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A gift all of us could treasure

Marin Independent Journal - 12/10/2018

Dec. 10--I was paraplegic once, for a day.

Let me explain.

When I was the editor of a small weekly newspaper in Miami in the mid-1980s, a local nonprofit sponsored a disability day for media folks. I showed up, they gave me a disability -- there were many but you couldn't choose your own -- and a wheelchair, instructed me to go about my day as usual and wished me luck.

I needed luck. Or something. Mostly the use of my lower body again.

That day was one of the hardest days of my life (giving birth, twice, is up there, too, but a lot more joyous). I couldn't navigate the crooked and cracked sidewalks well or cross streets easily. I couldn't open the front door of my office building, couldn't fit into the bathroom stalls. It was exhausting just wheeling myself around.

Just as exhausting was how people reacted to me. Some stared, some beamed huge smiles at me or wished me an enthusiastic, "Hello!" but I'm not sure why; I did nothing to deserve those smiles, those greetings. Some offered to help, which I appreciated sometimes, but not when I didn't need help because I could do it on my own. I didn't like all the unwanted attention -- attention I didn't receive when I present as "abled." It felt like pity.

No one wants to be pitied.

Say what you will about George H.W. Bush -- I was not a fan -- but the 41st president who died last week understood that, which is why he passed the Americans with Disabilities Act.

What a game-changer.

"This act is powerful in its simplicity. It will ensure that people with disabilities are given the basic guarantees for which they have worked so long and so hard: independence, freedom of choice, control of their lives, the opportunity to blend fully and equally into the rich mosaic of the American mainstream," he said the day he signed the ADA into law, on July 26, 1990. "Together, we must remove the physical barriers we have created and the social barriers that we have accepted. For ours will never be a truly prosperous nation until all within it prosper. ... We rejoice as this barrier falls for claiming together we will not accept, we will not excuse, we will not tolerate discrimination in America."

If only that were fully true. If only the current administration felt the same way.

Still, even the most tolerant of us sometimes feel awkward in the presence of someone who's not "normal" like we are, although some disabilities aren't clearly visible.

Or we consider them brave or heroic, notes San Rafael'sFrancine Falk-Allen, who contracted polio when she was 3 years old, in her witty and honest memoir, "Not a Poster Child." That isn't right either. "Sometimes people who put us crips on a pedestal are then disappointed when we eventually display that we have the same warts as everybody else."

It makes me wonder, who's the truly disabled person -- the one with the disability or the people who only see the disability and not the person?

I often forget to appreciate the privilege of my ableness, the ease of being able to get up on my own, dress myself, taste, hear, see -- life at its most basic, and its most fullest. How quickly it can change! The past few weeks, I have been hobbling about in a boot, crutches and a knee scooter thanks to a fractured metatarsal bone in my left foot -- don't ask; I'm a klutz -- and I am now painfully aware of, and humbled by, the loss of my ableness. The simple things I enjoy -- playing on the beach with my dog, hiking, cycling -- are gone. For now.

It's not permanent, thankfully, but something else could be one day. Then what?

Being forced into in a wheelchair for life made Mill Valley's Dr. Grace Dammann feel suicidal at first, after the trailblazing AIDs doctor survived a head-on collision on the Golden Gate Bridge that led to multiple surgeries and years of rehab. But what she told me before the Mill Valley Film Festival premiere of the 2014 documentary "States of Grace," which details her story, and what she says by the film's end, is a different story. The grace is in being alive and appreciating the impermanence of everything. "Nothing lasts forever, including great pain, great sorrow, great helplessness." Or even great happiness.

How true.

As we exchange gifts this holiday season, those words are a gift each of us can treasure.

Vicki Larson's So It Goes runs every other week. Contact her at vlarson@marinij.com and follow her on Twitter at OMG Chronicles

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(c)2018 The Marin Independent Journal (Novato, Calif.)

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