From the start, I sensed something special about him. I didn't know he was blind and suffered from cerebral palsy.
Born premature, my brother spent his first months in an incubator. I was 4 years old, clueless about babies.
"What is that?" I said the day he finally came home.
"That's your brother," said my mother. "Call him Joe."
I poked him and he grabbed hold of my finger and my heart.
"Whoa," I said, "he's strong!"
Little did I know. Joe would prove stronger than the sum of his infirmities, the weakness in his legs, the limits of his mind, the never-ending night of his vision. More than strong, he is fierce. I saw it clearly that day and have never doubted it.
When he was 6 months old, my mother brought him home from a checkup and told me to watch him while she fixed supper. We started playing a game I called "dogs," rolling on the floor like pups. Then I looked up and saw my mother watching us. She was crying.
"He's blind," she said. "The doctor told me today."
I looked at Joe. He was laughing. "He can't be blind," I said. "He smiles at my face."
"He smiles at your voice," she said. "He'll never see your face."
That was that. Joe was blind. Mama went back to cooking. I went back to playing a dog.
Joe's fierceness of heart served him well, but it didn't make him easy to live with. He flat-out refused help of any kind ("I can do it, Sister, get out of my way.") But he made me do a few things: Tell him stories; sing him songs (he liked "Love Lifted Me"); and describe the way things looked.
Sunrise, for example. He'd feel it through a window warm on his face. Then he'd wake me up to tell him what it looked like. If I got it wrong, he'd say, "Nope, that's not it. Try again."
When he was 7, Joe spent a month in a hospital following a surgery that failed to help his legs. A nurse told my mother he fell asleep every night singing "Love Lifted Me."
From the age of 8, he boarded at a school for the deaf and the blind, learning to read Braille and beat up deaf boys. When he was 16, the school said he'd learned enough and sent him home with a Braille typewriter and that fierceness of heart that at times forced my mother to double up on her nerve pills.
At 21, Joe moved out to live on his own, he said, "like a man." He learned to cook, clean, do his own laundry and most anything else he pleased.
Then he met the love of his life. She, too, was blind. They dated three weeks before eloping. When Joe called to tell me, he said, "Even a blind man can fall in love at first sight."
They shared 10 good years before he lost her to cancer. In painful proximity, he also lost our mother, who was his champion, and our stepfather, who was Joe's best friend.
What is left when you lose the loves of your life? My brother clung with an iron fist to three gifts: faith, hope and love.
His faith grew stronger. His hope held fast. And his love for his family and the Creator who gave him life has never dimmed.
Some people pity my brother for all he has lost or never had. I envy him for his fierceness of heart and the riches of his soul.
The years ahead may prove to be his hardest. His legs are growing weaker, threatening to rob him of the independence he's fought so hard to keep.
My sister (who replaced our mother as his champion) and I often wonder what will happen if Joe can't live on his own. What would it do to him? It's not up to us. We'll do what we can, but it's his life. He won't have it any other way.
You don't find strength to do something until it's time to do it. Joe has found it whenever he needed it. I believe he will again. Love will lift him. It always has. Even a blind man can see that.
Award-winning columnist Sharon Randall writes about the ordinary and extraordinary:
randallbay@earthlink.net
Family on 01/28/2015