, but she has no idea if there are 100 or 500.

Eva knows these are things that her eyes might never learn. She professes not to care.

“I’m just going to see all that I can,” she says, “and not worry about what I have missed.”

*

Eva spends her days sitting in her room, gazing at the river and her photographs. Her talking watch announces when it is time for lunch and bingo and Mass.

She longs for a Bible with letters large enough to read. She fantasizes about going to Hollywood and seeing the faces of the stars, especially Dolly Parton, the prettiest one. She would love to see a moose. She says she would be content, now that she has seen a bit of the world, to close her eyes and die. She is ready to see her parents in heaven.

“How do you know there is a heaven?” asks an old man as they sit on the rest home porch and discuss God’s gift. “You can’t see it. You can’t see God.”

“But I can see all his creations,” Eva says.

She clicks her fingers and leans toward the home’s pet dog, a golden Belgian shepherd. “Here, Beauty,” she calls. “Come here, Beauty.”

Old and lame and a little blind himself, Beauty shuffles over and nuzzles her hand.