The Loss That’s Not There 
I recently had the pleasure and, in a very real sense, the
privilege of speaking to the Death and Loss Education Coalition in Liverpool,
N.Y. The coalition is an admirable group that seeks to educate and heighten
awareness for professionals and individuals in the areas of death and loss; it
is hard to imagine a more honorable purpose than that. We all face the
experiences of death and loss, and we all have little say over when these
experiences come into our lives. But we do have quite a bit of say over how we
manage them and the choices we make in response to them.
I was asked to speak to this group of rather
extraordinary folks about the loss those of us who live with brain injuries
experience. I sustained my brain injury when I was held up and shot in the head
in 1984.
As late as the day of the presentation I was not entirely
sure what I would say. In the first place, all brain injuries are different.
Some who have them exhibit symptoms with greater frequency than others. Others
have difficulty with memory, difficulty with initiating and following through
on things, impulsivity, various forms of paralysis, challenges with speech, and
so on. Obviously, all these things confront the person with loss of some kind.
And in order to manage loss, any loss, one has to first accept it and not give
in to it. The philosophy I fiercely believe in goes like this: You have to
accept it in order to manage it, and you have to manage it in order to get as
free of it as possible.
Yet even though I knew all this and knew all this was
worth mentioning, I was missing something. Dare I say I was at a loss as to
what I really wanted to say and, in truth, what really needed to be said.
And then as I was driving to the presentation, the loss
that needed to be talked about the most came to me: the loss of our complete
humanity in the eyes of others, the fact that when we are either born disabled
or sustain a disability somewhere down the road, we are immediately seen as
being less human and less valuable and of less worth than others.
When I talk with survivors of brain injury and other folks
who live with a disability of some kind, the number one complaint I hear is, We
get treated like we’re children. Tied for a close second? We get treated
like we’re stupid and We get treated like we’re crazy.
None of these three forms of dehumanization are true.
Nevertheless, they are prevalent, and they are brutally destructive.
The tragedy for many of us who live with disabilities is
that when you get the message day in and day out, year after year, that you are
worth less than others, you begin to believe it. And if there is one thing any
person has a right to do, it’s to reclaim the whole of his or her
humanity.
The loss we experience when inundated with the "less than"
message is, in fact, not there. We only have to pay attention to ourselves and
each other to know this is true. If we pay attention, we will recognize that
people do not have to stand up to stand tall; they do not have to have sight to
have vision in life; they do not need to have hearing to know the sounds of
justice and injustice. People don't need anything but the awareness of their
very existence to know they are whole.
Peter Kahrmann is an advocate for people with
disabilities and writes a blog on disability issues. He resides in New York
state. Kahrmann's blog is on the Home page of www.ilusa.com |
