PART 5 — The Years No Photograph Could Hold

Final Part

At sixteen, Chrissy Steltz couldn’t know that one day she would have a son.

She couldn’t know that she would graduate with excellent grades, or that she would go to senior prom wearing a mask, or that eleven years after a shotgun accident took her sight and destroyed much of her face, a team of specialists would make her a facial prosthesis.

We know all of that when we begin reading her story.

She had to begin with what she knew when she woke up.

And that was very little.

What Came After She Woke Up

Chrissy had been in a coma for six weeks. Waking up was the outcome the people who loved her had been waiting for. It was also the point at which Chrissy herself had to begin learning what the accident had changed.

She had spent sixteen years being able to see. When she thought of a page in a book, she knew what printed words looked like. When she thought of walking down a hallway, she knew what it was like to see the far end before she took a step. She had memories of recognizing a person across a room, catching a look before someone spoke, and glancing into a mirror on the way out.

She would have to learn new ways to do many of the things that had once depended on sight. Some experiences, including looking at her own reflection, would remain memories.

There was no way to settle every question about the years ahead from a hospital bed. Even something as straightforward as returning to school depended on smaller questions. How would she read the material? How would she get from one place to another? What kind of help would she need, and what could she learn to do herself?

Those questions had answers she could begin to work toward.

She learned Braille. She trained to use a white cane. Both skills gave her more ways to decide what she wanted to do and how she would do it.

A line of Braille could take her somewhere a conversation couldn’t. She could go back to a passage as many times as she wanted. She could stop at a sentence she liked. In school, she could do the thing every good student needs to be able to do at some point. She could go back through the material and see where her own understanding had gone wrong.

People remember that she graduated with excellent grades. Somewhere behind those grades were assignments she found interesting and assignments she probably would have been glad to finish. The difference matters. For a while, reading itself had been something she had to learn all over again. Now there was room to have an opinion about what she was reading.

Her white cane offered a different kind of freedom. The more information she could gather about the space ahead of her, the more say she could have in how she moved through it. A skill learned through practice could eventually help with a decision as ordinary as where to go next.

At sixteen, having a say in where you go next feels important even when you’re talking about the next twenty minutes.

Chrissy was at an age when she wanted to make those decisions. The ways she could make them had changed. She still had places she wanted to be.

A Night That Was Going to Happen Either Way

One of those places was her senior prom.

The date had been set. Her classmates would finish their classes, get ready, and go to the dance. The evening would come and go regardless of how far along Chrissy was in recovering from the accident or how she felt about being seen in a room full of people.

She went wearing a mask.

There’s a reason that small sentence stays with you. Prom gave her something she could say yes to while there were still things about her future she couldn’t resolve.

You can think back to a dance or a graduation and remember how much depended on the fact that everybody was still there. In another year, you might see two of those people for lunch. In five years, you might find out where somebody moved. For a few hours that evening, the people you had spent your school days with would be together in one place.

Chrissy got to be there, too.

She had worked hard to get back to school. Part of what she got back was the chance to care about something beyond getting through schoolwork or learning another skill. She could look forward to an evening whose purpose was to have a good time.

A person recovering from a serious injury can spend a lot of time being asked about progress. Can you do this now? How far have you come? What are you working on next? A dance makes room for a different question.

Do you want to go?

Chrissy’s answer belonged to her. The mask was part of how she went. The evening itself belonged to the same part of life it belonged to for everyone else there. High school was nearly over, and they were young enough to care what they wore to the dance.

Eventually Chrissy graduated. There was a diploma to mark the years she had put into her education. And once she was out of school, there was no schedule that told her what the next big moment would be.

She would meet the man she married during the years between the accident and the fitting of her prosthesis. He was blind, too. There were parts of each other’s lives they could understand from experience, and years’ worth of other things to learn about each other.

Then they had a son.

That makes it hard to call those eleven years a waiting period. You can wait for something and still have years so full that one day you look back and realize the person waiting at the beginning had no idea who would be beside her at the end.

The Day the Specialists Finished Their Work

By 2010, Chrissy was twenty-seven. Her son had already made her a mother. She had a husband who knew her as an adult. The face she remembered from before the accident belonged to a sixteen-year-old girl.

The specialists were making a prosthesis for the woman who had lived the years between.

Their work brought together medical knowledge, engineering, and the precision it takes to recreate the appearance of features people recognize at a glance. They could help restore something Chrissy had missed. They could give her a choice about her appearance after an injury that had taken that choice out of her hands.

Chrissy was still blind when she received it.

Think about being handed something whose effect other people can see immediately. A person facing you could say what they noticed first. Someone else might study the details and describe them differently. You could hear both descriptions and still have your own experience of what had happened, based on things neither person could see from across the room.

For Chrissy, that difference was built into the moment. A photograph would show how the prosthesis looked. She would be the one wearing it.

The story of the fitting can be told in a few lines. A group of specialists made a facial prosthesis. A woman who had lived with a severe injury for eleven years received it. People later saw photographs of the result.

Living with something is a much longer story than receiving it.

Whatever Chrissy wanted from the prosthesis would matter in the context of her own days. It had to become part of getting ready, going somewhere, coming home, and being with people she knew. Its significance could settle into her life slowly, in ways the photograph would have no reason to capture.

The same was true of so many things she had learned since waking up. Braille mattered because it gave her access to what she wanted to read. A cane mattered because she had somewhere to go. The prosthesis mattered because it was for a woman who already had places to go and people to come home to.

That’s where the finished piece belongs in her story. She had a life ready to receive it.

The Days Her Son Would Know

A child eventually learns that his parents had whole lives before he arrived. It can be a strange discovery. The people you call Mom and Dad once went to school, once had to be home at a certain time, and once wondered who they would marry.

When Chrissy’s son was old enough to understand that his mother had been sixteen once, the first fact he knew about her would still be the one he’d learned in his own home.

She was his mother.

If he ever asked about her senior prom, he might be curious about the mask. He might also want to know what she wore or who went with her. A child hearing a family story can take it in a direction a reporter might never think to go.

If she told him about learning Braille, he might want to know how she could tell one letter from another. If she told him how old she was when the accident happened, he might have to get a little older himself before sixteen sounded young.

A stranger can feel as though they understand the whole story the first time they hear it. A child can hear a story about a parent more than once and take something different from it each time, because he keeps growing into the parts he was too young to understand before.

However much Chrissy chose to tell him, he would have his own history with her.

He would know the sound of her voice from before he knew what all the words meant. He would learn which questions he could ask her when she was busy and which ones worked better when she had time to sit down. As he got older, he would have stories about her that had nothing to do with anything a stranger had ever read.

All of that comes from being present for days nobody thinks to put in a photograph.

And there’s an ordinary pleasure in being known that way. You can leave a sentence unfinished and somebody knows where you were going. You can laugh before you’ve told the funniest part of a story because you remember what’s coming. You can be quiet in the same room and let the other person go about whatever they’re doing.

Those moments are easy to overlook when you’re telling a story built around an accident and a medical achievement. They’re among the moments that make somebody’s life feel like her own.

Chrissy’s son came into the world while she was still years removed from the sixteen-year-old waking in the hospital and before she received her prosthesis. His place in that timeline is simple. By the time the photographs could be put side by side, somebody in Chrissy’s house was already growing up calling her Mom.

There were years ahead for the two of them that neither picture could hold.

Story Reflection — Where the Story Comes to Rest

The original account gives us three ages and stretches of time that are easy to remember. Chrissy was sixteen when the accident happened. She spent six weeks in a coma. She was twenty-seven when she received her prosthesis.

Try telling her story for a moment without using any of those numbers.

A girl went back to school after losing her sight.

She learned to read again, and she used what she learned to finish her education.

When senior prom came around, she went.

She fell in love with a man who understood blindness from experience. They married and had a little boy.

A group of specialists helped her reclaim part of an appearance she remembered from before any of those things had happened.

The dates help put the events in order. Telling them without the dates gives the quieter ones a little room. You can hear how much of Chrissy’s life would disappear if you went from the accident straight to the fitting.

There’s also a temptation, once you know how those years unfolded, to read her earlier decisions as though she knew where they would take her. She couldn’t. Learning Braille was something she could do in the present. Going to prom was something she could decide in the present. Each choice was worth making on its own terms.

Her story leaves room for how hard those years could be. The accident took things that mattered to her. It also leaves room for the pleasure she could find in a school dance, an education she worked for, or a family she was beginning to build. A person can feel the weight of a loss and be looking forward to something that same evening.

That is one reason the mask at prom deserves as much attention as the prosthesis years later.

At prom, Chrissy went somewhere she wanted to be with what she had available to her. At twenty-seven, she accepted help that gave her a new option. There’s a kind of generosity in allowing both decisions to stand. She could value the life she was living and still want a particular part of it to change.

The final photograph gives us a natural place to close the written story. It records something the specialists worked hard to make possible. As the reader, you can close the page there.

Leave a little room in your mind for the next day.

Her child would wake up a day older. There would be things to do that had been waiting since the day before. At some point somebody would call for her, and she would answer from wherever she happened to be.

A family lives in those days. A photograph gets one of them.

Lesson Learned

You can begin making choices about your life while you’re still living with a loss.

Chrissy could learn to read through touch while she still remembered what it was like to see a page. She could go to prom while knowing she might draw attention. Years later, she could welcome a prosthesis without having to revise what the previous eleven years had meant to her. Each choice answered a different need.

Practical help can give somebody more control over their day.

Learning Braille and training with a white cane mattered because there were things Chrissy wanted to read and places she wanted to go. The specialists’ work mattered because it gave her a choice about her appearance. Look closely at any of those developments and you can see what it gave her in concrete terms. A page she could read herself. Information about the path ahead. A prosthesis she could choose to wear.

Give people room to tell you about the part of their life they want to talk about.

Someone hearing Chrissy’s story might have a question about the accident or the prosthesis. She might have something she’d rather tell them about school, her husband, or her son. Once you’ve spent time with the years between the two photographs, you can understand why the conversation might take a different direction from the headline.

Final Words

When I think about where to leave Chrissy’s story, I keep coming back to two moments.

In one, a twenty-seven-year-old woman receives a facial prosthesis after eleven years. The specialists can see the result of their work. Chrissy gets to decide what place it will have in the life she goes home to.

In the other, a teenager goes to her senior prom wearing a mask.

The second moment happens years before the first. The dance is that night. There’s an evening to get ready for and a room full of classmates she’ll soon stop seeing every day. In a little while, high school will be over. She’ll go on to meet people she can’t name yet, including a little boy whose voice she’ll one day know as well as her own.

She has all of that ahead of her.

For now, she’s going to the dance.

THE END