INTRODUCTION: My mother was mostly blind during the final years of her life. A passionate reader, a woman who loved to sew and mend and cook and clean, her infirmity made the favored activities of her life nearly impossible. She did learn to crochet by touch, and made over one hundred Afghans for her grand- and great-grandchildren in those final years, but they were years lived in temporal darkness. But through it all she glowed! There was a source of light in her, a shining certainty, that enabled her to see more clearly than any of those whose love and compassion brought them to her side to read to her and to visit with her and to reminisce with her. The real light of the world, rather than being dimmed by her handicap, increased its brightness and radiance as the weeks and months passed by, until it seemed there was no darkness in her at all. More than any person I have ever known, she knew what Jesus meant when he said, “I am the light of the world.”
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