My Body Politic

Conscripts to the Cavalry

On a spring day in 1971, my husband, my best friend, and I set off from Boston, Massachusetts, bound for Washington, D.C. We walked down the street together, we stood together near the entrance to the Mass Pike, and in unison we thrust our thumbs out, looking for the ride that would take us far on this first leg of our journey. We got the ride, and then another, and then another. And with each ride we got closer to Washington. But we never got there, and by the end of the day, my friend Carol was dead and my husband John, the ferociously smart man I’d married much too young, was in a coma he would never wake up from. I lay down the hall from him, tethered to tubes and machines, breathing hard to keep myself alive.

We had been on our way to Washington to protest the war in Vietnam. We had no doubts on that day we set out. This was the demonstration that would end the war, and we would—we must—voice our outrage. While it hurt us to know about the horrors, we lived at a safe distance from danger. Just two years before, John and I had been planning to go to Canada so that he could escape the draft, but then, just weeks before we were to leave, he fell and damaged his knee and his draft status was changed to 4- F, an immediate exemption from service. Carol and I had been training at a local center to be draft counselors, to assist young men who were trying to avoid the draft. We wanted to do something meaningful—something to show that we were not just tie-dye hippies, flashing peace signs to passersby.

We all knew of men who had been killed, and of those who were wounded and wouldn’t ever walk again, or hear again, or breathe properly. But we were safe from that. We could only speak out against the injustice, and so we set off.

Suddenly, this became my story alone to tell. I lost my husband John, a wry wit who rebuked all that was hypocritical and phony. He led a frantic life, and was heard to say openly and with assurance that he knew he wouldn’t live long. He had a nervous energy and a long lean body that caught my eye the first time I saw him. John dropped out of college shortly after I did, and we both had a defiance about us. Neither of us wore it comfortably. Mine was tinged with self-doubt, and his with a brashness

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and a lust for beer that often muddied his righteousness. We were living together and apart. He had loved me and been my friend, but he had hurt me too. He pulled and pushed, wanting too much, or nothing. I loved him too, and pulled and pushed back, and neither of us was wise enough to make it better.

And I lost Carol, an upright oak tree. A woman who made art of everything she did. Her long fingers were constantly weaving, twirling, braiding—threads, rope, string; wherever she was, she would pull from her pocket a small crochet hook and some yarn, and hook and loop, hook and loop, catch and knot, cutting the thread with her teeth, tucking in the ends, sliding it back into her pocket when her turn came up on the supermarket check-out line. On her face, she wore a red birthmark that slipped across her cheek, and gave her a soft glow. I told her many times how beautiful it was, as were her almond-shaped eyes and the long brown hair that flowed to her waist. She lived with a man named Rick, and they were a lively, playful pair. The four of us spent most of our weekends together. Carol and I had met at one of the temp secretarial jobs I took to make ends meet, and we insisted that we all get together. We would tease the guys later on because neither trusted our judgment, and had put off getting together for months. Once we did, we stuck. Rick didn’t go with us to Washington, as he was the only one among us who had a steady job, and he had to work. He would hear when he got home that night how his life had been shattered too.

So Carol and John were lost to us. And John and Carol lost life. I breathed, and breathed, and breathed, and in beds down the corridor from me in a Baltimore hospital they each stopped breathing. Carol that same day, and John, they told me, a few days later. I never saw them. Or, if I did, I don’t remember. I’ve blotted it all out. The crash, the ambulance, the airlift in the helicopter, and the emergency room are locked up somewhere, I hope never to be found. But now, many years later, what I do remember, and want to reconstruct here, is the life I grew into. The new shape and formation of my body were set on that April day; the meaning this new body would have for me took years to know.

For it wasn’t until some time after I sustained the injury to my spine that immobilized my legs, after I learned to use a wheelchair, and after I had reckoned with myself and the world for a while in this new state—it wasn’t until then that I gained the vantage point of the atypical, the out-of- step, the underfooted. It took being turned away from restaurants because they would not provide a table for me and discovering that my local polling place, library, post office, and movie theater were now off-limits to me. I first had to endure strangers coming up to me in public to offer a pat

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on the head and tell me how brave I was and obstinate college professors who thought it was my responsibility to get to classes scheduled in buildings that had no ramps or elevators. Crucially, though, it was banding together with other disabled people for good purpose that taught me what I needed to know for this new life.

The injury was a sudden cataclysmic event, and the paralysis in my legs was instant. Becoming disabled took much longer. I learned along the way how a young woman of privilege, although living at the time as a college dropout and self-fashioned hippie in rented rooms on the outskirts of Boston, could, by the collision of a tinny Volkswagen bus into a cement embankment on Interstate 95, become a marginal citizen, her rights and liberties compromised, and her economic advantage, white skin, and private school education weakened currency in this new world she inhabited. It was, of course, the same world I had always lived in, but when I was a nondisabled person I hadn’t recognized the ways that world had favored me. I had always taken it for granted that if I could go places or get jobs that disabled people couldn’t, it was because I was strong and healthy and they had their deficits and incapacities. While I probably (my memory is fuzzy here) felt sorry for those who “couldn’t,” I saw no agency on the part of those of us who “could.” Certainly not those of us who were concerned about the plight of the unfortunates. We would at least want them to be cared for, housed, and fed.

Once I was pushed over to the other side, shelter and nourishment seemed meager fare for a body and mind that wanted a full life. I had ideas, I yearned to go to college, take a trip, get a job, and live on my own. I was a twenty-three-year-old robust and excitable young woman—ready for more life, not less.

After the accident, I spent almost a year in two different hospitals and a rehabilitation institute. I don’t remember much of the first few weeks. I was in an ICU and heavily sedated. Someone, I think it was a nurse, did tell me that John and Carol had died, but she must have had to tell me several times, because I kept asking for them.

It wasn’t until the third or fourth week that a doctor came to tell me that my legs were paralyzed. It seems strange now that I didn’t realize it. I seem to have been able throughout this ordeal to shut out many things. I must have known it on some level, but kept the thought at bay. I was lying in bed on my back unable to move anything but my left arm, since my right was fractured and in a cast, and I must have thought (if I let the thought in at all) that I was just too weak to move.

The doctor stood over me and delivered his news, not hurriedly, not