For those living with blindness, Brookline-based group offers opportunity for independent lives
“We want to be treated as equals. We want to function as independently as much as we can. My definition of independence is knowing when to ask for your help when you need it, and knowing when you don’t have to ask for help when you don’t need it.”
Dean Denniston can be found some Monday nights in Cambridge, where he stands on stage at the Cantab Lounge’s open mic to play acoustic blues on his guitar.
Denniston, now retired after decades working in state government, first learned how to play at the YMCA on Huntington Avenue at age 15, after a childhood spent playing the piano.
“It’s my hobby, it’s my therapy… it keeps me sane,” said Denniston during an interview in his Brookline home, as he strummed a few bars on a guitar.
Now he splits his time working as the chief lay leader for his church, King’s Chapel in downtown Boston, and serving on the Massachusetts Commission for the Blind Statutory Advisory Board.
Denniston, who lost his sight to a hereditary condition, said volunteers with the Massachusetts Association for the Blind have allowed him to live his life on his own terms.
“I get so much out of it to be able to be independent,” he said. “We want to be treated as equals. We want to function as independently as much as we can. My definition of independence is knowing when to ask for your help when you need it, and knowing when you don’t have to ask for help when you don’t need it.”
MAB, which was founded in 1903, supports programs that assist people living with blindness and other eyesight problems.
The organization connects about 90 people in Greater Boston with volunteers, but is looking for additional volunteers, as the group has a yearlong waiting list for clients who are waiting for assistance.
Barbara Salisbury, the organization’s CEO, said volunteers help clients with day-to-day tasks like reading mail and food shopping. (The program includes training and a background check of prospective volunteers, she said.)
While volunteers make a six-month commitment, many stay on for years, she said, working with the same client.
“These relationships develop over time,” said Salisbury, who noted that friendships can grow between the clients and volunteers. “It doesn’t feel like a volunteer relationship.”
For Denniston, MAB connected him with several volunteers since he began participating in 1974. He’s stayed in touch with many of them through the years, and some still return to help out; one woman helps Denniston send more than 100 Christmas cards every year. And having a volunteer — instead of a friend or family member — offers privacy.
“Using a volunteer gave me a sense of independence,” he said, “because I didn’t have to depend on a spouse, a parent or a sibling… I don’t care how close you are to somebody. You want your own privacy.”
Denniston’s current volunteer is 28-year-old Barry O’Neill, who has worked with Denniston once a week for four years. O’Neill said he joined MAB when he was looking for a community service opportunity, and MAB was located near his home at the time.
Now, four years in, he said the relationship with Denniston is the reason he’s still around.
“I stayed because I enjoy hanging out with Dean,” said O’Neill.
The feeling’s mutual.
“Barry’s not my volunteer. He’s my friend,” said Denniston.
Denniston was born with his sight, but a hereditary disease called retinitis pigmentosa robbed him of his vision over the years. He described himself as an angry young man after his diagnosis, and often asked himself, “Why me?”
But in 1968, he had a conversation with someone — Denniston said he never got the man’s name nor saw him again — who listened to him as he complained about his vision problems.
Denniston said the man was able to put Denniston’s concerns in to perspective. He doesn’t downplay his blindness, Denniston said, but he learned to live with it.
“’God has given you so many gifts, and given you a new way of seeing people. So why don’t you focus on that, rather than what you don’t think you have,’” Denniston said the stranger told him. “And I never forgot that.”
But his career path was no sure thing following his graduation from Yale University with a master’s degree in divinity in 1971. While Denniston learned to handle his eye problems, he found some in the business world couldn’t see past them.
“Most people, when they deal with a blind person, they say, ‘Well, he can’t see, so therefore, he can’t do,’” he said.
He said he found it hard to land a job because employers believed a man with dwindling eyesight would need an assistant to do the job.
“In the 1970s and 1980s, blind people did three things. They either caned chairs, they tuned pianos, or they stood on a street corner selling pencils,” said Denniston of the stereotype. “That was the sighted person’s vision of blind people. And I decided I didn’t want to fit that mold.”
He found work as a counselor at Boston University before getting a job in the Department of Social Services. The hiring consultant — whose own son was blind and found it difficult to get hired — decided that Denniston had a place in the agency.
Denniston would go on into roles in departments for social services, transitional assistance and the Massachusetts Coalition for the Blind.
He retired in 2009, after working as director of the Office of Civil Rights and Equal Opportunity for the Executive Office of Health and Human Services.
While there is adaptive equipment available — such as computers that can speak written messages aloud and electronic note takers that can translate Braille into spoken words — Denniston said there’s no substitute for human help.
“Technology does not replace a human being… it’s the human contact, it’s the warmth, it’s the human contact,” said Denniston.
And the volunteers from MAB have provided that service for decades, he said.
“They’re reliable, they’re dependable, they show up,” said Denniston. “And showing up is a big deal, baby, it’s a big deal.”