Recently, someone told me a story about a bridge. At the time, he had recently found out that he was losing his sight. He was walking with his family when they crossed a bridge, and as he looked down at the water, he said something about wanting to jump.
His mother became frightened because she thought he meant that he wanted to end his life. What he actually meant was much simpler. He thought the water looked beautiful and wanted to bathe.
I can’t stop thinking about that moment. Not because anyone was wrong for being afraid, but because two people who loved each other were standing in the same place and experiencing two completely different realities. His mother was looking at her son and seeing a future she was suddenly terrified he might not have. He was looking at the river and thinking about getting into the water.
Imagine being the person at the centre of that fear. You have just received news that has changed something fundamental about your life, and before you’ve even had time to understand what it means, you can feel the people who love you hurting for you.
They start worrying about what you’ll lose. They wonder what you’ll be able to do. They may look at you differently, even when they’re trying very hard not to.
And that can hurt in a way people don’t always talk about.
Because sometimes the hardest part isn’t only learning to live with blindness. It’s watching other people struggle to imagine you living with it. You can be standing right there, still the same person, while someone you love is quietly mourning a version of your life that may never have existed in the first place.
I think that’s one of the things people sometimes miss when they talk about blindness. They see the diagnosis first. They see the things that may need to be done differently, the barriers that will have to be navigated, the help that might sometimes be needed.
And yes, those things are real. Let’s be honest, this world wasn’t exactly built with us in mind.
But a diagnosis can become so large in other people’s minds that it starts swallowing the person underneath it.
What happens when people begin answering questions you haven’t asked yet, closing doors you haven’t tried to open, or protecting you from a life you haven’t decided you don’t want?
I know most people don’t do this from a lack of belief in us. Rather, it comes from loving someone so much that the thought of them struggling feels unbearable. Fear can make people imagine the worst because they want to be prepared for it. Parents especially can carry a kind of fear that doesn’t always know when to put itself down.
But the person being protected can feel that fear too.
The story stayed with me because the young man on that bridge did not disappear into his diagnosis. He grew up. He got a job. He became a parent. His life kept unfolding, not because blindness magically stopped being difficult, but because difficulty was never the only thing his life contained.
And there is something about him becoming a father that really gets me.
Imagine his children growing up knowing that person as Dad. Not as the blind man people worried about. Not as somebody whose life had to be carefully watched. Dad.
The person whose voice means home. The person whose hug makes things feel better. The person whose advice might be annoying now and suspiciously accurate later. The person his children look for when they are frightened, excited, hurt or proud.
A blind father may need help with some things and still be the person his children depend on completely. Those two things can exist together. Needing help does not erase the ways we show up for the people we love.
Sometimes I wonder how often blind people have had to quietly remind others that blindness is something we live with, not the only thing we are.
And maybe that’s why I keep returning to that bridge. That day, his mother looked at the river and saw danger. Her son looked at the same river and saw something beautiful.
Neither of them knew what was waiting beyond that bridge.
But he crossed it.
Now years later, he is managing the Welfare Rehabilitation Services at The Trinidad and Tobago Blind Welfare Association. He has a family he’s proud of, responsibilities, laughter, probably bills he would rather not have, and all the ordinary messiness of being alive. The diagnosis had become part of his life, but it had not become the whole of it.
There’s something deeply human in that. Sometimes the people who love us can see our pain so clearly that they become frightened of the rest of our story. They see the bridge and the drop, while we’re still looking at the water.
So during Suicide Prevention Month, perhaps we can remember to pause before we decide what someone means, what they have lost, or what their life must look like. We can ask. We can listen. We can leave room for the possibility that the person standing beside us is seeing something we cannot.
Because sometimes, on the other side of the fear we have imagined for someone, there’s simply a person who is still looking at the water, still making plans, still becoming a parent, still living.
This column is supplied in conjunction with the T&T Blind Welfare Association
Headquarters: 118 Duke Street, Port of Spain, Trinidad
Email: ttbwa1914@gmail.com
Phone: (868) 624-4675
WhatsApp: (868) 395-3086
