Oliver Sacks has a beautiful piece, "Recalled to Life," in last week’s (October 31) New Yorker (sorry, the story is not on line!) about people who, usually through stroke or other traumatic neurological insult, lose the ability to express themselves in words.  In some cases, the disability goes deeper: certain people can lose the capacity to use language even in their thinking.  The condition is called "aphasia," and Sacks focuses on one of this patients, Pat, and how she becomes aphasic after a stroke but then adjusts her life around the new limitation in wonderful ways.

     There are a couple of things to note here.  First, Sacks has a marvelous description of the rehabilitation hospital where he works and where Pat is living.  And it gets at a larger point about disability:

   

Visitors to hospitals for the chronically
ill are often horrified at first, at the sight of hundreds of
"incurable" patients, many of them paralyzed, blind, or speechless.
One’s first thought is often: Is life worth living in circumstances
like these?  What sort of life can these people have? One wonders,
nervously, how one would react to the prospect of being disabled and
entering such a home oneself.

    Then one may start to see the
other side.  Even if no cure, or only limited improvement, is possible
for most of these patients, many of them may nonetheless be helped to
reconstruct their lives, to find other ways of doing things,
capitalizing on their strengths, finding compensations and
accommodations of every sort….

     Much of this comes down to perspective or what one is willing to see.  When confronted by disability most of us see the bad: the limitations, the opportunities lost, the tragedy.  Sacks is telling us to look at the whole picture, not really just the "other side."  For when seen in the larger context, the disabled, however disabled they are, are vital and constructive.  They are constructive in themselves, as they find ways of reconstituting their lives around their limitations, and they are constructive for us, for they show us our own limitations, out initial inability (and, for some, sadly, a continuing disability) to see the full range and complexity of humanity.  When looked at whole, the disabled reveal our own disabling fear of disability.

       Sacks makes these sentiments concrete in his telling of Pat’s recall to life.  Here is just one scene from the end of the piece (remember Pat has retained only a very limited use of words; she gestures and uses a book to point to words and phrases she wants.  As with most people with aphasia, she cannot communicate in the conventional manner, but she can reason and discern and make decisions):

As we moved up Allerton Avenue, bustling on a weekend afternoon, I saw that half the shopkeepers knew Pat, and shouted "Hi, Pat!" as she bowled past in he rwheelchair.  She waved at the young woman in the health-food store where she buys her carrot juice, and received a "Hi, Pat!" back.  She waved to a Korean woman at the dry cleaner’s, blew a kiss, and held a kiss blown back.  The woman’s sister, Pat was able to indicate to me, used to work in the fruit market.

     It goes on.  Read the whole thing.  It is obvious that Pat, a naturally outgoing and gregarious women, is able to express herself and integrate herself fully into the local community.  She thrives in the hospital that most of us would see as a hell on earth, and weaves in and out and through a dense web of social relationships.  She is fully and unambiguously human.

    I see Chuang Tzu in all of this, of course.  He would not need to be convinced of each and every individuals worth and integrity.  But Sacks helpfully reminds the rest of us of precisely that point.