Frank Bruni Started to Lose His Vision — But Gained Gratitude

What if we all carried around a sandwich board that in a few words shared our most personal and heaviest burdens with anyone passing?

What would your sandwich board say? Celebrated journalist and author Frank Bruni told me his might read, “Compromised eyesight, could go blind.”

A few years ago, Bruni woke up one morning to discover that he had suddenly lost vision in one eye (most likely a result of some kind of stroke as he slept). He also was confronted with a real possibility that he might one day lose sight in his other eye. That’s a lot to handle for anyone, especially someone like Bruni, who until then enjoyed normal vision, read voraciously, and made a living writing for one of the world’s most respected newspapers.

As unique and challenging as that may sound, Bruni isn’t sitting back asking, “why me?” He isn’t the least bit interested in self-pity. The question we should be asking — as Bruni told me in our conversation and as he shares in his new book The Beauty of Dusk — is “why NOT me?” After all, most of us will be visited by challenges and we are all going to feel pain and face loss. He’s not being morose or ominous; he’s just being honest.

His sandwich board theory is meant to remind us that if we actually had a window into the private suffering of others, not only would we be more empathetic and accepting, we’d be far less prone to self-pity.

While some hardships and suffering cannot be alleviated (innocent people in Kyiv immediately come to mind), other situations that suck can perhaps be managed. These roadblocks require us to change course, adapt, and focus on what we do have. Bruni believes we can choose to be grateful.

This May, Bruni will deliver the Commencement Address at his alma mater, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. We joked about how his colleagues at Duke, where Bruni is now teaching, might take this. He’s unlikely to ease this long-standing rivalry, but in talking about the responsibilities of a commencement speaker, we got onto the topic of advice. Without disclosing what he’s likely to share with Chapel Hill’s Class of ‘22, he passed along something that resonated with him about the resilience human beings have. For that pearl of wisdom, how it applies to what we’re witnessing happen in Ukraine, and more, read and watch my interview with the writer.

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John Molner: I wanted to start by asking, how’s your vision today?

Frank Bruni: It’s totally functional because my left eye’s good. But my right eye is kind of useless. I can get by pretty well with just my left eye. There are moments when things are a little bit swimmy, there are typos that I commit that I never did before, but all of it is manageable.

So does the vision in your left eye compensate — is it stronger than it was before?

No, not that I can tell. What happens over time though, is that your brain more frequently and better edits out the input of your right eye. Because what does happen a lot in the beginning and even now, is your bad eye tries to get involved. And so it screws up your depth perception. It screws up a lot of things. I will be texting with and because I can’t see things in relation to each other as accurately, I’ll hit the wrong key.

Take us back to that morning when you woke up in 2017 and you had blurred vision, and then you had this horrendous series of consultations.

Basically, my blood pressure fell for unknown reasons while I was sleeping. It choked off the blood supply to one of my optic nerves and frazzled it. And that’s what ruined the vision in my right eye. When I woke up that morning, I could see because my left eye was working, but I could tell something was really wrong. There was a fog over the right side of my field of vision. And it was such an odd thing because it was almost like a smear of jelly or something. I assumed that my glasses weren’t clean or I got something in my eye. And because of that, and because of the human capacity for denial, many hours went by before I got super concerned.

And then from there on, it was rapid-fire. I was at an eye doctor who said, “this is a problem too mysterious and serious for me.” And then I was at a neuro-ophthalmologist. And then I was getting an MRI…I mean, boom, boom, boom. And the next thing I knew, 12 days later I was on the one existing experimental drug trial for this issue. And somebody was sticking a needle in my eye. It was a really scary period, but it all went by so quickly. The adrenaline or the surrealness of it all kind of saved me from the terror.

Are you at risk of losing vision in your left eye?

No one really knows. The conventional wisdom based on the literature is that there’s a 20 percent chance that it will happen to the other eye. So the odds are with me to get by forevermore with one eye, but the stakes are pretty high. There’s some belief that as the years go by, if it has not happened to your other eye yet, that with each passing year, the odds diminish — but that’s a belief more than it is knowledge. But I may still be living with a 20 percent chance of my left eye going, and then I’m blind. That was a big part of the challenge of this. It was a thing I wrestled with a lot — how do you live with that kind of sword hanging over you?

Did you discover the answer to that?

One of the ways you do it is to realize all of us, whether we know it or not, are living with that sort of uncertainty dangling over our heads. None of us knows what’s coming for us in a week or a year or a decade. I could not have known this vision problem I have was coming and there’s nothing I could’ve done to prevent it. And frustratingly, it seems there’s nothing I can do now. If it’s going to get worse in the future, if that second eye’s going to go, there’s almost nothing I can do to prevent that. But I have full control over how I react to that. I have a lot of control over my emotional response to that.

I’m a writer. That’s how I make my living. I get really frustrated that what happened to me affects that so directly that it takes me longer to read something. It takes me longer to write something. I have to budget in time to circle back and look for all the typos that were never there before. And when I’m focused on that, I’m angry and I’m sad.

But it’s so possible to look at it a different way and say, wait a second, the fact that someone is still publishing my words, the fact that there are people out there who want to read my words, that’s as worthy of emphasis and focus as any added difficulty in getting them out there. And that’s the control that we all do have over our lives. There will be many forks in our lives where you can decide to stare at what you’ve lost, what’s been taken from you, what your hardships are, or you can decide to steer forward and stare at your blessings and all that remains.

Right. And that’s really the universal aspect of your book. And then you talk about these amazing people who have their challenges. You call it your sandwich board theory, which I love. Can you explain that?

So in the book, there’s a chapter called the Sandwich Board Theory. And it sprung from my observation as I was dealing with this that I didn’t want to feel self-pity. I didn’t want to dwell on that question, “why me?” And I also kind of knew instinctively that wasn’t the right question.

I took a whole new, fresh look at everyone around me — my close friends, my acquaintances, people whom I was meeting for the first time. And I really looked hard at them and picked up on cues and realized something that we all should realize sooner, which is just about everybody out there has had a terrible struggle or is struggling, has the scars from pain in the past, or is carrying pain with them. But in most cases, you don’t see it. You look at me, nothing seems to be amiss with my right eye. You don’t know that I can only see out of one eye and that I go through my days with a fear of going blind. People who have terrible mental health challenges, you don’t see that from the outside.

And I found myself wondering how improved the world would be if all of us just happened to be wearing sandwich boards that listed briefly some of the main challenges that we’ve survived or that we’re going through. My sandwich board would say, “compromised eyesight, could go blind.” Someone else’s might say, “was treated for cancer three years ago. It might come back.” Someone else’s might say, “lost my beloved spouse two weeks ago.” We would be less prone to self-pity. We wouldn’t say, “why me?” We’d understand that the real question is “why not me?” We all are going to be visited by these challenges. And we’re all gonna feel pain.

I wanted to ask you about gratitude and how important you think gratitude is in comparison to other characteristics or attributes we should strive for.

I put gratitude near if not at the top of the list. And it’s hard to kind of rank them because I think they all overlap. When we talk about resilience, I think one of the components of resilience is gratitude. But I think gratitude is everything.

I think about the people in Ukraine and what they’re going through, and when I wrote my New York Times column this week, I was trying to come up with some words to capture the sort of the blessing of living in a country that is at peace at the moment. And if we don’t pause at a moment like this, as we watch what Ukrainians are going through and kind of realize our good fortune, that’s just wrong. And it’s also a missed opportunity to pause and have gratitude.

It’s off-topic, but I have to ask you, how do you evaluate the outlook in Ukraine and the stature that President Zelensky has as he’s appealing to the world community to do more?

This is one of those really, really hard situations where, if you do more, do you escalate the conflict? There are no easy choices here for someone like President Biden or any of our allies because you don’t want to escalate the conflict.

Up until the day of the attacks. I was getting emails from friends and acquaintances saying, “you have to write about what a clown President Zelensky is. You have to write about how he’s miscalculated the situation, you have to write about how he doesn’t measure up to this job.” And now everybody feels differently about him and probably neither view is accurate, but it is an extraordinary thing to watch the human ability to rise to the occasion. To see what kinds of qualities and strengths a given situation can bring out. And in that sense, we’re not off-topic at all. Because part of the story I tell of myself and all the other people I got to interview for The Beauty of Dusk is about the ability and opportunity to discover the strength that you never knew you had when circumstances change and demand that you have it.

Katie wrote a book years ago compiled of the best advice people she’d interviewed had ever received. What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?

One of the things I did to manage and learn from what happened to me was I went around and interviewed people who had been through struggles or had dealt with what we call disabilities. And one of them was a retired circuit court judge, right below the Supreme court. He went blind when he was in his early 30s and went on to have children and a brilliant career. And on a day when we were walking from his office through the Metro, and this blind judge was guiding me more than I was guiding him, he said to me, “starfish can regrow limbs, but that’s nothing compared to what people can do.” And it was a tribute to human adaptability and nimbleness. And I think he’s right, and it’s not a piece of advice, but it’s an observation. I keep it close to heart because when you’re going through something difficult, when you’re worried about what the future holds, when you’re suddenly navigating new limits in your life, do not ever underestimate your nimbleness as a human being and do not ever underestimate or short-change the truth of that statement: starfish can regrow limbs, but that’s nothing compared to what people can do.

If you could assign this book to three people to read, who would you like to read your book?

I really would love us to get to a point where our politicians could cooperate, and I’m not drawing any equivalences here whatsoever: I’d like Chuck Schumer to read my book. I’d like Mitch McConnell to read my book. I’d like Donald Trump to read my book. I think maybe men need to read this book more than women do.

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This interview has been edited and condensed.