Deborah Kendrick doesn't say whether or not the body was embalmed and
displayed in an open casket, which was audio described.  I wonder what an
audio describer would say about an embalmed body.  Some view the
cremation process, with glass sides on the crematory machine.  Is a blow
by blow description of bodily tissues being vaporized at more than one
thousand degrees and large bones, including the skull, being pulverized
by a grinding machine really necessary?

Kelly

The Cincinnati Inquirer


Sunday, August 25, 2002

Audio description fitting for funeral

"That's morbid," my daughter said when I told her I was going to a
funeral in Columbus that would be audio-described for the visually
impaired.

Actually, I wasn't quite sure how I felt about it myself; but I was very
sure how I felt about the person being mourned, and the spouse who had
lost her.

Joann Fais Fischer loved theater and movies and was constantly promoting
the work of Accessible Arts, the nonprofit organization she helped form.

Through Accessible Arts, Columbus is perhaps the only city in the country
that offers live audio description for both classic and first-run films.
It was fitting, then, that Joann's funeral, where many blind and visually
impaired friends were in attendance, would also be the first service of
its kind to be audio-described.

Nothing about Joann's 64 years was particularly easy, but her constant
smile and positive outlook were the refrains heard from many on the day
she was buried. As a Type I (juvenile) diabetic, she had been giving
herself insulin shots for more than 50 years, and had accepted with grace
the losses wrought by that disease. Receiving the 50-year Survivor
Medallion for insulin-dependent diabetics from Eli Lilly a few years ago
might have been deemed gloomy by some, but to Joann it was evidence of
what determination and faith can accomplish.

Her diminished eyesight, triggered by diabetic retinopathy, led her to
many of the people and projects she valued most at the end of her life.
It led her to the American Council of the Blind, an organization where
she held office, worked hard, and made many friends. It led her to the
love of her life, Dr. Elmer Fischer, who became legendary among
Cincinnatians with disabilities in the mid-1970s when he founded Radio
Reading Services of Greater Cincinnati.

Ten years after establishing RRS here, he moved to Columbus to take a job
with Ohio Educational Telecommunications Network, coordinating all such
services throughout Ohio. The couple met in Columbus and began what Dr.
Fischer called "the most difficult and best 12 years of my life."

Who knows how two people in their 50s fall so wildly in love? Part of the
attraction, certainly, was their shared tendency to turn adversity to
advantage, and learn from their own difficulties how to benefit others.

When the couple married in June 1993, they arranged for the wedding to be
audio-described.

The circle was completed in more ways than one last week with the audio
description.

Joann Fais Fischer was just an ordinary woman whose extraordinary
optimism and integrity made a lasting impression on others with
disabilities near her.

As seasoned describer Nancy Van Voorhis spoke directly to my ear - and
that of 20 other listeners scattered throughout the crowded sanctuary - I
was grateful to be on the receiving end of this final tribute to Joann's
commitment to audio description.

As the describer named for me the gorgeous arrays of flowers, told me who
was coming down the aisle, and even read the words to the closing hymn so
I could sing, I knew for sure that there was nothing morbid in this
unusual occasion for description.

Grief and the loss of loved ones are every bit as much a part of life as
weddings and comic entertainment.

Accessing them fully is part of equalizing all of life's experiences for
everyone.

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