wise words
Frank Bruni on
Living with Afflictions by Randy Kambic
courtesy of Duke University Sanford School of Public Policy
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ne day in late 2017, Frank Bruni, a writer for more than 25 years for The New York Times—including as a White House correspondent, op-ed columnist, Rome bureau chief and restaurant critic—woke up with partial loss of sight in his right eye. He found out that his condition was non-arteritic ischemic optic neuropathy caused by loss of blood flow to the optic nerve. While he began treatment, he started writing a memoir to document how he was dealing with his setback and to present the stories of family, close friends, previous interviewees and others that have also encountered and dealt with medical challenges. His new book, The Beauty of Dusk: On Vision Lost and Found, is a wise, inspiring and moving account that displays human perseverance and optimism in navigating trauma and afflictions. Some of the people he describes are his mother, who battled uterine cancer; a college friend that has Parkinson’s disease; Cyrus Habib, a blind Rhodes scholar who became the lieutenant governor of the state of Washington; Nebraska senator and wounded Vietnam War veteran Bob Kerrey; and Juan Jose, a Mexican diplomat dealing with retinitis pigmentosa, which causes progressive vision loss. Bruni, author of three previous bestsellers, is now a full-time professor at Duke University, teaching media-oriented classes in the Sanford School of Public Policy. He continues to write a weekly newsletter and occasional essays for The New York Times.
How is your eyesight now? Did writing The Beauty of Dusk help you better cope with your condition? My eyesight is stable, but compromised. I have to read and type more slowly in larger fonts. Writing the book helped me cope in many ways including by showing me that with the proper adjustments, I could very much continue with my writing career.
How can we implement “taking deliberate, concrete steps to move beyond sadness” with our afflictions in practical terms? The first step I think is recognizing how many people confront or live with affliction. That helps dilute the self-pity part of sadness. But another crucial step is realizing that what’s gone is gone, what’s lost is lost and you only compound your sadness by dwelling emotionally on what’s unchangeable versus embracing what you still have.
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