Second Sight

           For me, the worst part of going blind wasn’t losing my sight – it was losing my family. The same traffic accident that left me lying nearly paralyzed in a pool of my own blood mixed with free-flowing gasoline with three lacerations, a punctured lung, and transmission fluid dripping from someplace into my eyes had left me hurt. The last thing I remember seeing was my husband lying beside me torn in three pieces by the wreckage of one of the other vehicles that we had collided with. I could not see them, but I had demanded to know what had become of my twins, and was told they were dead in the backseat. Only my sister had the guts to tell me what I wanted to hear, that one of them had been mangled to the point of near decapitation, and the other would have appeared unhurt if his neck hadn’t snapped.

            But that was only the beginning, really, and that was the hardest concept for me to grasp. I could handle hearing the details of how my two children, only a few years old, had left this world. I try not to think of what it was like to be able to see, since I can’t do it without thinking of that last detail, my husband dead beside me. I could see his insides, and that isn’t the part that makes me sick.

            It’s the fact that they aren’t here, and I am. For two years after the accident I felt like I wanted to die, and most likely would have tried to kill myself. That is how my blindness had saved me. I couldn’t make out enough of the world around yet, so I could not gather the means to commit suicide. So I was forced to endure the physical and emotional pain of being the only survivor of the family I had made for myself.

            I was numb for the next few years afterward, going through the motions of feeling useless and familiarizing myself with life without sight. I had finally reached a point of contentment in where I was when I met my next love of my life, the man who looked beyond my past and my blindness and loved me all the same.

            The pain is still there, it will never go away – but he has given me something to continue living for, and I am sure my family would understand. Before him, I had reached a contentment, but it was merely existing; now I have a husband, and the possibility of a family again. So in that way, my blindness had saved me so that I might save myself once again.