"Joe Ford, a Harvard undergraduate with severe cerebral palsy: "Like many others with disabilities, I believe that the American public, to one degree or another, holds that disabled people are better off dead
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This guy is exactly right-on. This is the sad truth of it all.
I have had the unfortunate experience of being in a family situation where this was actually said, one brother to another. One was quadriplegic with end-stage MS, and just happy to be alive....a sweet loving man who was being cared for at home by his mother and my husband, as was his wish.
One of the other brothers said to him one day, "I'd rather be dead, than live the way you do."
He did die, about a year later, at the age of 42. Why do people begrudge the disabled their existence?
For two reasons, I suppose. First, the disabled remind people of incapacitation and death, which many worldy people are inordinately afraid of. Secondly, they may feel guilty for not helping the less fortunate.
We who have vigorous physical and intellectual powers have much to enjoy. Severely disabled men and women may have only a few things: The voice of a good old pal. Almond-scented lotion. A favorite music CD. Warm buttery sunlight on their shoulders. The taste of strawberry jello.
Wouldn't we, who have so much to enjoy, be awfully mean to deny severely disabled men and women the few things they CAN enjoy? And death denies everything: all sensation, all pleasure, all the goodness of the body and every glimmer of the mind in this world.
May our disabled loved ones always be in the care of someone who multiples their pleasures. Someone who honors their EMBODIED spiritual nature. Someone who treasures every precious glimmer of their minds.
Mrs. Don-o
P.S. I am 24/7 caregiver for my darling 90 year old father,
who is blind and almost deaf, and whose mind is failing from vascular dementia.
We keep him well-supplied with what he likes: peanut butter and chocolate chips (eaten with a spoon), the Mozart and Bach, on tape cassette with earphones, sauerkraut-pork-and-mashed-potatoes (German comfort food), nose-to-nose contact, and hand-in-hand. He can still receive Holy Communion. If he has a little pain, he gets a little morphine. Life is good.
That's why God gives strength to the strong. So we can give sweetness to the weak.