The Dignity Of Eating Alone
Return, at the end, to the specific human thing that Bessie Blount’s feeding device was designed to restore.
Not just the ability to eat. The ability to eat alone.
The ability to eat at your own pace. The ability to eat without a caregiver timing your bites. The ability to eat a full meal or stop partway through based on your own appetite and judgment, not the caregiver’s schedule.
For veterans who had lost both arms in the service of their country, eating was a daily reminder of what they had lost and of what they were no longer able to do for themselves. Three times a day, at every meal, the absence of their arms was the most immediate fact of their existence.
Blount’s device did not give them their arms back. It did not restore their full pre-injury capabilities. It gave them independence at mealtime. The ability to choose when to eat, what to eat (within what was available), and when to stop.
This is not a small thing.
In the rehabilitation literature, the restoration of independence in activities of daily living — eating, dressing, toileting, mobility — is understood to be fundamental to psychological recovery from severe disability. The person who can feed themselves independently is in a different psychological position than the person who must be fed. The former has agency at a fundamental biological level; the latter is dependent at that same level.
Blount understood this intuitively through her daily work with veterans. The feeding device was not just a mechanical solution to a mechanical problem. It was a psychological and human intervention designed to restore something essential to a person’s sense of self.
That the VA declined it — declined to give armless veterans the ability to eat independently — is the specific indictment at the heart of Blount’s story.
France gave them that independence. France said yes to what Blount had built.
And Bessie Blount Griffin, who had taught herself to write with a pencil in her mouth after her teacher punished her for writing with her left hand, knew better than almost anyone what it meant to find an alternative pathway to a capability that should have been available from the start.
She found alternative pathways. All her life.
Her name was Bessie Blount Griffin. She was born in a one-room school in Virginia. She proved her point. And she deserves to be known.