When I was 18 years I was diagnosed with Usher Syndrome and it took me another eighteen years to understand which were the consequences of this disease and realize that it is one of the main causes of deaf blindness.
The level of hearing loss and low vision still allows me to have a quite normal communication despite when I don’t succeed in reading lips or when the volume of the telecomunication devices is not adequate.
I have already written about the difficulties that hearing impaired can have nowadays during this pandemic caused by Coronavirus.
Today, in this article, I want to talk about the sense of touch.
This sense is very important for deaf blind people because it allows them to communicate.
If you have never seen how it is possible to communicate with the tactile sign language you can watch this video
As far as the actual social restrictions of quarantine are concerned, it’s obvious that some actions and facilities should be granted to deaf blind people otherwise they wouldn’t be able to live and survive.
Perhaps they would use gloves or they would wash their hands carefully.
For those who are blind, the problem is serious too.
A handshake, a hug, a hand by which they are held,are necessary means to communicate what they cannot see.
A blind person cannot see a smile that makes him/her feel good when he/she needs assurance.
Now, besides talking about these cases, I would linger about the importance of the sense of touch for everybody as nowadays it seems to be a forbidden sense.
We cannot touch each other, somebody says that we must stay away even from our partner.
If the loss of hearing and seeing makes the communication difficult and limits it, the deprivation of touch, and therefore of contact, is a limitation to relationships.
This is even worse.
We communicate our deep feelings with touching.
Through the sense of touch it is possible to convey either good feelings or bad ones in a silent way
Kisses, caresses ,embraces, are gestures of contact as well as kicks and punches.
If evil words can be more harmful than a punch, no words can substitute a caress.
Walking hand in hand with somebody, embracing the mother, the son, the partner, are daily gestures by which we can convey our deep feelings,
Human warmth from a body to another body.
How could we live without this sense of touch? How long can we last without it ?
What should we do in order to overcome its absence?
Somebody wonders if Second World War was worse than the Coronavirus or not.
According to the opinion of some aged people who have lived both these two catastrophes, the answer is that the pandemic of Coronavirus is worse.
Bombs destroy, make noise are dropped by an enemy you can see.
You know who to hate.
If you are lucky to survive you can hug someone.
The Coronavirus is not only invisible, but it compels us to be wary of other fellows, to keep away from everybody, even from the people we love.
It doesn’t matter that we have still a lot of food inside our supermarkets and therefore we can eat adequately if our heart is empty.
What shall we do?
We must try to feed our heart with other sensations that may warm it up and can substitute the sense of touch for a little while.
Singing, for example, warms us up and helps us to join one another.
For this reason the flash mob about singing from the balconies have become so popular and have spread all over the world.
Poetry is another way to warm us up
It conveys emotions that someone felt some time ago, perhaps some centuries ago, which are similar to yours and therefore you feel less lonely.
Another possibility is nature.
If for the time being, we cannot embrace our fellows, we can at least embrace a tree or caress a flower.
Perhaps some one is lucky enough to put the feet into the thawed fresh water of a creek.
However, we must not find some substitutes to hugs, or some alternatives that deceive us we may give them up.
This is true above all for Italians.
In other countries people don’t hug a lot and theyare colder and more detached from other persons than in Italy.
We are very very warm
It is this warmth that moves from one body to another one.
It comes into our body from the sun rays
If a song or a poem cannot warm you up, try to find a sun ray or a fire and let their light heaten you till when human beings will be able to heaten you again.