|
Nancy Brown, 65, of Spotsylvania County uses sign language to communicate. Brown was born deaf and lost her eyesight while in her 30s.
Frank Brown pushes his mother through the aisles of the Wal-Mart
Frank Brown reads the morning paper to his mother, Nancy Brown, in their Thornburg home. Since she is deaf and blind, they use a hand-over-hand sign language.
Nancy Brown talks to Jim Cahill at a coffee shop in Spotsylvania. Brown joins a group of deaf people who gather there each month.
Nancy Brown feels her way down from the porch of her home |
BY JIM HALL
One of the benefits of having a mother who can't see, hear or speak is that you can plan a surprise party for her while she's in the room.
Which is what Frank Brown Jr. did.
This spring Brown called friends and relatives to invite them to a surprise 65th-birthday party for his mother, Nancy Brown.
Brown, 36, planned to take his mother to lunch at Massaponax. Then, rather than go back to their Spotsylvania County home, he would take her to Fredericksburg, where family and friends would be waiting.
But Nancy Brown wasn't completely surprised. She is deaf, blind and mute, but not unaware.
After the birthday lunch, Frank Brown turned north onto U.S. 1 to go to the party, rather than south toward home.
Nancy Brown, riding in the passenger seat, knew something was up.
"Where are we going?" she asked, using sign language. "Are we going on Route 1 south?"
Frank extended his right hand, and she placed her hand on top of his so she could "hear" his reply.
"No, something different," he signed.
She noticed that the pavement under the car felt different. And the inside of the car grew darker for an instant when they passed under Interstate 95.
When they got to the party, 20 people awaited them. Nancy Brown was delighted to find her sister-in-law from Durham, N.C., and her sister and her husband from Roanoke.
"Yes, I was very surprised," she said.
BLIND AND DEAF
Nancy Brown is one of perhaps 3,000 deaf-blind people in Virginia.
Accurate numbers are hard to come by. Experts say that the deaf-blind often don't describe themselves that way, especially if they can see or hear at all.
Brown, however, fits almost any definition of the term. Recently, when asked about her losses, she sat at her kitchen table and typed on her Braille typewriter.
"I am not totally blind yet, but I am still blind," she wrote.
As for her hearing, she typed: "I grew up a deaf person not able to hear anything."
As a result, she doesn't speak.
Brown began to lose her sight in the 1970s. She was in her 30s and the mother of three small children. Within 12 years, she was almost totally blind.
"I was very shocked," she said.
She remembers telling the doctor who diagnosed her, "It can't be," and asking, "Why me?"
She added simply, "I cried."
Her loss was gradual, apparent at night and with a narrowing of her field of vision. She compensated by using glasses and large-print text.
She remembers seeing Frank, her son, graduate from Spotsylvania High School in 1991 and later seeing one of her daughters graduate, but little after that. She regrets that she has never seen Sully, her 10-year-old grandson. She's told that he looks like her late husband.
Eventually she resigned herself to her blindness and began to learn Braille and other skills.
She has retinitis pigmentosa, a condition in which the retina slowly degenerates. When the disorder happens to a deaf person, the dual loss is described as Usher syndrome.
Today, Brown sees little more than blankets of light and dark. At night she can see moonlight, fire and Christmas lights.
GRADUATE OF GALLAUDET
Brown was born Nancy Setzer in Morganton, N.C., the fifth of 10 children. Both she and a sister were born deaf, a fact she attributes to her parents' being first cousins.
She can hear some loud noises, such as thunder or fireworks. Most of the time, however, she hears nothing.
Her father died when she was 11. He owned an auto body shop and was the first to teach her finger-spelling, a form of sign language, which he learned from a customer. Later she taught her younger sister.
Brown went first to the North Carolina School for the Deaf and later to Gallaudet University in Washington, where she earned a bachelor's degree in library science.
Today, when she talks with someone, she uses a tactile, or hand-over-hand, form of American Sign Language favored by the deaf-blind.
When someone is signing to her, she places her left hand lightly on the knuckles of the other person and reads his or her hand movements. To speak, she signs with both hands.
MOTHER OF THREE
After graduation from Gallaudet, Brown was working at a bank in Washington and later in Northern Virginia when she met Frank Brown.
He, too, was deaf, a native of Tennessee who attended the schools for the deaf in Tennessee and Virginia. He was an auto body repairman.
They married in 1970, and later had Frank Jr. and two daughters, Connie and Bobbie, none of whom is deaf. The family lived in Alexandria, then Fredericksburg and finally Spotsylvania.
For the last 23 years, Brown has lived in a two-story Cape Cod, surrounded by a field, near Thornburg.
After his father died in 2006, Frank Brown Jr., who is single and does not work, became his mother's link to the rest of the world. Nancy's daughters and grandson live nearby.
Mother and son spend much of their day together. He uses sign language to read the morning paper to her. He also helps around the house and takes her shopping and to the doctor.
She lives mostly on the first floor of the house, moving carefully from room to room, her left hand out to guide her. She is small, about 4-foot-9 and 100 pounds, with gray hair.
Wherever she goes, she drags an oxygen line, attached to a cannula in her nose. She smoked two packs of cigarettes a day for 27 years. She quit about five years ago.
The rooms of the house are cluttered, but she knows where everything is, and Frank never moves anything.
Recently she asked him to retrieve a family photo, but he couldn't find it.
"It's behind the door," she signed.
He looked again, but still couldn't find it. She got up from the couch and felt behind the bedroom door. The picture was not there.
She checked another room and found it.
"I moved it," she signed.
FIXES HER OWN MEALS
Most days, Nancy rises early to fix breakfast.
Recently, she filled a measuring cup with water, then felt for the coffee maker on the coun-ter.
With the coffee brewing, she went to the refrigerator for the Egg Beaters, margarine and sausage patty.
The kitchen was quiet, but she couldn't hear the clicking of the pilot as she ignited the gas burner. The knob for the burner has foam dots so she can adjust the flame.
She also placed her hand above the fire to measure the heat. Too high, she decided, and moved the knob.
While the sausage was cooking, she touched a fork to the bottom of the skillet.
"If it's sizzling, I can feel it," she said.
In this way she cooks by touch and smell, or, as she says, "cooking without looking," the title of a television show for the blind.
Soon the smoke alarm sounded, but she did not hear it.
Frank came from another room to silence it.
"That's what wakes me up in the morning," he said. "Whenever she cooks sausage or bacon."
CHOOSING PLASTIC BAGS
Later, after Frank took his mother to Fredericksburg for a doctor's appointment, they stopped for groceries.
Frank pushed her through the aisles in a wheelchair cart. At one point, they stopped for plastic bags.
Frank pulled the snack-size bags from the shelf. But Nancy shook her head and flicked her wrist. She wanted another size.
Frank tried the sandwich-size bags. Again, she ran her fingers over the box. Again she shook her head.
Finally, Frank chose the storage-size bags. Nancy nodded.
She placed them in her cart, and mother and son moved on, to repeat their silent exchange over cans of coffee.
TO BE UNDERSTOOD
Last month, Nancy and Frank traveled to Raleigh, N.C., for a picnic.
There she met the wife of a man who, like her, has Usher syndrome. The woman complained that her husband was too dependent and refused to learn Braille.
"He's not accepting his blindness," Brown said.
Brown's approach has been the opposite, to be as independent as possible, to understand and be understood.
The woman described her husband as despondent, but Brown describes herself as grateful.
She is grateful for the love and care of her children, she said, grateful for her independence and grateful for the memories of a world she once could see.
"I love my life so much that I could not hate myself for what I am," she typed. "I am deaf and blind. Why should I hate myself?"
Jim Hall: 540/374-5433
Email: jhall@freelancestar.com
|
About this story Nancy Brown participated in this story in a number of ways. Frank Brown, her son, and Arva Priola of the disAbility Resource Center served as interpreters during interviews. Also, Brown answered a list of questions that had been translated into Braille by Nancy Buck at the Central Rappahannock Regional Library. Roger Bourdon, a retired history professor at the University of Mary Washington, translated Brown's Braille responses to those questions. --Jim Hall |
