I thought I knew my neighbor. Almost every time I go out to my car, she’s there in her driveway, puttering away at some little task from her wheelchair. Often she uses the grabber I gave her (left from the days when my late wife was in her wheelchair) but I have seen Linda with a hoe, a shovel, a rake and any tool that she can wield while firmly strapped in her motorized rolling chair. And today, I found her pulling at a long hose unwinding from its cart. She pulled while her vehicle was backing up. And she would water her plants. Often she uses a watering can. She has strong arms.
I could not let this remarkable demonstration of grit and determination go by without comment, so I stopped to talk. Often I try to do this, knowing that hers is a lonely life, with only a health aid to talk with. She says this helper thinks she shouldn’t try to do so much manual labor.
But her live-in assistant is wrong, no matter how well intentioned.
Linda knows exactly what she wants to do, needs to do and wants to do. She told me that even before she had finally been diagnosed as having Multiple Sclerosis (M.S.), she knew something was wrong. The medical verdict was devastating for Linda. She said all she did was stay in bed while feeling sorry for herself for a year. It was her total denial period. She knew the truth but she wouldn’t accept it. Her apartment was on the second floor of the house next door to me and she was able to have a chair lift installed for those times when she needed to get out for therapy sessions and doctor visits.
What followed were years of frequent hospitalizations and, tragically, some spinal surgery that left her a paraplegic. Years in a county nursing home followed for Linda. Not pleasant years. The one bright spot is that after trial and error, a medication was found that would limit the further damage to her frame from M.S. This neighbor feels guilty for never even going to visit her during her long confinement in the care institution.
A new era opened for her when her long-time friend, who had lived with a partner sharing the downstairs space, died suddenly. Linda had owned the house jointly with the woman now deceased. Her former upstairs apartment had for some time been rented out to another woman. The downstairs pair had let the house deteriorate. It became shabby, junky, and overloaded now and then with dogs and cats. The basement was chaotic. Suddenly the surviving occupant of the downstairs left the scene and fled to Florida. What should the now single owner of the house, Linda, do?
She made a brave decision. She would leave the nursing home and reclaim her own house as her residence! I discovered there was a ripple of surprise and doubt in the neighborhood as the word spread Linda was coming home. She will never be able to make it! But they (we) didn’t know what kind of gutsy woman Linda really was.
She told me that everyone, after her disability was known, was always telling her what she couldn’t do. They communicated fear and gloom while telling her that she couldn’t do this and couldn’t do that. “But I wasn’t interested in hearing about all that. I had done my grieving and had lived through the depression of it all. I was asking, ‘What CAN I do? Not what I can’t do.’ I was well aware of the negative. How about the positive?”
Her face was alive with excitement as she described her going to work to realize some of her plans and hopes. She had virtually no money, except for the equity in the house. But it needed so much work. Earlier some agency had garnered enough funds to have a wheelchair ramp built to rise to the front door. And she did begin receiving a modest Social Security disability stipend. But she had a previously undiscovered asset: ingenuity. That and her assertive spirit kept her phoning this or that agency with questions. She found an organization of volunteer retirees who are dedicated to give help to just such folk as Linda. So they came to help clean out the basement of its junk. The M.S. Society was most helpful. By phone she arranged therapy sessions and was picked up by a wheelchair friendly bus to go there. She is finding, however, that her most helpful therapy is working outside her house with her grabber, hoe, hose, or rake.
Imagine tending flowers – she once worked at a florist shop – with water can and hoe and trimming clippers, all from her power chair with wheels! Any debris on her driveway or front walk or lawn will surrender to her grabber and gets deposited in a little trash bag she has tied to her mobility machine. She has her portable phone in her lap and can phone her aid to come and fetch her as needed. Once she phoned me because she had slipped off her wheelchair cushion and couldn’t sit up straight. Could I help her? (Her aid was out fetching groceries.) A gift to me that she asked. Another time one wheel was stuck in a little ditch in her back yard. I was glad I was home. At other times, never frequently, she will call with a question or a request and I am honored that she gives me a chance to assist.
This brave woman next door, with her smile and happy laugh, is living the philosophy I try to preach. But today as she told me her story – a true fable of Accentuate the Positive, Eliminate the Negative (which I remember as a pop tune from my youth), she preached that principle to me more graphically than I ever have.
I nominate her, not as our hometown M.S. Queen for the Day, but as an everyday Brave Heroine, a model for the negative souls among us who complain of their lot, who face challenges with “it can’t be done!” We can learn from Linda to ask instead, “But what can be done?”
Life can begin in a wheelchair. Where there is a will, there’s a way!
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| Page last modified by Richard Lee on 27 July 2004 |
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