Its been two years now since the death of my friend Catherine Vasalou. Catherine was totally blind, and just like this writer...one of our main interests was calling into “talk radio shows’’. Catherine was extremely well informed, very feisty, like Helen Keller and other blind notables she knew the isolation and discrimination toward other blind citizens. Catherine had never seen anything, she was born blind, attended the North Carolina School for the Blind, graduated from East Carolina University and did graduate work at UNC - Chapel Hill.
She returned home to Wilmington to care for her aging parents, which she did until they died. At the same time, she was responsible for both her parents and their home. She worked as a full time medical transcriptions at the two local hospitals. The only time I ever met Catherine, even though we talked on phone daily, was when my driver took me by her house and we took her for a ride in my 13th Cadillac. She had told me how much she wanted to ride in a Cadillac. My driver at the time was a black lady who knew exactly how to treat her and we stopped on the way to buy some strawberries and other things I knew she liked. She enjoyed listing to Rev. Sprouse on the radio. So, with her in the front with my driver, we drove down to his church, so my driver could describe the church to her, and then drove down to my beach house, so my driver could describe the beautiful home on the ocean. She called me later and said, “this was the nicest thing that ever has happened to me”.
Catherine had no living relatives, and the public had, in general, completely ignored this remarkable, wonderful woman of unusual intellect. She called radio talk shows all over the country, including Larry King, she would also often do trivia contests. I asked her one time, “in all the years you have been blind in this city how many times has anyone or group done anything for you?” She said, “when my mother died, one church group brought some food and a business where my mother worked helped pay her burial costs.” Catherine’s father was Greek, had migrated to this country and served in WWII. She told me at length how she taught him English. But, after her parents had died, no one else she knew visited her, except a cousin.
Catherine discovered that she had terminal cancer. She passed away in a nursing home but she told me ahead of time that there was a burial space next to her parents and that the funeral home had instructions to just bury her without announcements or services. She said, “the world has ignored me this long and I do not want any one to remember me in death.” This writer feels very much the same way, and has left similar instructions ‘out of sight, out of mind’. Most disabled citizens are ignored by family, friends and the public. Catherine said that at her own mother’s burial, a graveside service, the funeral director got everyone else into their vehicles and left her sitting alone by the grave, since she couldn’t see what was happening. Some people don’t realize a blind person cannot see what’s going on, she’d been forgotten.
Since I had been able to see as a young person, before the war, she would ask me to describe snakes and frogs, also buildings in town that never been described to her before. She had a seeing eye dog, Alma, while in college and one car load of young people hit her and the dog in the street one day and never stopped. It killed the dog, but she survived, and of course, law enforcement did nothing. The Commission for the Blind, the Department of Aging, never did anything to help her. She was completely crippled with arthritis. She continued to care for herself and her home even though she had to crawl up and down the steps. She had had rehabilitation training at the school for the blind, but since this totally blind veteran has never had one minute of rehabilitation training, she told me many ideas about laundry and preparing food.
One matter that bothered her her entire life and which was so indicative of the discrimination of minorities, such as the disabled, is the fact that like the public schools, the schools for the blind were already segregated. The black blind students were kept at a the school in Garner and the white blind students were kept in a school in Raleigh. It was always a mystery to Catherine that the black blind students were brought to the campus of the white blind school to do the yard work, raking leaves and so forth. Now we know this is true because it has been substantiated by black, blind adults who were at these schools as children.
The worst part of her life was that people in this town took advantage of her. She had a reverse mortgage on her house which had been left to her though her mother and grandmother but often had bad money problems. Trying to get the oil burner repaired, she told me of how one jeweler in town robbed her of her mother’s jewelry. A former mayor, who deals in antiques and pawn shops, robbed her of family furniture ,including an old photo of herself in an old curved glass frame. She hired one painter to paint the patio table and four chairs for which he charged her $476 and I estimated that he used three cans of white spray paint. Because of my intervention, he refunded her $300. Another “professing Christian” charged a unnecessary amount to re-tile her kitchen floor. These are just some of the things she told me about, and I’m sure there are many, many more.
As a small child, she had one brother, Billy, who fell in a pot of boiling water while her mother was doing the family wash (with which we older people are familiar). There she was, blind, the mother trying to get the two year old out the wash pot and her mother said, “you will have to stay with him while I go to the highway to stop traffic and get help.” She said she has never gotten his screams out of her mind or the feeling of his small body in the tiny coffin. Catherine was a small, overweight but very independent woman whose time on this earth was mostly a sad, isolated experience, but unlike many who ignored her, she had a great Christian faith. I’m sure she is in a much better place at this time.
No comments:
Post a Comment