Compassion Rationed

"Relatively Disabled" by F. D. Reeve, in Michigan Quarterly Review (Summer 1998), Univ. of Michigan, Rm. 3032, Rackham Bldg., 915 E. Washington St., Ann Arbor, Mich. 48109–1070.

Ever since his son was thrown from a horse and left paralyzed from the neck down in the spring of 1995, poet and essayist Reeve has learned how not only the disabled themselves but their relatives and close friends must struggle against a loss of personal identity.

Within days of the accident, not only neighbors but casual acquaintances and even total strangers began approaching the author to inquire about his son Christopher’s health. Though they were often sincerely sympathetic, Reeve says, it soon became apparent that they did not want to know about the reality of his son’s "personal, day-after-day suffering— how precarious his life was, how his health fluctuated, how close he came to death in the hospital and has come afterward as well." Instead, Reeve says, they wanted the TV version of the plight of the actor who played Superman. "They wanted to hear about his televised role as sufferer—his fight against unconquerable odds—and I, important to them only as ‘Superman’s Father,’ was expected to assure them that the fight was still going on."

The actor’s fans do not realize, Reeve says, "how they’re discriminating against—that is, denying individual identity to—an individual father and son struggling to maintain a difficult relationship in the face of differing values and overwhelming physical problems. In Christopher’s case, the role of ‘handicapped Superman’ has taken the place of reality. If I refuse to be de-individualized, or if I insist on mentioning the misery and hardship that my son feels daily—he who can never be alone, who must be wakened and turned every couple of hours during the night—I become a nay-sayer to the image of which he has become custodian."

"Public stereotyping of the deaf is no less discriminatory," adds Reeve, whose wife, Laura Stevenson, a novelist-professor, is deaf. He says, "I’ve learned that while people will go out of their way to help a person in a wheelchair, they assume that someone they can’t talk to is stupid, perhaps retarded, definitely to be avoided." Reeve was incredulous at first when his wife told him how she was treated. But after frequently "witnessing people coldly leaving her out of the conversation—even at the faculty lunch tables in her own college—I admit it’s true." Moreover, he says, "people who talk to me when I meet them by myself cut me out, too, when she and I are together."

"Everything in American media encourages people" to respond to the disabled by stereotyping them, writes Reeve. "The difference between admiring a deaf professor’s ‘courage’ or a Superman’s ‘good fight’ and developing flexible, compassionate understanding of L. Stevenson or of C. Reeve is thought."