The rarefied air we breathe here at Dartmouth permeates our lives in both obvious and subtle ways. Although intoxicating and often imbuing us with a self-satisfied sense of importance, this air cannot, by itself, sustain us. As time goes on many of us develop a healthy craving for something different, something more... real.
I have come to understand that the feelings of isolation and disconnect that characterized my freshman year at Dartmouth were a direct result of this — a kind of emotional hypoxia. The more people I have spoken to, the clearer it has become that not only is this is a common syndrome on campus, but its treatment is entirely dependent on us. We must find something or someone meaningful enough to help shepherd us through our descent into an environment more conducive to all sorts of life.
For me, Beverly Daigle, an 81-year-old blind woman from Lebanon, New Hampshire, was that someone.
I went to go visit Beverly a few days ago, just to catch up and reconnect. She greeted me at the porch in her pastel clothes that her aid matches for her a week in advance. She gazed past me as she reached out for a hug and asked me if I noticed that she now wears her hair straight.
Although stark, Beverly’s home feels well lived-in. The first room you enter is the TV room, where she spends most of her time. The flat screen serves as her main form of company most days, even though she cannot see it. The walls hold some photos of Beverly and her family from over the years. So much effort has been put into the decoration of this room that I often forget Beverly cannot visually appreciate it. But perhaps, just knowing that she is surrounded by images of her family is enough. I admire that.
The kitchen, where we visited with each other, is the only other major room on the first floor. In this room, I first realized how strictly Beverly’s home must be arranged. Due to her lack of eyesight, she relies entirely on familiarity with the layout of objects. As we sat at her kitchen table, I saw Beverly eating a Collis brownie and scone underneath a sign that read “Life is Short; Eat Dessert First.” It was fantastic. Between bites she sheepishly disclosed to me that she is trying to lose weight.
I met Beverly at the end of my freshman year through a class called “COVER Stories,” taught by environmental studies professor Terry Osborne. The class is centered on the notion that activism “succeeds best when activists work in deliberate partnership with human communities.” Students can apply their theoretical readings of social and environmental justice through the class’s partnership with COVER Home Repair, which strives to bridge the gap between service and community.
At the end of the term, each student chose an individual associated with COVER — either a volunteer, a staff member or a homeowner — to interview about his or her experiences. We presented the culmination of our efforts, either a mini-documentary or written piece, in front of our class, the COVER community, Tucker Foundation members and those who had been interviewed.
I was somewhat skeptical about the possibility of effectively bringing COVER’s philosophy to fruition. Although I was not assigned to work on Beverly’s house last year, I was assigned to interview her for the final project along with two of my classmates. We clicked immediately.
Beverly has spent her entire life in Lebanon and over half of it in the same house on Church Street. As Dartmouth students, it is hard to imagine the level of familiarity with a place a lifetime breeds. But remaining in Lebanon all her life was certainly not something Beverly wanted. She confided to me her desires as a young woman to see the world.
“I wanted to marry somebody who lived out of town so I could move out of Lebanon — and of all things I married a Lebanon man,” she said, laughing, when I spoke to her in the beginning of our relationship. But her laughter betrayed a certain wistfulness.
Today, Beverly lives alone — her husband passed many years ago from a tragic accident, and her four children have moved away. This is not unusual for a woman of Beverly’s age. As we progress through life, our circle of relationships grows smaller. What is unusual about Beverly’s life alone is the fact that she is almost entirely blind. I remember how stunned my classmates and I were as she demonstrated for us how she goes up and down her nearly vertical basement steps, crawling on her way up because she cannot see the steps. But Beverly never speaks of her loss of sight — rather, she speaks of lost connections and her constant ache for human interaction. On the final day of class last spring, we were able to give her this gift.
I can still recall the sound of Beverly’s voice on the phone when I invited her to our end of the year reception to view the class’s final projects. Her excitement was palpable, contagious. I am not sure Beverly fully understood the nature of the event that day. Beverly’s lack of affiliation with higher education made it so that the notion of an academic presentation, especially through video documentation, was something entirely foreign to her. But the logistics were really irrelevant — she just wanted company.
As I sat with Beverly at the reception, I realized that the essential ingredient in composing a poignant and authentic story was the subject of the piece and, more importantly in my case, forming a lasting relationship.
It’s funny — Beverly was the star of the show that day and she didn’t even know it. (She did relay to me recently that she “tells everybody under the sun” that she was in a video, lamenting that she hasn’t seen it on TV yet.) Beverly couldn’t see our smiles as we watched her tell her story on the video, and she couldn’t see my tears, or anybody else’s, at the end of the event. Rather than pride, she radiated humility and unadulterated joy that day — she even expressed regret that details about her spoon collection weren’t in the video.
Early in our relationship when I spoke to Beverly, I sensed that her unspoken past was lurking just beneath the surface of our conversation as if, like Beverly’s life, her thoughts and emotions were circumscribed. I now think that this is not because Beverly’s mind is small but rather because, living alone and isolated for so long, her world is small and has not allowed her much opportunity to give voice to her feelings. As our relationship evolves and our friendship deepens, so do our conversations.
Though I have given her the friendship and company that the human heart yearns for, Beverly has given me something much more profound — she has reconfigured the mechanism through which I perceive my environment. By accepting me into her life, my relationship with Beverly forced me to expand the boundaries of my head and heart beyond the confines of Dartmouth College, enabling me to appreciate and feel connected to Dartmouth in a way that I had been alienated from before. It is ironic, really, that it took somebody so completely separate from my environment to transform the way I experience it. My relationship with Beverly has enabled me to put my life here in context. Dartmouth is much more beautiful when viewed as part of a broader landscape of lives beyond its manicured green, when it is seen as a contributor to the community rather than the community in and of itself.
I’ve enjoyed the rarefied air much more these days, for I am no longer under the impression that it is meant to be life sustaining or entirely satisfying on its own. It is only a temporary and imperfect high, made much sweeter by the recognition of other climes.
