On a trip to Ashland’s Oregon Shakespeare Festival with the Montefiore Senior Center, Frances Neer was forced to confront her blindness.
“I came home and I was absolutely devastated,” says Neer, a retired college teacher living in San Francisco. “I couldn’t see the stage. I couldn’t see anybody,”
She had made the trip to Ashland in the early 1980s after losing her sight in 1981 to glaucoma, later compounded by macular degeneration.
“After coming home, I stayed in bed and moaned and groaned and on the third day I said, `This is ridiculous. I have to do something.’ I had to drop the psychology of sight and pick up the psychology of blindness.”
Neer, now 83, describes the psychology of blindness as learning to get information from the other four senses.
“You pay very strict attention to the clues that the other senses give you. I can tell by the touch of a person’s hand if they’re relaxed, if they’re tense.”
Neer describes this experience in “Perceiving the Elephant: Living Creatively with Loss of Vision,” a collection of essays that she edited.
She is also the author of “Dancing in the Dark,” a guide for living fully with blindness, and is working on a third book, “Breaking Barriers: Blind Rites of Passage, the Extraordinary Stories of Uncommon People.”
Neer has devoted most of her life to education, teaching child development (“in all its aspects”) at City University of New York after receiving a bachelor’s in English and a master’s in child development from Brooklyn College.
She chose to meet the challenge of blindness by going back to school, earning a certificate in gerontology and a second master’s in low-vision studies from San Francisco State.
In the introduction to “Perceiving the Elephant,” Neer writes, “I have my own world, and there is no use longing for what I have lost. In my world, the third world, all of us are in a world within a world…We have our own privacies that nobody in the enlarging world understands…As we search for and develop our own powers, we add a fourth dimension to the world we used to know. This dimension is insight.”
A transplanted New Yorker, Neer grew up in a “Yiddish-Russian-English-speaking family” on Long Island.
Although not religious, her family observed the holidays and her mother kept a kosher kitchen.
“To this day I won’t eat bread and butter with meat,” Neer says.
There was a strong sense of Jewish identity in her childhood home, an identity she still maintains.
“I make myself known as a Jewish person,” says the San Francisco resident. “When you come into the house there’s a menorah in the foyer. It’s a silent way of stating my case and stating who I am. To me that’s exceedingly important. I will never deny my origins.”
She and her late husband, Joe, continued the tradition of celebrating the Jewish holidays with their son and daughter.
In 1974, she retired from teaching and moved to San Francisco to be near her son and his family, at his request.
“We always obeyed my son. He was very smart,” Neer says.
Years later, family tragedy followed. Neer’s son, Bill, died of AIDS in 1984. A year later, his widow, Ann, died from diabetes and other health problems.
Neer took on the job of raising her then-13- year-old granddaughter. Though her granddaughter didn’t go to Hebrew school, Neer told her Bible stories, acting them out with rosewood chess pieces in the shape of biblical figures.
“Sometimes this is even better than Hebrew school where kids act up and they’re not very serious.”
Neer bought the chess set on one of her two trips to Israel. She still remembers the power of Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial.
“When I came out of that place I couldn’t move. I just couldn’t move.”
In “Perceiving the Elephant,” she writes about traveling throughout the world, talking to kids in the San Francisco schools about blindness, the adjustment to loss of sight in old age and the need to reintegrate into the larger world.
“Hands-on experiences,” she writes, “become a way of life.”
Besides writing and editing books on low vision, she developed the Visually Impaired People’s forum, an educational forum sponsored by the Department of Ophthalmology at UCSF Medical Center. Coming to terms with her limitations was, ironically, a liberating experience for Neer.
“Once I stopped fighting for that which I no longer had, then I could work with what I did have,” she says.