Disability Visibility : First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century

by Alice Wong

If the choice is to end our lives, he says, we should have assistance then as well. But Carol Gill says that it is differential treatment—disability discrimination—to try to prevent most suicides while facilitating the suicides of ill and disabled people.

know only that in chasing to achieve the person I once was, I will miss the person I have become.

In 2016, a Japanese man who was outspoken in his belief that all people with disabilities should be euthanized massacred nineteen disabled people and injured twenty-six at an institution in Sagamihara, Japan. Four years later, the victims still haven’t been publicly named—reportedly out of respect for their families, who wished to avoid the stigma that comes with having disabled family members.

Between the chair and the van to transport it, we spent nearly $100,000, even with Medicare’s help. I had considered a power chair in the past, but it was Khalil who motivated me to move forward with such a big purchase.

You have a level of loss we would usually expect to see in someone in their seventies.” Crip time is time travel. Disability and illness have the power to extract us from linear, progressive time with its normative life stages and cast us into a wormhole of backward and forward acceleration, jerky stops and starts, tedious intervals and abrupt endings. Some of us contend with the impairments of old age while still young; some of us are treated like children no matter how old we get.

Freud wrote in “Mourning and Melancholia” that “normal mourning” resolves on its own and needs no intervention. Only melancholia is a true illness, mourning without end, without resolution. The bodymind refuses to let go of the lost object and deforms itself in the process.

“I guess the downside,” I said, “is there’s no healthy person to take care of you.” “But when you’re alone, there’s no healthy person to take care of you, either,” she said.