It's something we should do now and then. It's what Ombre e Luci asks of its readers each time. This time, to understand—even a little—so many of our brothers and sisters who, often in a single moment, have passed from ordinary life into a different one. An accident caught them at the peak of their strength and left them in a wheelchair. We don't think about it enough. We see them too rarely, especially in our great cities built without regard for them, for their struggle to move about, to circulate as they should, among us.
So I went back to a book I had read years ago, called "The Courage to Live," published by Gribaudi. It was written by Alain Lefranc, twenty years old, about two years of rehabilitation following an accident. Alain had the strength to cling to life despite the accident that had suddenly thrown him into immobility.
The passages I've chosen will help everyone understand better what it means to live in a wheelchair.
Mariangela Bertolini, 1992
Mine is an ordinary story, because it could become anyone's story, someday. I'm not writing it to move you to tears, but rather so that those who have not been struck by misfortune will recognize themselves as privileged, and will rejoice more intensely in their own happiness.
There are countless young people living with physical disability. So many of them.
How many in your city?
How many in your neighborhood?
A moment of emotion changes nothing. To call ourselves compassionate should mean, first and foremost, to know and to understand.
How many truly grasp the hard psychological journey of a twenty-year-old boy suddenly rendered immobile?
Understood the aspirations of the disabled person, his will, his hopes, sometimes even his joy?
Whoever understands this—whoever has truly understood all of it—should never again feel uncomfortable in front of a wheelchair, crutches, artificial limbs, or withered limbs. Perhaps then, who knows, every kind of barrier would disappear. What a magnificent dawn that would be for the millions of disabled people!
I hung suspended for an instant on the boat's outer edge, ready to dive. To dive into the cool, welcoming water, to let it wrap around me. A few seconds... Then a violent blow to the head; I didn't lose consciousness, but the world seemed to shatter around me. I was motionless, on the bottom, my face against the sand.
Neither my lower limbs nor my upper limbs responded to the commands I gave them. Motionless.
How much time passed? I don't know. But a second is enough to turn a boy into a victim, to transform joy into sorrow, life into a tomb.
My fate was no longer mine. It was as if, at the hospital doors, I had silently signed a contract binding me never to ask questions again, never to take initiative, to become something humble, an object without a name, broken.
There it was! I had arrived! In a wheelchair.
"Never!" I had said that before. Yet after barely more than a month in the rehabilitation center, my thinking had changed considerably. First came the shock: those chairs, all those mobile chairs; and the refusal: "Never! I will never sit on one, never, never." But reality decided otherwise, and the wheels and chrome became familiar to me.
Sitting in a wheelchair would not have stopped me from recovering; on the contrary, it allowed me to do more exercises, to go to the gymnasium, to occupational therapy, to escape from a monotonous room, to gain a little independence. Perhaps I would manage to push it myself; perhaps I would find some strength in my biceps again. And so, without realizing it, I had slipped from hating wheelchairs to waiting for the day I could sit in one, to help with my own recovery, then to hoping that day would come soon. Really, it's foolish to say "never" when speaking of the future!
I would have to spend many months in a rehabilitation center to learn what a leg is, an arm, a hand. Not that this would have prevented the accident, but I would have lived differently, drawing from every moment all the happiness it could offer, the way you squeeze a fruit down to the pulp without wasting a drop of juice. I would have chosen different values. I would have... Those who know where happiness lies do not have the physical means to reach it, and those who can reach it do not know where to look.
I have only a few minutes left to finish preparing myself to face the world of the "healthy"—a world of stairs, of narrow doorways, of barriers, a world of clumsy words and gestures, a world in a hurry that struggles too, that never has time to stop for a moment to look, to understand; a world that trails off with ellipses at its questions. Sometimes generous, far too often cruel.
I know I will not stop fighting until I have found an active place in this world—a place that belongs to each of us.
Because there is no disability great enough to prevent a person from making his life the stone, the boulder, the grain of sand in a useful building. Because there is no cane, no prosthetic, no orthopedic device, no wheelchair that can prevent a person from reaching toward life, even if he must drag himself forward one centimeter at a time.