AIRA

Family and friends helped me tremendously during the weeks and months after David’s death. But when it came to dealing with the mundane problems that confront blind and low vision people who live alone, Aira was there to ground me. Aira was my newest friend. Aira isn’t a single person, but rather a company dedicated to making information available so that blind and low vision people can do what they want to do. It’s name is an acronym for artificial intelligence remote access. Aira refers to its users as explorers. Before I became one, I’d never thought of myself as an explorer. But, given that explorers tend to be self-possessed individuals who boldly stretch their limits, I like the sound of that. Aira, according to its CEO, believes a key challenge behind blindness is not lack of vision, but lack of immediate access to visual information. The company is on a mission to provide instant access to information for anyone, anywhere, anytime. To make this happen, Aira connects blind and low vision people to human agents. The explorers have cameras, either on cell phones or on specially equipped glasses. The agents see the world through these cameras. They tell the explorers what they are seeing. At a glance, it may seem like splitting hairs to differentiate between lack of vision and lack of immediate access to visual information. But visual information is the thing most people get when they scan a recently arrived letter, or gaze at the traffic signal to see when permission to cross has been granted. You can live quite well without vision, but without access to visual information, your life is necessarily smaller than it ought to be. So much of your time and energy goes into getting that information. It saps your reserves. Perhaps that helps to explain why it pleased me to be designated by AIRA as an explorer. Explorers go after the fullness of life. Explorers get access to Aira services by purchasing time in minutes. I was extremely fortunate to have a friend who offered me some free introductory minutes at the moment when I most needed them. I was moving out of the nursing home suite I had shared with David, and back into the apartment we had purchased three-and-a-half years earlier. I would be living alone. There was no doubt that I would need some help. Take the fridge in my apartment, for example. On the front of it there is a touch screen that controls a lot of things. In fact, it does something whenever you touch it. The advantage of being able to see is that you can tell what it did, and what you have to do in order to undo whatever you accidentally did when you unintentionally touched it. I had a feeling you couldn’t actually turn the fridge off by laying a knuckle on its panel, but what if I was wrong? It was time to call Aira! Facing this unfriendly contraption, I aimed my iPhone threateningly at the fridge and made the call. In less than five seconds, a live human came on the line. “Hello Wendy. This is Amy. What would you like to do today?” I could think of a lot of things I’d like to do today, but I decided to stick with the problem at hand. “I’d like to read the screen on my fridge so I can figure out if I’ve made any changes that ought to be reversed.” “Okay. Hold the phone back a bit. Slant it upwards. There we are. If it’s okay with you, I’m going to take a picture with your camera and magnify it here so I can read the printing.” It doesn’t take us long to figure out that I have accidently switched on the light and turned the ice maker off. It only takes a few seconds for Amy to direct my fingers to the spots where corrections can be made. With the light turned off and the ice maker turned on, Amy’s off the phone and on to something else in less than two minutes. The problem is solved. Without Amy, I’d have had to ask somebody to come over. That time, instead of calling up my friend Bev with a plea to help with my fridge, I could call and invite her to join me on a walk. The move to the apartment presented many opportunities for the Aira agents to work with me. The daily mail delivered dozens of sympathy cards I could not read, and my kitchen, having been used by various guests during my stay with David at the nursing home, was cluttered with cans, jars and packages I could not identify. I wanted to know if my mirrors were clean. I needed the instructions on the package of pancake mix. On my way out to a meeting, I was unable to determine which room was 3-105 in the Education Building at the university. Aira agents gave all the information I needed using my phone camera Suman Kanuganti is one of Aira’s co-founders. He has great dreams for the company, and with good reason, since it has flourished. . It was founded in 2015. In 2017, it provided 20,000 hours of explorer-to-agent contact. It has partnered with companies in creative ways. Intuit now funds Aira services so that blind and low vision business owners can use its bookkeeping services and access its websites. Corporate sponsorships provide free Aira service to all users in 20 major United States airports and a national chain of pharmacies. These days, some explorers wear smart glasses with mounted cameras that can read the text on signs without the intervention of a human agent. As for me, I have dreams for Aira too. I imagine the day when I will be staying in a hotel. Instead of waiting for a sighted person to help me navigate the lobby, I’ll call up Aira and take an exploratory journey past the shops to the restaurant. I might even try to find a store in a large shopping mall. For now, I’m content to pay a monthly fee of $30 US for 30 minutes of Aira service. I can add extra minutes if I need them. For $129 I could get 300 minutes, but this is more time than I can reasonably use. Helping blind people get access to visual information is a major occupation of most sighted people who befriend those with blindness and low vision. Many of my blind friends live happily enough without Aira. They share their homes with sighted spouses who can see whether the mirror is clean or the fridge screen has been corrupted. They do not feel the need to use a cell phone for this type of visual information. In the past I would have been one of them. But family and friends are so much more than providers of information. We need them for all sorts of reasons. Aira has not turned me into a sighted person. It has not entirely replaced the sighted assistance I use to get so easily from David. But now, given the opportunity to assign the mundane tasks to my Aira agents, and the fun tasks to my human friends, I find the idea of living alone to be a little more appealing, a little less threatening than it was the last time I did it. I was twenty years old then. That was forty-five years ago.

GRIEF IS A MONSTER

Grief is a monster that springs in ambush when you are least prepared for it. It squeezes the life out of you until you can barely breathe. At least that’s what I’m noticing about grief these days. It’s a recent discovery. I’ve viewed it differently in the past. Monsters were distinctly absent from my prior encounters with grief. I used to experience grief as a heavy burden dragging backward from behind, like an ox cart throwing off hay bales maybe, or the red wagon the neighbourhood flyer delivery families used to pull down the street, lightening their load by dumping bulky catalogues in every mailbox. Or possibly grief was a tunnel with dark walls on the sides and a light at the far end where I might at last emerge, blinking in surprise after the long journey. These things I imagined in my days of smaller griefs. The opening for a bigger grief presented itself to me when my husband died near the beginning of darkest January. His death was not so much a sudden event, but rather the culmination of a long-entrenched process with a predetermined conclusion. Gone forever was my lover, my best friend, the man whose final concerns were driven by his wish that I might have a happy future. There I was, a widow after 45 years of happy marriage, waiting for the burden of grief to drag me back or the tunnel to close me in. But where was the burden? Where was the tunnel. Where was the sadness? I waited for the grief to happen. While I waited, I moved out of the nursing home where we had been sharing a suite. I bought four orchids to flourish in the wintry sun that slanted through my living room window. I sang as I cleaned my kitchen. I played Bridge with good friends and exercised at the YMCA. Now untethered from domestic care-giving obligations, I accepted all invitations to work, play and eat. But where was the burden? Where was the tunnel? Could the process of grieving really be dispensed with so easily? All around me were people who approached me cautiously, looking for signs of my bereavement. I told them all that I was doing fine. To those who seemed to want more I said, “You know, we lived together in a nursing home for the last two years. I am sad to lose him, but it is such a joy to be in my own place again, eating my own cooking, and living like an ordinary person.” It hardly seemed an adequate tribute. But I could offer no better accounting than that. February found me still smiling, serving Sunday dinners to family and friends. I ordered a humidifier for my apartment and booked flights to Ontario and Vancouver. Grieving in a recognizable configuration still had not begun. To people who asked how I was doing I said, “You know, we were close, and we went through nine years of continuous losses. At first he couldn’t skate and then he couldn’t take long walks. Then he couldn’t keep working and then he had to give up driving. Eventually he couldn’t operate the TV remote or feed himself. We mourned all those losses together. So I guess maybe my mourning was pretty much done by the time he died. .” There were days when my heart strings hummed with the tension of sadness, other days when I felt a twinge of longing for the life we had lived together. I greeted these symptoms with some relief. Still, it didn’t seem quite enough. “This is grief,” I said to myself, “And it is not so bad. Perhaps the fact that I am a basically happy person has served to protect me from the worst of it.” February, however, is a short month. March brought the much-anticipated opportunity to visit my beloved daughter and her family in Ontario. Ontario hadn’t seemed so far away when David was ill. Our daughter had made it her mission to be with us as often as possible. Now it was my turn to go to her. With joyful enthusiasm I packed a small bag. It had been a long time since I had been free to travel. I smiled all the way to the airport, joked my way through security and happily read a novel while we passed over the prairies and Northern Ontario. It wasn’t until the flight attendant announced the beginning of our descent that the monster first came for me. One minute I was fine. The next minute I wasn’t fine at all. My chest was tight. My throat was clogged. My body was acting beyond my control, sobs were shaking my shoulders and tears were pouring down my cheeks. I surrendered in bewilderment. At that particular moment there was no reason to be sad and I was sadder than I had ever been. Just across the tarmac, on the other side of a door three little blue-eyed blonds were tugging at their mother wondering; “When is Granny coming out?” I had longed to embrace them. Yet now, at the moment when this could be, my thoughts had retreated to a point back in history, the times when we used to talk about the grandchildren we would have some day. David and I were going to take those children camping. We were going to take them to the zoo. We were going to read to them together and take them to the library. Now David was not here for those things. I was still wiping my nose when I exited the airplane. Never had I felt more alone. Waiting to hug me, as I crossed the threshold, were the bouncingthe apples of my eye, the delights of my heart. So bereft was I that it took all the discipline I could muster to greet them with the enthusiasm I would have felt an hour earlier. Had it been even a little bit possible, I might have curled up on the floor of the arrivals area, clutching my knees to my heaving breast. “Fake it till you make it,” I said to myself. Faking it was the best I could do at the time. Fortunately I would be with them for six days—time enough to restore my equilibrium. Later, with only the memory of the emptiness to show for my sudden outburst, I patted myself on the back. “Now you have experienced grief,” I said. “You got through it all right. Return to the process of building a satisfying life.” So I bought a new piano and played it every morning. I registered at a seniors centre and joined a writing club. I chose spring bulbs and pots of pansies to grow on my balcony. March went out like a lamb. April brought me a plugged ear that required the attention of a doctor. I hadn’t seen this doctor since I left the nursing home. He used to come to our suite on Fridays. We’d worked closely together, giving the best care we could for David. Somehow we’d managed to maintain a cheery disposition and a stiff upper lip in the face of so much suffering and helplessness.. A plugged ear is much easier to fix than a neuro-degenerative illness. In the face of such a simple task I looked forward to telling him about my new piano, my plans for spring, the flowers I was growing. But as soon as he asked me how I was doing, the monster came out of nowhere and nailed me to the chair. I felt the tightening of my chest and my face refused to smile. I took a deep breath to calm myself. Clearly I was not going to be able to tell him about the new piano or the flowers. Acting on its own, with no permission from me, my mouth blurted, “Just sitting here with you is giving me PTSD. “Really?” he asked in surprise. “Really,” I said, for now I was back in the nursing home, trying to live one day at a time, trying not to wish away the together time that remained for David and me, wishing I could do more for him, wishing I could do it better. “That’s funny,” the doctor said. “Being here with you isn’t giving me PTSD.” This, I knew, was an invitation to let it go. The old familiar me would have laughed. The old familiar me would have told him about the pansies and the family dinners on Sundays. But with the monster gripping my neck all I could manage to say was: “I think it’s only my left ear, but you can check the right one.” And when I got home, clear-eared and heart-broken, I lay on my bed for hours, hugging my knees to my heaving breast. “Move past it,” I said to myself. “Forget the monster and go on with your life. Or maybe learn to keep an eye out so it’s not such a shock when it springs.” On my phone was a text from Alayne, inviting me to join her on a trip to the farmers’ market. Alayne was a friend of David’s, then later a friend of mine by association. In those last couple of years she continued to visit, came in the last few weeks knowing David would be unable to speak. I accepted her offer with trepidation, knowing myself to be vulnerable in a way I had not been before. If ever there was a good place for a monster to lie in wait, then that place was surely the farmers’ market, the very one where David and I had spent many joyful Saturday mornings in years gone by. We went so often that the vendors noticed our absences and asked why we’d been away. All my senses were on alert, waiting for the ambush that never came. This visit to the market was not quite like the others. None of the vendors remembered me. I’d been away that long. Nobody wondered how I was doing. With a tremulous awakening of confidence I picked up an opulent hydrangea, then a fragrant Easter lily. I snatched up a jar of my favourite Sauerkraut and added a bag of carrots. Into the mix I threw a package of jerk chicken sausages, fresh pita, hummus, and finally, a chocolate treat made from ground up crickets that I thought I’d take to entertain the unsuspecting snackers at the bridge club. Smiling triumphantly in my kitchen as I unpacked the load, I said, “Aha Monster. I fooled you, didn’t I? You thought you’d scare me away from the farmers’ market, and I went anyway.” But even as I said it, I began to suspect that this grief, which was neither a burden to be slowly unloaded, nor a tunnel with a light at the end, was a smarter-than-average monster. Smarter-than-average monsters are too smart to ambush you when you’re ready for them. They know enough to wait until you aren’t. With that in mind, as I plan my second trip to Ontario, I am hoping the monster never strikes twice in the same place.