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By Mihar Dias April 2025
In every family, there comes a moment that reveals what truly binds or breaks us — love, pride, duty, or resentment. This is one such story.
An elderly woman, now 77, is going blind — not due to fate or lack of medicine, but due to something far more human: fear, misinformation, and the tangled threads of familial dysfunction.
For five years, her brother — a man in his sixties, has begged his two sisters to get cataract surgery.
One finally tried, but her hospital phobia led to a skyrocketing blood pressure, and the operation was called off.
The other, influenced by old wives' tales and communal ignorance in the outskirts of Alor Setar, continues to reject medical intervention despite doctors warning her of permanent blindness.
But this story is not just about medical neglect. It’s about something deeper — the fraying bonds of kinship and the collapse of kindness under the weight of ego and excuses.
This elderly woman has children. They live mere doors away. And yet, one daughter is too entangled in her secretive second marriage to help, meeting her husband only weekly.
The other, juggling three children and a husband's orders, pleads that her hands are tied. Neither can spare a few days for the woman who once sacrificed her life to raise them.
The son, though loving, lives far and cannot get leave from work. In frustration, he throws up his hands: “Let her go blind. None of us are willing. So be it.”
Here, we confront a tragic truth: it isn’t blindness that afflicts this family. It is a kind of emotional myopia — a spiritual cataract — where empathy is clouded by pride, where resentment eclipses responsibility.
Offers of help have come — from an ailing Uncle Din whose wife offered to take the old woman for her surgery, and from a former in-law who felt compelled to step in. Yet both were met not with gratitude, but with outrage: “He’s not even family anymore. Where do we hide our faces now?”
And so pride stood guard at the door, as kindness was turned away.
LESSONS TO BE LEARNED
This story is not rare. It plays out in quiet homes across the world where aging parents become burdens, not blessings, and love is conditional upon convenience.
The Quran speaks directly to this in Surah Al-Isra (17:23):
“And your Lord has decreed that you not worship except Him, and to parents, good treatment. Whether one or both of them reach old age [while] with you, say not to them [so much as], ‘uff,’ and do not repel them but speak to them a noble word.”
Confucius, too, taught filial piety as a moral cornerstone, urging children to honour their parents not only in word, but in deed.
And from a Western lens, the psychologist Carl Jung wrote:
“The greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of its parents.”
But perhaps the greatest burden today is the unacknowledged labour of love those parents gave, dismissed when they need love in return.
We also learn that fear — irrational and cultural — can be a paralysing force, especially when surrounded by ignorance.
The importance of health literacy cannot be overstated. Where facts do not go, myths flourish. Community leaders, religious figures, and family must stand together in compassion and clarity to counter harmful folklore.
And what of pride? Philosopher Alain de Botton once said:
“Pride begins with a sense of being unloved and ends with making oneself unlovable.”
Here, pride does not protect the family’s dignity — it poisons it.
THE FINAL CALL
Let this story be a lesson not just in eye care but in heart care. That the time will come when regret will no longer matter, when “we should have helped” will echo too late. A mother may forgive, but time will not.
To the families reading this:
If your mother is old and frail, help her see — not just with her eyes, but through the love you show. Drive her to the hospital. Walk with her through fear. Speak gently to your siblings. Accept help from those outside your circle if those within it won’t rise. Let kindness triumph over ego.
Because blindness of the soul is far worse than any cataract of the eye.
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