PART 4 — The Woman Beyond the Headline
If you met Chrissy Steltz after seeing the photographs, you might have had a dozen questions ready before she said hello.
Her little boy could have interrupted every one of them with a single word.
“Mom.”
It’s easy to picture that interruption. A stranger has arrived with questions about the most dramatic thing that ever happened to you. Your child has arrived because he needs you to open something.
The stranger knows how old you were when the accident happened. Your child knows which cupboard you’re going to open when he asks for a cup.
They’re both familiar with something about you. Only one of them knows where the cups are.
What a Stranger Would Ask First
The headline introduces Chrissy at sixteen, when a shotgun accident during spring break left her permanently blind and destroyed much of her face.
Her son came into her life years later. From his point of view, his mother’s blindness would have been part of how their home worked from the beginning.
A young child takes a surprising amount for granted. If there’s a place where the keys belong, that’s where the keys belong. If Mom asks you to tell her what you’re holding, you tell her. And if you’ve dragged a toy into the middle of the floor, you eventually learn that the middle of the floor is a terrible place to leave it.
As children get older, they visit other homes and discover that every family has habits it considers perfectly obvious. At one house, you take your shoes off at the door. At another, everybody’s shoes are under the kitchen table and you have to guess which pair is yours.
Some of the ways a household is organized matter more than others. When a person navigates by touch and memory, putting something back where it belongs can save them from having to search for it later. For a visitor, that may take a little explaining. A child who grows up with it learns where things go the same way he learns which drawer holds the forks.
That’s one reason the difference between a stranger’s questions and a child’s questions is worth sitting with.
Someone hearing about Chrissy for the first time might want to ask how she manages at home. A child growing up there is busy learning how the home works, which rules he can negotiate, and what happens if he announces he isn’t tired five minutes before falling asleep.
Give a child long enough with you and he’ll learn the sound of your footsteps, the difference between your serious voice and your joking one, and how many times he can call your name before you say, “I heard you the first time.”
A photograph gives him very little he can use in that education.
He has better material. He has you, day after day.
The Part Where She Gets to Ask a Question
There’s something peculiar about meeting a person whose story you’ve already heard. You may feel you know them well enough to ask a personal question, even though they’ve just learned your name.
What was it like to wake up?
What do you remember?
How did it feel to receive the prosthesis?
These are natural questions for a reader. Put them all together and you can see how little of a conversation they leave for the person answering.
Chrissy had returned to high school, finished her education there, married, and started a family. Any of those experiences could have given her something to ask another person.
What school did you go to?
How old is your son?
Does he ask for the same story every night, too?
A conversation can change direction completely when someone gets to ask a question of her own. Suddenly there’s something to be curious about besides what happened to her. You might find out you’re both struggling with the same stage of parenthood. Or you might learn you disagree about something and end up talking for twenty minutes about a subject that would never make it into a headline.
That’s the chance people get when they meet anyone for the first time. They get to find out whether they have something to talk about together.
When someone’s medical history arrives ahead of her, there can be a temptation to spend that first meeting confirming what you already know.
Chrissy’s classmates had a different starting point. They knew her as a student. Even after the accident changed what it took for her to get through a school day, she still had classes to attend and assignments to finish. She could have an opinion about whether the homework was fair. She could be interested in what somebody else was wearing to the dance.
And she could do well in school.
Her excellent grades tell us she had something to offer in those classrooms that couldn’t be understood by hearing the story of how she arrived there. A teacher still had to read her work. The work still had to be good.
Years later, the specialists had the opportunity to understand another side of her. They were helping an adult make a decision about her own appearance. Chrissy was the person who would live with the finished piece, so what she wanted from it mattered as much as anything someone might say about the picture afterward.
Imagine how easily a reader can pass over that in the excitement of seeing the result.
The camera tells you how the prosthesis looked from where the photographer was standing.
Chrissy could tell you how it felt from where she was standing.
A Face Can Matter in More Than One Way
Chrissy had spent sixteen years seeing faces before she lost her vision. Her understanding of a face could include memories of her own reflection, the faces of people she loved, and the expressions she once recognized from across a room.
Losing the ability to see those things changed how she could experience them. It also meant the people around her might still be communicating visually in ways she couldn’t follow.
Think about a conversation where everybody can see one another. A person looks toward the door. Another person catches the look and turns. Nobody says anything. A whole little exchange takes place without a word.
Now think about what happens when someone says, “Come in,” or calls out the name of the person at the door. Suddenly everybody listening has a way into the moment.
There are dozens of small instances like that in an ordinary gathering. Someone enters a room and assumes everyone saw them come in. Two people smile at a joke before either speaks. A person points toward a chair while saying, “You can sit over there.”
People make these gestures automatically. With a little familiarity, they can learn to be more specific just as naturally.
The prosthesis could change something people saw when they looked at Chrissy. The way people included her in a conversation still depended on what they did once they started talking.
And that meant a stranger looking at the after photograph could understand one very real part of her experience while knowing almost nothing about what would make a meeting with her comfortable.
For Chrissy, receiving a prosthesis could matter for reasons beyond strangers’ reactions. She had lived through a change to her appearance that she had never chosen. Years later, she could make a decision about an aspect of that appearance for herself.
There’s something personal about having that decision in your own hands, even when somebody else can see its result more easily than you can.
People make choices about how they present themselves for all kinds of reasons. Sometimes an outfit reminds you of a person who gave it to you. Sometimes a particular color feels right because you remember wearing it on a good day. Sometimes you choose something because it lets you go about your business without having to think about it again.
Someone standing across the room might judge your choice entirely by how it looks. You might have made it for a reason that would never occur to them.
A face carries even more history. It’s the part of your appearance other people often notice first, and it can hold some of your earliest memories of yourself.
Chrissy knew the face she had before the accident. She also knew eleven years’ worth of things about herself that the girl in those memories had yet to learn.
The woman receiving the prosthesis had earned a high school diploma. She knew what it was like to be married. She had a child whose needs could rearrange her plans before breakfast.
A team could help restore something from her past. It would become part of a life that had gone on growing while she waited.
The People Who Met Her in the Middle
The eleven years between the accident and the prosthesis are often described as a wait. That’s true if the event you’re keeping track of is the fitting.
From another point of view, those years are when Chrissy met people who would become central to her life.
Her husband came to know her during those years. He was blind, too, which meant some explanations could be shorter between them. Other explanations were still necessary, as they are in any relationship. Two people can share a major experience and have entirely different ideas about when to leave for an appointment or how long it’s reasonable to put off doing the dishes.
That’s one of the things marriage does. It takes a person you once had to make plans to see and makes them the person you talk to about whether there’s anything left for dinner.
Over time, the conversation gathers things nobody outside the marriage would immediately understand. The names you use for places. A joke one of you remembers better than the other. A question that sounds ordinary to anyone listening but means something specific because you’ve asked it a hundred times before.
Chrissy and her husband built their marriage in the years between the pictures. When their son arrived, he joined a family that already had a history.
One day a child gets old enough to ask what his parents were like before he was born. He may have a hard time imagining that there was ever a house his mother walked into where nobody called her Mom. He may want to hear where his parents first met, what they thought of each other, or what they did when they found out he was coming.
Those are family stories. They can be told over dinner in pieces, interrupted when somebody needs to get up, and finished another evening when the child remembers there was a part he still wanted to hear.
If Chrissy ever chose to tell her son about the accident, he would have a different picture of the person at the center of it from the one a stranger brings to the first paragraph. He would already know the sound of her voice. He would already have his own memories of being with her.
He might hear about senior prom and want to know what kind of music people danced to.
He might hear that she learned Braille as a teenager and ask how long it took before she could read a whole page.
The small questions can be the ones that make a story feel close. You can hear that somebody lived through a terrible accident and feel overwhelmed by the size of it. Then you hear that she wanted to go to a school dance, and you remember standing in front of a closet at seventeen, worrying about a decision that would seem perfectly simple ten years later.
Suddenly you have one ordinary thing in common with someone whose life initially sounded impossible to imagine.
What Happens After People Stop Looking
Think about the last time you saw a photograph of someone you hadn’t spoken to in years.
You might have noticed a different haircut, a child standing beside them, or a room you didn’t recognize. You learned a few things in seconds. If you wanted to know what had happened in all the years between, you’d have to call.
The photographs of Chrissy asked very little of the people viewing them. The difference was there to see immediately. Someone could share the story before reading far enough to find out she had already finished school, married, and had a son.
Those events deserve more time than the image asks for.
There’s a sixteen-year-old waking from a coma and an older teenager learning a way to read that she can use for the rest of her life. There’s a student who has work due on a regular school day. There’s a girl putting on a mask to go to prom because the dance is that night.
There’s a young woman falling in love. There’s a couple making room for a baby. And there’s a twenty-seven-year-old receiving something she has wanted for years, with a whole set of responsibilities waiting for her at home.
You can tell the events in that order. To get close to what any of them meant, you have to stay a little longer in each one.
Stay with the student long enough to remember that she had to read what was assigned before she could have an opinion about it.
Stay with the girl going to prom long enough to let her be excited about prom.
Stay with the mother long enough to imagine someone calling for her while she’s halfway through doing something else.
Then, when you return to the photograph taken after the fitting, you can see where it belongs. It captures a change worth remembering. It comes after a great many other days she might have chosen to remember, too.
There’s a question people like to ask about a recovery that can be shown in pictures.
What was the moment everything changed?
There are several answers in Chrissy’s story. The accident changed what she could do in ways she would spend years discovering. Learning Braille gave her a way back to the written word. Marriage changed who she made plans with. Having her son gave someone a name for her she had never had before.
The day she received her prosthesis belongs on that list.
If the story had stopped eleven years earlier, nobody reading it would have known any of those other days were coming. They would have known she’d survived. They could have hoped things would get better. The details would still have been ahead of her.
That’s the hardest part to recover once you already know the ending. The sixteen-year-old girl had to make plans while the future was still a blank. She had to begin learning Braille before she knew how well she’d be able to read it. She had to get ready for prom before she knew what the evening would be like.
And at twenty-seven, she still had an unwritten future.
Her son would get older. There would be questions he was too little to ask yet. There would be years when he wanted to tell her every detail about his day and years when getting one detail out of him might take half the evening.
A photograph could show his mother at the moment the specialists finished their work.
He would get to know her on all the days that came after it.
And if someone ever handed him those two famous pictures and asked which one looked more like the mother he knew, he might need a minute to understand the question.
He knew what she sounded like when she was trying to keep from laughing. He knew when she was busy and he ought to wait. He knew how to find her in a house without having to see her first. All he had to do was call her name and listen for where the answer came from.
He could have told you more about her before breakfast than either photograph could show in a lifetime.
