Seeing world's beauty before kids go blind

Canadian family's epic trip to create visual memories for their children with an incurable eye disease is captured in documentary film

- Alison de Souza

NEW YORK - What would you do if your children were slowly going blind?

This is the heartbreaking reality faced by Canadian couple Sebastien Pelletier and Edith Lemay, who have learned that three of their four children are gradually losing their sight to an incurable eye disease.

So in 2022, the husband and wife from Montreal decided to drop everything and take an epic, year-long, 24-country trip with Mia, now 13; Leo, 11; Colin, nine; and Laurent, seven.

Armed with a bucket list that included swimming with dolphins and seeing elephants, they traveled to places such as China, Cambodia, South Korea, Egypt, Nepal, Zimbabwe, and Ecuador.

The goal was for Mia, Colin, and Laurent - who all have retinitis pigmentosa, a condition that progressively shrinks one's visual field - to see the world's beauty while they still could and create visual memories they can draw on later.

The family's inspiring tale of love and resilience - which is full of ups and downs as the children come to grips with their condition - is told in Blink, a documentary that is now showing on Disney+.