The longer you live in a small town, the more you see, so I like to walk. On one of my longer routes, I trek past the Cobbossee Stream, where I often see immature bald eagles, looking for breakfast. After the steep incline of Winter Street, I cut through a Civil War-era cemetery, filled with the familiar names of very young men, whose descendants still live in Gardiner, Maine.

I’ve completed half my four-mile loop by the time I enter a more rural landscape. Near the high school, poplars line the right verge. I often stop and listen to their rippling leaves, which shift in the wind, moving in color from silvery grey to green to white.

Once in a while, I take out my hearing aids here. An experiment, I think. Although I secretly hope for a miracle.

I take them out and hear…nothing.

It’s an odd sensation to watch in silence the undulating grasses of the fields, whose sighing movement, not that long ago, I could hear. Fifteen years ago, I was diagnosed with a genetic, progressive hearing loss. Seven years ago, I bought hearing aids, which make a difference, although my hearing is declining.

My disability has sent me to a peculiar new country. The experience of impairment is everywhere and nowhere in our culture, informing debates over euthanasia, abortion, stem cell research, present in rapidly increasing numbers of Americans, but seeming an experience mainly of other people, whom we feel sorry for. It is unaccountably absent from popular culture, including creative nonfiction, where people confess every imaginable form of sexual behavior, substance abuse, family dysfunction, but much more rarely physical impairment.

Perhaps our avoidance is related to a desire to be compassionate. There is shame in discussing a handicap, which I see in the way people avert their eyes when I infrequently take out my hearing aids in their presence. They seem horrified by my weakness, full of kindness and pity.

In Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, a character remarks to the protagonist, “We’re a sentimental people and we horrify easily. True, our moral fiber is rotten. Our national character stinks to high heaven. But we are kinder than ever.”

For Percy, moral debates over disability are linked to this kindness. The technology that can eradicate disability and suffering will create a world where all children are loved and the old and impaired die happy deaths. Where some day no one will have to ask her companions to repeat themselves or be unable to hear the sounds of grasses in a field.

As Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor notes, the prevalence of disability and illness invariably dredge up issues of morality and stigma. In our culture, based on dominion as well as compassion, we are expected to fight the terrible stranger of impairment.

“What can you do about it?” people invariably ask me, of my deafness. Literature and movies often describe the experience of “battling” illness, ending in triumph. The complex, difficult experience of living with a disability remains alien.

Except for those who have the courage to embrace it. I‘ve been reading Richard Gianonne’s Flannery O’Connor: Hermit Novelist, where the author links O’Connor’s artistic and personal biography to the asceticism of desert spirituality. O’Connor had lupus, the unpredictable disease that had killed her father. She understood illness, which, she wrote, is “always a place where there’s no company, where no one can follow.”

Forced by circumstance to live in Milledgeville, O’Connor’s vision was shaped by constraint. In Mystery and Manners, she noted that vocation entails a call, sometimes against one’s will. In surrendering to her call, O’Connor looked hard at impairment and found it looking back. Perhaps she saw in its face a reminder of our weakness, of the necessity of yielding to God. And the freedom in that submission.

Abba Evagrius’ “Always keep your death in mind and do not forget the eternal judgment,” was one of her favorite sayings. This may have been what O’Connor had in mind when she welcomed the stranger at the door.