by Deborah Kendrick
(Reprinted from "The Cincinnati Inquirer," August 25, 2002.)
(Editor's Note: This article was originally printed in "The Columbus Dispatch" and is reprinted with permission. To alert editors of newspapers near you to the weekly "Alive and Well" column on disability rights issues, contact Deborah Kendrick via e-mail at [email protected].)
"That's morbid," my daughter said when I told her I was going to a funeral in Columbus that would be audio-described for the visually impaired.
Actually, I wasn't quite sure how I felt about it myself; but I was very sure how I felt about the person being mourned, and the spouse who had lost her.
Joann Fais Fischer loved theater and movies and was constantly promoting the work of Accessible Arts, the nonprofit organization she helped form.
Through Accessible Arts, Columbus is perhaps the only city in the country that offers live audio description for both classic and first-run films. It was fitting, then, that Joann's funeral, where many blind and visually impaired friends were in attendance, would also be the first service of its kind to be audio-described.
Nothing about Joann's 64 years was particularly easy, but her constant smile and positive outlook were the refrains heard from many on the day she was buried. As a Type I (juvenile) diabetic, she had been giving herself insulin shots for more than 50 years, and had accepted with grace the losses wrought by that disease. Receiving the 50-year Survivor Medallion for insulin-dependent diabetics from Eli Lilly a few years ago might have been deemed gloomy by some, but to Joann it was evidence of what determination and faith can accomplish.
Her diminished eyesight, triggered by diabetic retinopathy, led her to many of the people and projects she valued most at the end of her life. It led her to the American Council of the Blind, an organization where she held office, worked hard, and made many friends. It led her to the love of her life, Dr. Elmer Fischer, who became legendary among Cincinnatians with disabilities in the mid-1970s when he founded Radio Reading Services of Greater Cincinnati.
Ten years after establishing RRS here, he moved to Columbus to take a job with Ohio Educational Telecommunications Network, coordinating all such services throughout Ohio. The couple met in Columbus and began what Dr. Fischer called "the most difficult and best 12 years of my life."
Who knows how two people in their 50s fall so wildly in love? Part of the attraction, certainly, was their shared tendency to turn adversity to advantage, and learn from their own difficulties how to benefit others.
When the couple married in June 1993, they arranged for the wedding to be audio-described. The circle was completed in more ways than one last week with the audio description. Joann Fais Fischer was just an ordinary woman whose extraordinary optimism and integrity made a lasting impression on others with disabilities near her.
As seasoned describer Nancy Van Voorhis spoke directly to my ear -- and that of 20 other listeners scattered throughout the crowded sanctuary -- I was grateful to be on the receiving end of this final tribute to Joann's commitment to audio description.
As the describer named for me the gorgeous arrays of flowers, told me who was coming down the aisle, and even read the words to the closing hymn so I could sing, I knew for sure that there was nothing morbid in this unusual occasion for description.
Grief and the loss of loved ones are every bit as much a part of life as weddings and comic entertainment. Accessing them fully is part of equalizing all of life's experiences for everyone.