It would be interesting to know if I am wrong in my assumption
that most Americans know the story of Helen Keller (1880-1968). My
assumption would be wrong if you are reading her story here for the
first time.
While Helen Keller was in college, she told the story of her
childhood in the 1903 Story of My Life and she appeared as
herself in the silent 1919 film Deliverance. Her childhood
was also the subject of the 1959 Broadway play, The Miracle
Worker, and the film by the same name in 1962 starring Patty
Duke (Astin) (b. 1946) as Keller. There were as well the 1979 and
2000 remakes of this film for television.
In 1904, Keller graduated from Radcliffe. The 1984 TV movie,
The Miracle Continues, depicted Keller’s college and young
adult years.
In 1964, President Johnson awarded Keller the Presidential Medal
of Freedom. Her native state, Alabama, honored Keller by placing an
image of her on the U.S. quarter in 2003, placing a statue of her
in the U.S. Capitol in 2009, and naming a hospital after her.
Stamps bearing Keller’s image have been issued by countries
throughout the world, including by the U.S. in 1980. Several
countries have streets named after her. And in 2005, India produced
a film about her, entitled Black.
Why all of this attention? Because Helen Keller became both
blind and deaf after an illness when she was 19 months. She was
taught to communicate at age 7, and she went on, during a long life
of 88 years, to contribute to our lives.
Apparently no one told the story of Helen Keller to the
identical Belgian twin men, age 45, cobblers both, who
sought and
obtained assisted suicide in Belgium in December. Belgian law
requires unbearable pain. The men’s pain was mental, namely, that
they were deaf, and becoming blind. They were not yet blind. Being
45, they were not near the end of their natural lives. Their
conditions were incurable but not terminal.
Apparently, too, no one told the story of Helen Keller to
Jacqueline Herremans, a member of the Belgian Commission of
Euthanasia, who said about the twins that “they would not have been
able to lead autonomous lives, and that with only a sense of touch
they had no prospects of a future.” (The senses of smell and taste
are ignored.)
It was with good reason that Not Dead Yet was founded in the
mid-1990s. The members are persons with disabilities advocating
against assisted suicide vehemently opposed to Professor Peter
Singer’s articulation of criteria for what constitutes a human
being.
Many people associate the word Talladega with NASCAR racing and
the 2006 movie Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky
Bobby. My background — as someone who lived three years with
11 teen-aged boys with mental and physical disabilities, and who
served for five years as a director of the Chicago Bar
Association’s Legal Clinic for the Disabled, Inc., housed in the
renowned Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago — causes me to
associate the word Talladega with the town’s famous Alabama Institute for Deaf and Blind.
Reading of the story of the Belgian twins, I was reminded of my
paternal grandmother who became blind when she was a young mother.
But she raised five children. I was also reminded of my good
fortune in appearing in Juvenile Court in Cook County (Chicago) on
the Child Abuse and Neglect “calendar” before Judge Stephen R.
Yates. After Judge Yates received a diagnosis of Lou Gehrig’s
Disease (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or ALS), he continued to
judge and to teach. He
died at age 60, not of assisted suicide.
While you may not have known, or known about, Judge Yates, we
have all heard of, listened to, or read books by the cosmologist
Stephen Hawking (b. 1942), who has a condition like Lou Gehrig’s
Disease.
I assert that the Belgian twins could have lived, and lived
well, despite being blind and deaf. Note that they were becoming
blind over several years so they had plenty of time to prepare for
their new situation. Apparently they used two years of this time to
shop for a doctor who would help them commit suicide.
But let me turn your attention from the person or persons with
disabilities to their doctors, relatives, and caregivers. The
inspiration for these people would be Anne Sullivan (1866-1934),
“the miracle worker,” played in the 1962 film by the late Anne
Bancroft (1931-2005) and in the 1979 remake by Patty Duke Astin.
Sullivan had grown up destitute and in an almshouse. She was 20
years old, nearly blind and a graduate of a school for the blind,
when she traveled the long distance from Massachusetts to Alabama
to teach the 7-year old blind-and-deaf Helen. She and Helen Keller
were to become companions for decades.
Twenty years after Anne’s death, Helen published a tribute to
her in Teacher, Anne Sullivan Macy: A Tribute by the Foster
Child of Her Mind (1955). There have been several biographies
of this great teacher: Nella Braddy, Anne Sullivan Macy: The
Story Behind Helen Keller (1933), Sarah Miller, Miss
Spitfire: Reaching Helen Keller (2007), Marfe Ferguson Delano,
Helen’s Eyes: A Photobiography of Annie Sullivan, Helen
Keller’s Teacher (2008), and Kim E. Nielsen, Beyond the
Miracle Worker: The Remarkable Life of Anne Sullivan Macy and Her
Extraordinary Friendship with Helen Keller (2009).
At Anne’s passing, Helen held her hand. And so, Helen had
switched roles and had become Anne’s caregiver. For their part, the
Belgian twins decided that they would rather commit suicide than
care for any other human being, including their surviving parents
and brother, who had pled with them, in Dylan Thomas’ words of 1951
“Do not go gentle into that good night… Rage, rage, against the
dying of the light.”
