Recently, I left my regular sunglasses in my other purse and needed to use my spare pair. Which were Mitzi’s.
As I sat there at the beach, wearing her sunglasses and looking at the world around me through the same lenses she looked through so often, I wondered what she really saw…and what Alzheimer’s let her see.
She lost the ability to read a few years ago. Along with her depth perception. And peripheral vision. As I sat there, I made a small circle with each hand and held it up to the lenses so that I could only really see through the small holes in the circles of my hands. It was pretty humbling to look through those small holes. The giant beautiful landscape of the blue-green sea and off-white sand, the birds, the people, all of that was reduced to the circumference of a quarter-sized visibility over each eye.
I had a truly profound moment of awakening about how vital the family, friends, and caregivers are to someone with Alzheimer’s while I sat there looking through the quarters of Mitzi’s lenses. Moreover, I marveled at the way her heart saw people even when her eyes weren’t working that well. She saw the beauty in the people around her, the hurts, the hopes, and a million different things to be grateful for. May we all have lenses like those to see the world through…????
