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operation?”
    “Unfortunately, at this time…,” he began, and hearing his tone switch from upbeat to regretful was enough of an answer to make me stop listening. There was no cure, no treatment. This was the real deal, an old-school affliction where you get it, you’re fucked, case closed. But as my mind fell with increasing speed into despair, I clung for a moment to a ledge of doubt.
    “How can you be sure? How can you be sure that I have this?”
    Dr. Hall unfolded the ERG printout and handed it to me. Although it was blurred, the chart was easy to make out. It was more or less a straight line.
    “This is supposed to be sinusoidal,” he said, “with ups and—”
    I cut him off: “I know what sinusoidal means.”
    “It’s supposed to show peaks in electrical activity when your retina responds to the light,” he explained. “But in your case, we’re not seeing those peaks.”
    There’s no equivocation in a graph that should be wavy but is flat. Staring at that flat line, I knew no second opinion was necessary.
    “This is going to affect the way you live your life,” Dr. Hall went on, “and in a way, you’re in a fortunate position now because you’re just starting out. You’re going to want to consider this factor as you choose a career, and a place to live, and a partner.”
    I closed my eyes. Dr. Hall disappeared, along with his flat-line graph and the eye chart on the wall behind him. It wasn’t exactly darkness I found behind my eyelids; it was just absence, nothingness. I wondered if that was what blindness would be like.
    “You’re going to want to start making changes,” I heard Dr. Hall say. I opened my eyes and found him leaning forward, looking at me intently.
    “Do you understand?” he asked.
    “Yes,” I replied.
    But I didn’t. I didn’t have a fucking clue.

 
 
Tip #2: On sharing the news
    There is no good way to break the news of your incurable degenerative disease to loved ones.
    Not the weirdly upbeat delivery (“So, guess who’s going blind?”). Not the made-for-TV-movie approach (“There’s something I need to tell you; are you sitting down?”). Not the downplayed, bratty teen approach (“So my eyeballs are rotting. Whatever.”). All the ways bum people out.
    Prepare for tears. Gifts of talismans. Sudden and impassioned religious gestures such as the laying on of hands and benediction with holy water. None of this is likely to make you feel better. It may, in fact, freak you the hell out, and cause you to determine that this news is the kind best kept private. Just be sure you know what you’re getting into. You may find yourself a grown-ass woman in a disguise standing by a canal with a mobility cane in your hand. Stranger things have happened.
     

 
    2. MY FATHER’S STUDY
    It’s an unsettling sensation to witness your past getting a major rewrite. It was like Dr. Hall had run a “find and replace” search on the document of my life; for every instance of “clumsy,” replace with “blind.”
    I kept thinking of a book I’d read when I was about eight, a slim paperback about Helen Keller’s childhood. The illustration on the cover was framed in black and showed Helen, about the same age I was when I read it, blindfolded with a white cloth, holding a cat against her chest. I’d devoured the book, like I did so many, in an afternoon, and had read a chunk of it while following my mother around Cangiano’s Italian supermarket. I’d been so engrossed in the book, in fact, that I’d walked into a display of discounted biscotti and caused a cookie avalanche.
    “Would you pay attention to where you’re going?” my mother had hissed. “Put the damn book down for a minute!”
    So I did, turning my attention instead to picking out what kind of ravioli we were going to have for dinner. There was no way I could have guessed that the reason I bumped into the biscotti wasn’t because I was a bookworm with her head in the clouds but because the cells in my