One morning in the fall of 2017, Frank Bruni woke up unable to see out of his right eye. During the night, the journalist, then 52, had suffered a rare kind of stroke that ravaged one of his optic nerves and left him with a thick fog across the right side of his vision. A few days later, a neuro-ophthalmologist warned him, “You know that this could happen in your other eye.” Bruni asked what that risk might be. “About a forty percent chance,” came the frightening answer.

Bruni’s diagnosis was less a line in the sand than a fork in the road, reminding him that he, like most of us, has the agency to choose his path. Do we give into our “sadness and scaredness,” or take “deliberate, concrete steps to move beyond them?” he asks in his new memoir, “The Beauty of Dusk: On Vision Lost and Found.”

Throughout the book, Bruni not only tells us his story but introduces a number of people who have come to that fork, including his mother, who challenged “doomsaying, defeatism and dark moods” after being diagnosed with uterine cancer and went on to confound her doctors and model a positive way of living to her son.

Bruni recalls how his attitude was as important as his treatment options. “My world blurred, but it also sharpened,” he writes. “I held my breath; I exhaled. I said hello to new worries; I said goodbye to old ones. A clever friend of mine summed up my status wittily and well: ‘When one eye closes another opens.’ ” A half-full glass kind of guy, Bruni tells us his story isn’t about making lemons out of lemonade or how the night is darkest before the dawn. “It’s about dusk. It’s about those first real inklings that the day isn’t forever and that light inexorably fades.”

On that fateful night, he adds, “I went to bed seeing the world one way. I woke up seeing it another.”

Bruni’s book reminded me that it’s perspective that determines how we see the world. Halfway through the book I picked up my iPhone to review some of the many photos I’ve taken of sunrises and sunsets. The dawns are literal and metaphoric new days, but I found the sunsets, although equally beautiful, to be tinged with a certain sadness. Bruni, in explaining the brain’s neuroplasticity – “it reorganizes and reinvigorates itself over a much greater span of human life, and to a much greater degree, than was long assumed” – we are reminded that the capacity for change remains with us throughout our lives. Each sunset, be it from illness or aging, is a new opportunity.

In his interview with former Nebraska senator and Vietnam veteran Bob Kerrey (who had his right foot and ankle amputated after a grenade attack), Bruni helps us see how hardship might allow for a deeper understanding than a life “untouched by significant turmoil.” His musings took me back to my mid-20s, when I was diagnosed with metastatic cancer. Before then I’d been a self-assured jerk, a know-it-all who’d never faced any real adversity. After three surgeries and four rounds of chemotherapy, at age 26 I had to learn to rely on others, to accept dependency, mortality and vulnerability. Those were gifts it took me decades to appreciate.

Bruni describes vulnerability as both “a portal and a bridge,” as he introduces us to Juan Jose, a Mexican diplomat diagnosed in his teens with retinitis pigmentosa, a rare eye disorder that can cause a slow descent into blindness. Instead of bemoaning his fate, Juan Jose describes how he changed as a person. “I became patient,” he says, adding, “In all my defects, patience is one of the good things. Because you have to become patient. And you have to become resilient.” The moral of the story, according to Bruni, is that while we can’t control what happens to us, “we have the final say over how we regard and react to them.” To that point, Juan Jose can’t cure his blindness “but he can shape his story.”

We all have our stories, and so many of them are invisible. To look at Bruni’s author photo – or to see him in person as I do from time to time here in North Carolina – you’d never know that he’s largely blind in his right eye. If you looked at me (clothed, at least) you wouldn’t see the three scars that reveal my own cancer history, or know a close family member is under treatment for a life-threatening cancer. To this point, that much of our suffering is not readily apparent, Bruni introduces his “sandwich-board theory” of life.

“Imagine that our hardships, our hurdles, our demons, our pain were spelled out for everyone to see,” he writes. “Imagine that each of us donned a sandwich board that itemized them.” Bruni says his would be, “Eyesight compromised, could go blind.” We all need to understand how little we may see of the suffering of those we care about — not to mention those we only meet in passing. This is why one of the most popular and recurring social media memes is, “Be kind to others. You never know what someone is going through.” Indeed.

My favorite chapter in this book is the one about Bruni’s dog. Regan is an Instagram celebrity who regularly teaches Bruni – the old dog in this instance – new tricks. Among them: “Putting off experiences often means never having them.” And on occasion, Bruni reports, just before leaping into the air Regan catches his eye as if to say, “Look at me. Look at what I can do.” He marvels at her aerial feats, but that’s not the point. Her simple joy is infectious, with the power to ease whatever is troubling her human companion.

You don’t need a dog for this (although it helps). Bruni says what you need is “attention, openness, and humility … the recognition that something ordinary could be extraordinary. Without therapy or thought, Regan reveled in being alive. That helped me do the same.”

If I had one quibble with this moving and inspiring book, it’s that not everyone has the resources or the fortitude to confront a serious illness the way Bruni has. Still, I hope that his readers can discover through this memoir the inner strength to face their inevitable challenges, a renewed understanding of what others would say on their invisible sandwich boards, and a deeper well of compassion and kindness.

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