We take so much for granted in life. God has given us so many gifts, and one of the most precious is the gift of sight. Never take it for granted. It is only when you don’t have sight that you realize how precious it is. Following is a story on the gratitude of Virginia Owens who was born blind.

Gwen cannot see well enough to drive or read large print, but she moves around the familiar setting of her house with few problems. “After all, I can see something as big as a chair!” she tells me. “At least most of it.”

She also cooks, though she admits she has mistaken grits for sugar at times and chili powder for cinnamon. And there have been times her earrings or her shoes have not matched. Gwen laughs at these mistakes.

Although she is blind, Gwen claims that blindness has its advantages.

“I don’t spend nearly as much time as sighted people worrying about my looks. I keep my hair cut short so that it’s easy to manage. I rarely wear makeup. When you can’t see yourself, you assume others can’t either,” she says.

Her children often warn Gwen about this insouciance. “Mother,” they say, “just because you can’t see them doesn’t mean they can’t see you.” They are especially amazed when Gwen begins dancing down grocery store aisles to the piped-in music.

“Another advantage to blindness,” Gwen claims, “is it gets you out of some activities you would not want to do anyway. I don’t have to work at the church bazaar, and I get to read while I’m cooking.” By read, Gwen means listen. She orders audio material from the Talking Books program of the National Library Service.

There are a few downsides to blindness, Gwen admits. She can’t work crossword puzzles by herself. Inability to drive keeps her at home more than she’d like. She’s dependent on others to take her to the grocery store and the pharmacy. This means fitting into other people’s schedules. It doesn’t leave much time for idle browsing in boutiques or hardware stores. But Gwen shrugs this off, “I probably save lots of money that way.”

Then she grows serious: “I remember the autumn day when I was taking my dog for a walk down a country road near my house. I looked across a spacious field where the grass was growing pale gold. I knew it was what’s called a beautiful day. But all I could see was a blur of yellow and a smudge of blue sky. All the detail was washed out.”

She pauses to take a deep berth. “That was the day I said goodbye to beauty.”

Of course, Gwen still enjoys the beauty she finds in music, scented candles, listening, the touch of a loved one, the differing textures of her cat’s fur and the grainy clay she shapes into bowls.

Gwen feels wonderfully grateful that her vision has stabilized over the past few years, thanks to the doctor at the Texas Medical Center everyone calls “the glaucoma guru.” She has learned a lot about the disease and encourages all her family and friends to have their intraocular pressure checked often. “Don’t be satisfied with ‘normal,” she says. “What was normal didn’t fit my situation, resulting in several years of visual down drift that could have been avoided.”

Gwen accepts her loss with resignation, gratitude and optimism. “Something happens to everyone eventually,” she shrugs. “This is just what happened to me.”

Every morning when she wakes up, Gwen looks around at familiar objects—her dresser, the overhead fan, a quilt rack—assessing how much she can make out. For the past few years, those objects have retained their misty, truncated shapes.

Then Gwen feels a surge of joy. She’s learned to value what remaining sight she has, about 5%, her doctor estimates. “It’s true you never know what you have till you lose it,” Gwen says. “But what I do have, thank God, makes so many things still possible.”

Sighted people may take vision for granted, but not Gwen. For Gwen, it’s a gift, not to be taken for granted.

When you wake up in the morning, do you thank God for the gift of sight and all the other gifts you take it for granted?

Virginia’s story is an inspiration to all of us as we work our way through this Coronavirus pandemic. We have to make temporary adjustments to our lives and lifestyles to break the grip of this disease. But these adjustments pale in significance to the adjustments Virginia has had to make, is making, and will always make every day of her life. Through it all, she is grateful.

When we get through this pandemic, will we have learnt anything? Will we be grateful?

—Fr. Hugh Duffy