10:28pm April 30, 2014

➸ Love, Fear, Death, and Disability

People fear and even hate disabled people because we remind them that they are both fragile and mortal. They don’t want to remember those things about themselves. And they find ways to physically s…

My fourth Blogging Against Disablism Day post, and I really think it’s the most important of any of the ones I’ve posted. It deals a lot with my thoughts around death, and how people’s fear of their own fragility, mortality, and vulnerability contributes to ableism that disabled people face in society. And, overall, why love has to be the answer, not just to ableism, but to our fear of death. I’ve dealt a lot with death recently – many close brushes myself, my mom just spent time in the ICU and coded once, I’ve spoken to my father about his fear of death as he gets older and older, and… it’s all been swirling around my head and coalescing into this post. And if I’ve written anything important at all, ever, it’s somewhere in parts of this post.

This is not the usual posts I write about disability and death, though. I don’t write much (beyond some warnings of how not to take what I write) about the way that disabled people are pressured into death – because I’ve written that a thousand times before. I’m focusing more on the universal ways people handle death, how accepting death as part of life can actually increase acceptance of disabled people, how love is the only way that we can truly handle any of this on a personal or social level. This doesn’t contradict anything I’ve written before about disabled people needing to fight to stay alive, it just fills out areas I’ve rarely touched on in that blog. And I hope I inserted enough disclaimers to keep people from misusing what I wrote in really bad ways.