Home | Away

Wednesday, March 08, 2006

Another subject altogether

This blog doesn’t usually do memorials.  OK, yes, I wrote a long piece in August about the deaths of Janet’s father and her best friend’s husband, but you know what I mean—I didn’t post anything on Coretta Scott King, for example, even though her passing was a milestone (and, unfortunately, the occasion for yet more wingnuttery having to do with black folk “politicizing” her funeral, in contrast with the well-behaved white people who refrained from politicizing the death of Ronald Reagan).

But last night when I learned of the death of Dana Reeve, I was stunned.  Not by surprise—I knew she had lung cancer—but by a sense that we’d lost someone of rare grace.  I know, I have a soft spot for caregivers of people with disabilities.  Sure.  And for people who are friends of Mark Messier.  (My god, it was only six weeks ago that she sang at Madison Square Garden in Messier’s honor.) But I think it wasn’t just that she was so powerful as Christopher Reeve’s partner and advocate—it was also that she and her husband dealt with more than most people know about.  Yes, there was the spinal cord injury itself, which is quite enough.  But for a while back there in the 1990s, Christopher Reeve became, in some circles, the example of How Not to Talk About Disability . . . because (so the argument went) he was all about cure, and not about care.  All about the remedicalization of disability, and not about the provision of services for long-term maintenance.  That was the argument, anyway.  If you didn’t have a connection to one or another sector of the “disability community” back then, you may not have seen the point of this critique: after all, who’s in favor of spinal cord injuries?  What’s wrong with curing a disease, or remediating a syndrome, or alleviating an injury?  Isn’t it a general species good that smallpox and polio and tuberculosis no longer sweep through the population?  There’s no such thing as a Tay-Sachs Preservation Society, right?  Well, right, but when you start talking too aggressively about “curing” or “eradicating” certain disabilities, some of us get kinda antsy.  Like those of us who are deaf, for example, or those of us who know people with Down syndrome.  We don’t see the “curing” or “eradicating” of these things as a general, unqualified species good; we tend to see them as perfectly acceptable forms of intraspecies diversity.  (I don’t even want to get into that new ABC show, “Miracle Workers.” All I’ll say is what I’ve said before, namely, disability deranges every political position on the spectrum.  Well, no, I’ll say a little more than that.  On the one hand, this is just creepy beyond belief: it’s the future of American health care, in which your only chance of medical treatment depends on your participation in a reality TV show.  And it’s cure-as-overcoming-as-salvation:  we might as well call it “Touched by a Medical Angel.” On the other hand, who’s against the innovative use of stem-cell research? You know who. And who among us truly wants to deny these people their desires?  Not me.) We thought that Nuveen ad in the 2000 Super Bowl was exceptionally creepy, too.  And we are deeply suspicious, for very good reasons, of the fact that most of the public narratives of disability involve plucky little humans “overcoming” their “handicaps”—even if we don’t mind touting the achievements of individuals with disabilities here and there as well.

So the Reeves caught a lot of extra grief that they didn’t really need, is what I’m saying.  And it always struck me that Dana Reeve dealt with that, just as she dealt with her husband’s injury and its aftermath, with extraordinary equanimity and greatness of soul.  I’m sorry she’s gone. 

Posted by Michael on 03/08 at 10:23 AM
(16) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
Page 1 of 1 pages