Today, December 3, 2024, is International Day of Persons with Disabilities. This year’s theme is “Amplifying the leadership of persons with disabilities for an inclusive and sustainable future.” If anyone embodied the leadership traits required to ensure inclusivity of people with disabilities, it was certainly Jen Powley.
Jen was another author in my class (2015) for the master’s program in creative nonfiction writing. I remember arriving a day late for second-year summer residency. My daughter had gotten married on the first day of the residency, so I hadn’t left Vancouver until after the reception and had only arrived in Halifax in the wee hours of the morning.
The next day, we had our mentor groups in the morning. Exhausted by my very late arrival, I took a nap on the lunch break and overslept. So I arrived late to the afternoon large group session and proceeded to go around on the break to say hello to people I hadn’t seen since the previous year.
When I got to Jen, she didn’t recognize me. This wasn’t a surprise. She hadn’t been in my mentor group the previous year; her quadriplegia (caused by MS) prevented her from socializing much; and my social inhibition never helps with anything. So, I don’t know if I’d ever introduced myself to her.
Approaching her to say hello, I explained that I’d missed the welcome reception the previous day as I’d been at my daughter’s wedding. Without missing a beat or cracking a smile, she said, through her assistant, “And do you think that’s a good reason?”
Jen was famous for her dry wit. Introducing her at a conference I later attended where she sat on a panel talking about disabilities, her first-year mentor, Lorri Nielsen Glenn, talked about her remarkable ability to, among other things, say a lot with very few words. I suspect Jen had an ability to zero in on the absurd long before she developed MS, but having difficulty finding the breath to speak honed her ability to “level a room,” as Glenn put it, in just a few syllables.
Powley’s memoir, Just Jen: Thriving Through Multiple Sclerosis (Fernwood Publishing, 2017) takes us from her diagnosis at age 15 through her adult life, boyfriends, difficulties finding work, activism in the disability community, quadriplegia, and finding the love of her life, not to mention earning several academic degrees in her spare time. (The first time I met her, she dryly described her decision to embark on yet another degree as “much to my parents’ chagrin.”)
In a chapter called Engineering Families, Jen wrote:
“Having hired twenty-seven assistants over eight years, I was accustomed to saying goodbye. Many of my assistants were students who didn’t stay for more than the years they were in school. Others simply moved on. Working one-on-one with my assistants, I came to know them well, but they usually only knew each other through the emails they typed for me. Some of my assistants met at shift change, but if one worked on Fridays and another worked Sundays, it was doubtful their paths would cross. Occasionally, I hosted barbecues for everyone who worked for me. Introducing themselves, they would say ‘Oh, you’re blah-blah at gmail.com. I’ve read your emails.’ The barbecues were meetings of the Jen community. I would say ‘knees’—to signal that I needed to be repositioned—and four people would get up to adjust me.
“I engineer families out of strangers, and in the time my assistants spend as part of my family, I hope they see how strong someone who appears so fragile can be. I want them to go into the world as doctors, marine biologists, academics, librarians, and artists who know that differently-abled does not mean dumb or ill-tempered. I want them to raise their children with compassion, and if their mother or brother ever needs assistance, I want them to know they’re strong enough to step up and give it.”
This book should be required reading for high school graduation because it helps readers learn some fundamental life skills: courage, humility, generousity, humour, compassion. At the least, I hope it’s used in some certificate, diploma, and degree programs for people who wish to work with those living with physical challenges. As Glenn wrote of her former student, “Trust this writer; she’s the real thing.”
Published in 2017, two years after our graduation from the MFA program, Just Jen went on to become a finalist in the Atlantic Book Awards. Jen Powley died on September 17, 2023, leaving an incredible legacy of warmth, wit, and wisdom. I didn’t know her well, but I know she’s missed.
I’ve just had a frustrating experience with a potential client. This person was looking for an editor to help with several writing projects requiring different levels of editing. They sent me a sample, and I provided an appraisal of their writing along with information about my rates for clients like them (i.e., hobbyists, as this person put it).
The response I received reflected the responses I’ve received countless times before. They’d been to my website, they could see I have abundant education, training, experience, and talent, and they had no doubt I was worth every penny I charge, but they just couldn’t afford me.
It’s not that I haven’t heard all of this before, more times than I can count, and it’s not that I don’t understand lacking the money to do all the things we might like to do. So what was it about this particular response that triggered me enough to write about it?
I think it was the comment about my worth. I have no doubt they intended it as a compliment—a way to soften the blow of rejection. But that’s not the way I took it. Because the truth is I’m worth every penny of a good deal more than I was offering to charge them.
I charge clients like them—hobbyists—about half what I charge government or corporate clients. I’m aware of freelancers who believe we should never charge anyone less than what I charge bigger clients, but I don’t agree. I’m okay with doing work that gives me things other than money. I get joy out of helping people explore their passion for writing or tell a story that’s really important to them.
But joy doesn’t put food on my table, so like every self-employed artist I’ve ever met, I have to find a balance between doing work that pays good money and making time for work that pays in other ways. And when I’m doing the latter, I have to find a balance between keeping my rates low enough to be realistic for those clients but high enough to cover my basic living expenses.
So here’s one of the reasons I find that statement about my worth … complicated. As a self-employed person, I calculate that about a quarter of every dollar I earn covers off things like office space, office equipment and supplies, CPP, EI, and worker’s comp, professional insurance, professional development, vacation and sick pay, and extended benefits—expenses that people at salaried or wage-earning jobs typically have covered or contribution-matched by their employer.
Another quarter of every dollar goes to federal and provincial income tax.
The remaining half is what puts gas in my car, food in my belly, and money on my mortgage. So when that prospective client said I was worth every penny of what I was charging, what they were inadvertently saying was that I’m worth half of what I charge hobbyists, which is half of what I charge bigger clients, which is what I need to actually pay my bills without losing money.
Here’s another reason I find statements about my worth—especially in the context of what people tell me they can’t afford—hard to swallow: because I’m an artist, I’m always valued less than a person in almost any other profession.
If that same prospective client needed a plumber or electrician, they’d pay twice the hourly rate I was asking—at minimum. If they were in physical or emotional pain, they’d pay at least twice as much to a massage therapist or a registered clinical counsellor.
Regardless of education, training, or experience, artists—writers, editors, graphic designers, visual artists, dancers, actors, musicians—are expected to work for wages that are not livable or barely so. I think probably the arts are the only field in which people are expected to understand that, no matter how well educated or experienced they are, they should be paid half as much as those in other fields with equivalent education and experience.
I read somewhere that people in communications typically earn half the salaries of people with equivalent education in other fields. In an era in which communication is increasingly important, an era in which we need creative minds perhaps more than ever before in history, I find this astonishing, not to mention shortsighted.
A final reason I find statements about my worth often … ironic is how often the people saying that are in high-paying professions where their annual income is easily quadruple mine. It’s the people in the lower-paying lines of work who so often value the work they’ve invested in their writing enough that they’ve saved their nickels and dimes to be sure that when the time comes they can hire someone good to do their editing and pay them fairly.
My response to this prospective client’s statement that I’m worth every penny I charge is not a lack of understanding that they meant it as a compliment. It has more to do with professional frustration, the same frustration felt by artists of all types who struggle to be paid a living wage and to field “compliments” like this graciously.
I would just like clients to understand that when they say “you’re worth every penny you charge” as a prelude to “but I’m going to look for somebody who’s not worth as much,” they’re making themselves feel better, not me.
I wrote this piece for my initial assignment in the MFA program at University of King’s College. I offer it in honour of Remembrance Day and of my father, Dick Melcombe, who died more than 50 years ago. I still think of you every day, Dad.
Edited to add: Someone, somewhere commented on the lifetime of grief I’ve lived with after losing my dad so young. Truer words. Not a Remembrance Day goes by that I don’t give in to my tears and allow myself the luxury of sobbing for a while.
A picture hangs in my living room, a sort of collage, but more organized, befitting its contents. It includes my father’s Royal Canadian Air Force wings and stripes from World War II, a green-and-gold RCAF emblem he embroidered while in traction for months in a veterans’ hospital, and two black-and-white photos, rimmed in gold. The pieces are carefully arranged against dark-blue cloth, framed in gun-metal grey with dignified flecks of gold. The photo on the left, taken before my father shipped out to England in 1942, depicts a handsome, athletic, optimistic, young man in his NCO uniform. To the right are his wings and stripes, a few threads out of place. From the photo on the right, the face I remember smiles out at me in his Pilot Officer uniform at the time of his medical discharge in 1945, still a handsome man.
In the first, he’s twenty-one. In the second, he looks much more than three years older.
There is more than my fathers’ wings and stripes in the space between those photos. There’s a story I only thought I knew until years after he died. By that time, decades had passed since a spring day when I’d shouted angry words at him, words I don’t quite remember, but will never really forget. By the time I understood how wrong they were, it was too late for anything but regret.
I wasn’t the first in my family to lose a father too soon. My father’s father died three years into the Great Depression. At eleven, he became sole support for his demanding mother and five-year-old brother. At sixteen, when he grew too old to continue working as an errand boy after school, he took a full-time job as a clerk at the Hudson’s Bay Company and finished high school through evening classes.
He signed up for the reserves in 1940, a few months after his nineteenth birthday; my mother once told me that, more than anything else, he wanted to get away from his mother and train for a career as an airline pilot. He was called up in 1941, spent a year in flight training, shipped out in 1942, and spent another year in combat training before being assigned a crew and active duty.
I learned much of this from his service records, which I requested from the Library and Archives of Canada in March 2011. My nephew had been studying World War II in school and had expressed an interest. In the meantime, like a lot of aging children of World War II veterans, I’d begun to see that not everything is as clear as I once thought it was—that not all wars are the same any more than all peace is the same. I’d begun looking at my adult son and seeing my father at the same age, hearing stories of Afghan veterans struggling to return to a normal life, and wondering how my father had appeared to cope so well. So I requested his records, hoping to fill in some blanks, unprepared for the large, brown envelope that arrived a few months later.
A few days after it arrived, I sat in my sunny yellow kitchen with my older sister reading through his application papers, and the reports at various stages of his flight training. The comments from his training officers read like dialogue out of an old war flick; I can picture the officers in their high-waisted pants, sitting at desks in barracks offices, smoking pipes while tapping away with two fingers at manual typewriters. “A good sort of lad,” wrote one. “Never flown at all but very keen to be a Pilot . . . should turn out all right.” “His day duel was done in cross-wind conditions but immediately the weather cleared, he improved rapidly,” another wrote. “Captaincy on cross-country flying was good. Accomplished one nickel [an aerobatic loop] successfully.” A third said simply, “Appears to be of the slow steady type, reliable.”
Reliable. That was my dad. Reliable.
Twenty-five years after the war, in the summer of 1970, I was thirteen. My biggest aspiration for the future was to be a hippie, and my main occupation in the present was to hate my father. I had no reason; it just seemed like the thing to do at the time. I knew he’d been in combat, though that was nothing to brag about then, with anti-Vietnam war sentiment at its height. He never talked about the war, anyway. He liked the movie, The Great Escape, a fictionalized version of a real-life escape attempt as told by Paul Brickhill in his eponymous book. He laughed uproariously at the TV series, Hogan’s Heroes, a sitcom set in a Nazi POW camp. He once said to my sister, after they’d watched The Longest Day, “So that’s what it was like below the cloud cover on D-Day,” the day the Allied Forces invaded Normandy, which ultimately marked the turning point in the war. One day when I was fifteen and had grown out of hating him, my parents and I were leaving for the airport, where they were seeing me off on my school’s spring break trip to Paris and London, a far cry from the kind of European trip he’d experienced. We were running late, and my dad was scrupulously punctual, so I was surprised when he stopped, grabbed a scrap of paper, and scrawled in his barely legible handwriting, “Millie Walters, 33 Hawkesbury Way, West Wickham, Kent.”
“What’s this?” I asked.
“My Aunt Millie,” he said.
“You have an Aunt Millie?” I asked, “In England?”
“Yes. I used to visit her when I was on leave. Give her a call. Tell her your Dick’s daughter.”
That was it. That was all I ever heard him say about the three years between those two photos.
In June 1987, fifteen years after my father’s death, I received a letter and short story from a man I’d never heard of: Frank Devine, a member of my father’s crew. With two babies in and out of the hospital and an aging, ailing mother, I never got around to replying—another regret. But I kept the letter; it provided reference points when I requested my father’s records. In it, Frank described himself as “the Mad Irishman Wop/A.G. jammed between three Cannucks and three Britts.” I hadn’t even known my father’s crew weren’t all Canadian. Frank and my dad had met in October 1943, Frank wrote, and flown together until six days after D-Day. “We taught [your Dad] to ride a bike at Pershore 23 Operational Training Unit, where the first five of us came together and flew in Wellingtons, Dick Melcombe (Titch) Pilot, Jack WestNavigator, St Pierre Bomb Aimer, Fred Bailey (Bill) Rear Gunner.”
Titch. My father had had a nickname. Titch.
At Pershore, Frank wrote, they picked up three new crew members: Jim Clement, Alf Deakin, and Harry Braithwaite. Even the names sound like characters from a 1940s war flick. They volunteered for the Pathfinders, a hand-picked corps of airmen with unparalleled navigational skills. The Pathfinders did precision target-marking, using coloured flares to ensure bombers hit targets accurately, which minimized civilian losses, and later dropping supplies to the Dutch. My father and his crew had volunteered for the 405, the lone Pathfinders unit in the RCAF, but it didn’t become operational until June 12, 1944—about six hours too late for my father’s crew, as it turned out.
In the meantime, they flew with the Ghost Squadron. It’s odd Frank didn’t mention it. I remembered my mother talking about it when I was a child, but as an adult I thought the name comical, and wondered if it might have been an imagined memory. But there it was with his records, on photocopied pages from a military history book. One of the most elite flying units in World War II Europe, the Ghost Squadron had earned its name both by flying night-only missions and by its reputation “for raining death and destruction down on the enemy”; its patch was a skull and crossbones. That gave me pause. It didn’t fit with the father I’d known, a man who’d hardly raised his voice except when watching Hockey Night in Canada. Crews had never served long with the squadron, my mother had said; it was too hard on them psychologically.
Maybe that was why Frank left it out.
In April 1944, after six months with the Ghost Squadron, while waiting for the Pathfinders 405 to take off, my father’s crew switched from Wellingtons to Lancasters. Considered “the pilot’s aircraft,” they were enormous, capable of carrying nearly their own weight again. These were the planes that dropped supplies to starving Dutch civilians in the last year of the war and later ferried 74,000 freed POWs back to England in just 24 days. That’s probably how my father made it back across the Channel. But Lancs were not built for comfort, or defense. Turrets for the gunners and bomb aimers were so small some
crew members had to put their flight boots inside and climb in before putting them on. At 20,000 feet, the temperature could drop so low that airmen returned to base with frostbite. And because they flew almost entirely at night, they had little armour.
Only the best pilots flew Lancasters. Only the most skilled crews became Pathfinders.
On a June day in 2011, I sat in my kitchen with my sister, flipping through pages from the big brown envelope, the morning sun flooding in. I’d made it past the mostly glowing comments from my father’s superiors to the actual service records, which were dark and hard to read, cramped writing in tiny lines detailing every post he’d ever been assigned and every mission he’d ever flown. I found my mind wandering from the bright day outside to a runway in England at night, imagining our dad in the cockpit of his Lanc.
No, that’s wrong: I was imagining my son. Though he’s now older than the man in the “before” photo, and taller, my son looks remarkably like his grandfather. He’s slight and fair-skinned and carries himself with self-assurance. I can see him sitting in the pilot’s chair, on an airfield lit by only a few runway lights. He’s checking gauges and chatting good-naturedly with his crew to put them at ease while internally focusing on the mission ahead. My father was a small man piloting a mammoth machine, a quiet, sensitive boy who’d been responsible for others for most of his life. He’d seen death as a child, having been in the car when his father was killed. He’d learned never to appear weak, especially to his mother. He’d grown up in a paradox, supporting his brother and mother, yet always under his mother’s thumb. At just twenty-two, he’d become responsible for the lives of the six young men under his command, and the deaths of countless others.
He was probably aware of that paradox, too. Later in life, he would tape messages to the dashboard of his car, reminding himself to have “Strength” and “Confidence” as he readied for the day ahead during his morning commute, donning a mask few people ever saw behind. His crew would never have seen. They would have seen nothing but a commander who took charge and took care of them. Even when they went drinking, Frank wrote, “his limit was two small beers, whilst the rest of us got sloshed, he always looked after us and we all admired him for resisting our devious efforts to get him Tipsy. You must realise that Bomber crews were as close knit as families, probably more so at times so you can appreciate how I feel about hearing that Dick has passed away.”
At thirteen, I didn’t know this. It wasn’t until forty years later that I applied for his records, and then sat at my kitchen table with my sister, comparing them against Frank’s letter, piecing together the time between those two photos and specifically the wee hours of June 12 1944. I knew about his life before the war, and had driven past his boyhood home in Vancouver’s varsity district. I knew how he’d met our mother after the war, a wounded veteran courting his nurse at Shaughnessy Hospital. But it wasn’t until years after his death, when my nephew asked about his grandfather and my son was considering enlisting to have medical school paid for, that the reality of the space between those two photos began to sink in.
They’d flown four missions in five days, Frank wrote, when they were shot down over German-occupied France. They hadn’t even had time to celebrate my dad’s promotion a few days earlier. On June 6 1944, they’d dropped bombs at Omaha, trying to give the troops who’d poured off the boats into hailstorms of bullets a chance to make it past the beach, over the dunes, into the forests. What my father hadn’t mentioned in that one-off comment to my sister was how difficult it must have been for all the Canadian flyers that day to realize it was cloud cover that had undermined their efforts. It wasn’t their fault they’d dropped their bombs too far behind the front lines, leaving many more bodies on the beach than anyone had imagined.
But it was war. The dead were dead. The living couldn’t bring them back. They could only move forward.
So on the morning of June 8, my father’s crew attacked German troops in the Fôret de Cerisy, and the following morning they hit Rennes airfield. On the night of June 11, they were called out at short notice to bomb a panzer division at Tours, where German forces had been called up from the south to reinforce the defences at Omaha beach, the codename for a beach in Normandy hit during the D-Day invasion. They were scheduled to drop their load at 00:45. I don’t know whether they did, because as Frank wrote, “We were hit at 00:45!”
Some sixty-five years later, feeling uneasy with the comforts of my kitchen and the sunshine-y day outside, I looked through page after page of statements by my dad’s crew, his superior officers, and even M. Maillet, the farmer in whose field he’d crashed, and I found myself unable to continue. The reports of his growing competence in training had been easy enough to read. Even Frank’s letter and his one-page account of the crash had not made the image of my father’s plane falling out of the night sky quite real to me. It had always been like something out of a movie—a black-and-white movie with officers smoking pipes and tapping on manual typewriters.
This was not a movie. This was survivor testimony. And my eyes were too full, my brain too overwhelmed, to read it. It was my sister, always more pragmatic than I, who grabbed a scrap of paper and began sifting through the pages, dissecting each man’s statement, extracting names and times, checking details against his service record, assembling the crew’s last moments together like pieces of a puzzle becoming a whole picture. I realized with some chagrin that, until then, that was all it had been to me. A fuzzy-edged picture I’d never gotten ‘round to focusing.
It was focused now.
They were between 1200 and 1500 feet when the first bullet hit. Braithwaite saw the fires in the inboard engines, dying down and growing again.
The pilot’s training and experience kicked in: Adjust engine pitch. Shut off petrol. Press extinguisher button.
The fire in the starboard engine went out, but the one in the port engine grew, fast.
Deakin yelled, “Fire in the fuselage . . . and under the starboard wing.”
“What’s our height?” West shouted.
”Bale out!” the pilot answered.
Deakin led the way, headfirst out the rear door.
Clement went next, and West followed, out the front hatch.
Glancing out the rear, Braithwaite saw ground rushing toward him, stepped back, braced for impact.
He felt a bump as the plane hit the trees, then a slight rise: the pilot pulling the nose up? Then—blackness.
From hit to crash, it had been less than three minutes.
Braithwaite came to surrounded by flames.
Maillet had seen the explosion and raced toward it. As he neared, he saw a man run into the woods. No time to spare, Maillet hurried toward the plane.
Two airmen were unhurt in the burning wreck, but the pilot was badly wounded. Maillet beckoned to the airmen, who ran after him.
The pilot, head traumatized, leg pulverized, was still strapped into the burning cockpit, tracer from the ammunition belts flying around the fuselage like deadly fireworks.
By the time Maillet returned, the Germans had arrived. The pilot was gone.
The soldiers searched the farm but found no one. Maillet had hidden Baily and Braithwaite quickly, but well; they remained there undetected for the rest of the war.
I had known from the time I was quite young that my father had been a pilot in a war and had been in a big plane crash; that was why he limped, and why he wore those funny-looking shoes that he had to mail order from that special place. The story of the crash had been told over and over, in his absence, by those who hadn’t been there. It had grown to epic proportions.
Sitting in my kitchen with my sister, the real story hit.
Except for the year I’d decided to hate him, I had always imagined my father larger-than-life, the dad who never lost his cool or seemed afraid. I’d never considered what he might have been thinking as his aircraft took fire, as the flames grew, and the plane dove. I’d never heard his voice shouting the order to bale out, or felt the adrenaline pumping as he’d struggled to keep the plane aloft until he reached the trees at the edge of the farmer’s field, his only hope of surviving the crash. I’d never asked if he’d been conscious as he lay there in excruciating pain, immobilized by his injuries, wondering what would become of his crew now that he’d gotten them to the ground alive, now that all he could do was listen to the jeeps screaming toward him, the soldiers shouting in German, the young men whose comrades’ lives his own bombs may have taken dragging his wounded body from the cockpit. I’d never asked if he’d been unconscious after the plane crashed, unaware of what was happening until he’d been awoken by the screaming pain of the jeep hitting every bump in the road, or in the operating room before they put him out and set his leg so badly it would never be right again, or in a bed where French nurses took his pulse and German soldiers stood guard as he came slowly to realize that though he’d survived the crash, if he even remembered it, his life was now out of his hands.
There are no records of my father’s time as a POW. The next piece of paper in his file was a copy of the letter to his mother. “Dear Mrs. Melcombe: Before you receive this letter you will have had a telegram informing you that your son . . . is missing . . . [He] was very popular with this Squadron, and was an excellent Pilot. He is greatly missed . . . There is always the possibility that [he is] a prisoner of war . . .”
As I sat in my kitchen with my sister, the details sorted and my tears done, I read past the unlikely optimism in the last line and went back to the first few sentences: He was very popular. He was an excellent pilot. The past tense hit me like a slap, as it must have hit his mother. I thought of my own son, so much like his grandfather. I thought of him achieving his life’s dream of becoming a doctor and going off to Afghanistan to repay his debt, much as my father had become a pilot and then gone off to war.
A hole opened up in my heart.
Years earlier, to my adolescent mind, there had seemed to be no difference between an offensive war and a defensive one, between fighting a real threat and an imagined one. But as I grew older and learned more, I realized that though many leaders have tried many times in history to justify offensive wars by framing them as defensive, that was not the case in World War II. One can argue all day that Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini were the product of previous wars and atrocities, but I can’t persuade myself that once any individual has gone that far and diplomacy has been exhausted, those living with imminent threats are wrong to defend themselves.
To my middle-aged mind, the sheer madness of World War II Europe has little in common with the irrational fear of “the red dog of communism” that fuelled the Cold War and gave rise to the wars in Korea and Vietnam. But in my thirteen-year-old brain, I saw only the images of naked children burned by napalm and innocent villagers killed at My Lai that streamed into our living rooms each evening, and I conflated them with my ideas about World War II. In my wannabe flower-child thinking, I believed all wars were crimes and my father was a war criminal. In the years after he died, I knew he understood I was just being a teenager, I knew he’d always loved me and I him, I knew he had forgiven me for my thoughtless words. But it wasn’t until that day in my kitchen decades later, poring through his service records with my sister, that I felt deep down in my bones how far off base my adolescent appraisal of him had been, how much my outburst must have hurt him, how powerless he must have felt to respond.
Most of my father’s crew—Deakin, West, Baily, and Braithwaite—survived what remained of the war, but I don’t know anything else about them. According to my father’s records, Clement, the second to bale out, had initially been hidden by the French, but later captured, probably interrogated, and then shot by the Gestapo. Devine, whom Maillet had seen running into the woods, had been captured and hit by “friendly” fire en route to interrogation, but had survived the war and emigrated to Van Nuys, California, from where he’d sent that letter.
The whole story reads like a script from a war movie. But it wasn’t a movie; it was my father’s life. It was what I didn’t know when I was thirteen and intent on hating him because it was hip at the time, and I wanted to be hip, to be a hippie, to fit in. I couldn’t see then that war, like life, is full of paradoxes. At thirteen, in the middle of an argument I remember nothing else about, I shot out some of the most ignorant words I’ve ever said. I don’t remember them exactly now, but I’ve never forgotten the tone, the intent, the spirit.
I was reminded of them recently when watching an episode of M*A*S*H, the 1970s sitcom set at a mobile army surgical hospital during the Korean War, a sitcom that reflected America’s growing intolerance for the continuing and senseless US presence in Vietnam. In the scene of M*A*S*H that I mimicked during that argument with my father, Hawkeye Pierce, the charming rogue and brilliant chief surgeon who’d been drafted into a war he wanted nothing to do with, was talking to a pilot. The pilot was clean, friendly, and almost completely unscathed by the violence and death all around him. As the story told it, a bomber pilot wouldn’t need to see a war up close and personal. This bomber pilot flew high above it all, dropped his bombs, and made it home every evening to where his Japanese wife awaited him with slippers and a hot meal. In the story, the pilot hadn’t thought much about the war, it was just his current job—until one day he found himself sitting outside an operating room watching Korean children being carried past on litters, crying out for mothers and fathers who had been injured or killed themselves. It was just the moment the maverick surgeon, Hawkeye Pierce, had needed to give the heartless pilot a piece of his mind about what was going on down on the ground every time he dropped his bombs. His monologue was admirable, I thought at the time, his tone righteous and moral and right. And so, on that day when I was thirteen, in the middle of an argument with my father, I called the scene up from my memory and gave my father a piece of my mind.
“Why should I listen to you?” I demanded. “You’re a murderer. Did you ever think about the people you were killing on the ground? The children? The babies? Or did you just drop your bombs and fly home to dinner? I don’t need to listen to you. You’re a murderer. You’re a hypocrite. You’re a baby killer.”
My father was not easily riled. I think he lost his temper twice when we were kids, both times with me, but this was neither of those times. This time, he simply stood in our front yard in his gardening clothes and a scuffed-up pair of the orthopedic shoes he’d worn every day since he’d made it out of traction and begun walking on crutches, and then on canes, and finally on his own. He’d been left with a pronounced limp, back pain, and a complete inability to regain the athletic prowess he’d enjoyed as the handsome, optimistic young man in the “before” photo, or even to fulfill his dream of becoming an airline pilot.
The day I shot him down was warm, but he wasn’t wearing shorts because he was embarrassed by the brown scar that ran the length of his calf. He never talked about it. He just covered it up, the same way he covered everything up. All “the boys” were told not to talk about things when they got home. As Frank wrote, “I thought then, probably very selfishly, [talking about it] is doing no good . . . I will forget about the whole thing which I tried to do, but it is impossible to forget and now I know I was wrong to try. There is so much which should have been done and still should be done, so as in future years people will appreciate truly what the men in Bomber command went through . . . I feel so guilty now.”
Guilty. Frank Devine was guilty of nothing. Nor was my father. My father did as he was told, as he’d been taught to do all his life, as a boy who’d become a man at eleven, a pilot who’d saved every member of his crew at the risk of his own life, and a veteran who’d been told to forget and move on. He never talked about the war, not even on that day when I was thirteen. On that day, after those words shot out of my mouth like tracer around a burning fuselage, my father just stood there, no expression on his face. I don’t recall who walked away first, but I never forget that I spoke such vile, callous, ignorant words. I’ve never in my life said any words to anyone that I’vewished more I could take back.
My father died of a sudden heart attack three years later. He was fifty-two. I was sixteen. I’d grown up a little, and our relationship had improved a lot, but I’d never gotten around to apologizing.
For years after his death, I held onto his war mementoes. Every year on November 11 I’d take them out and look at the pictures and run my fingers over the stripes and the RCAF emblem. I’d tell my children what I remembered of their grandfather and what little I knew of the night he was shot down, and I’d go to their Remembrance Day assemblies at school and cry a little.
A few years ago, not long after receiving his service records, my youngest daughter had an idea for a Christmas gift for me: something meaningful, something I’d never expect. On Christmas morning, we did the rounds, taking turns opening gifts and thanking givers. At one point, I think my daughter said, “I know it doesn’t seem like you’re getting much, Mommy, but there’s something big coming for you at the end.”
I might have muttered, “Oh, really? I hadn’t noticed.”
Eventually, the pile under the tree was depleted. My daughter said, “Mom, there’s one gift left, for you. You didn’t get a lot this year because this was really expensive. It’s from all of us, but it was my idea.”
“Okay,” I said, bemused.
She left the room, reappearing a moment later with a large, flat, heavy parcel loosely wrapped in brown paper. “I didn’t wrap it,” she said, laying it on my lap. “Be careful,” she said. “It’s fragile.”
So I opened it carefully, pulling back one flap of brown paper, and then the other. And when I saw it—the wings, the photos, the RCAF emblem—I stopped breathing. My face got hot. Tears flooded down my cheeks. A sound choked out of my throat. My vision blurred at first, and then my eyes squeezed tightly shut. From a distance, I heard my daughter ask, “Do you like it, Mommy?”
“Yes,” I said. “I like it.”
But what I wanted to say, what I wanted one more chance to say, was “I love you, Daddy. I miss you. I’m sorry.”
Now that picture, that collage, hangs in my living room. I look every day at the young man who went to war and the much older man who came home, and I know the story that fills the space between those two photos. Every year on November 11, I take out Frank’s letter and read it, wishing I’d gotten around to replying before it was too late, and lingering over the closing lines: “Bye for now great to be in touch with you after all these years I hope you will regard me as an uncle. God bless and protect you. Sincerely yours, Frank”.
I remember when Pauline Dakin gave her pitch to the class of 2015. We were the inaugural class of the MFA in Creative Nonfiction program at University of King’s College. That meant that everything that first year was a bit of an experiment, with about 20 of us as very willing, very excited lab rats. We’d arrived on a Sunday in August, spent a day getting oriented, and thereafter went into our mentor groups for three hours every morning and whole-group sessions in the afternoons. We started our pitches on the second or third afternoon.
I was intimidated by my classmates. I was a nobody who’d done a dozen years of freelance journalism, much of it for magazines no one had heard of, followed by a dozen years of communications for small not-for-profits, overlapping with a dozen years of copy editing. The rest of the class included a reporter from CBC’s The National, a former assistant editor of Chatelaine, a published novelist on staff at The Walrus, and a graduate of UBC’s esteemed BFA in Creative Writing—writers who were way out of my league.
Pauline was one of them. A long-time health reporter with CBC Radio, she pitched a timely and well-researched idea about the health impacts of screen time on the growing brains of children and youth. It would have made a timely and interesting book. But then she said she had another idea. She’d been toying with it for quite a while, but she wasn’t sure.
Finally, she shared the story of her unusual childhood. As she spoke, the room fell still and silent. After she finished, someone said something like, “I-I really like your first idea but, but your second idea¾wow! Yeah, uh, do that one.”
Pauline might have been the first of us to get a book deal, the result being the bestselling Run, Hide, Repeat: A Memoir of a Fugitive Childhood (Viking, 2017, 2022). The book flap says: “Pauline Dakin spent her childhood on the run. Without warning, her mother twice uprooted her and her brother, moving thousands of miles away from family and friends. Disturbing events interrupt their outwardly normal life: break-ins, car thefts, even physical attacks on a family friend. Many years later, her mother finally revealed they’d been running from the Mafia and were receiving protection from a covert anti-organized crime task force.
“But the truth was even more bizarre. Gradually, Dakin’s fears give way to suspicion. She puts her journalistic training to work and discovers that the Mafia threat was actually an elaborate web of lies. As she revisits her past, Dakin discovers the human capacity for betrayal and deception, and the power of love to forgive.”
Run, Hide, Repeat is the kind of page-turner you stay awake half the night to finish, all the more compelling because every word is true. Winner of the 2018 Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction and shortlisted for several other awards, Run, Hide, Repeat was re-released in 2022 to coincide with its launch as a five-part CBC podcast.
Recalling that afternoon pitch session for an article on cbc.ca about the podcast, Pauline says “I did my big pitch [on the impact of screen time on children and adolescents] and everyone nodded. And then, I just stood there. I didn’t know this was coming; I said, ‘Can I pitch you another story?’ … I just told this group of strangers and I was just trembling as I told it. Of course, I finished and they were all looking at me with eyes as big as pie plates going, ‘yeah you should write that one!’
“Even then … I didn’t dive right in. I waffled back and forth over two years about which book I was writing. Ultimately, this was the one. I am so glad I did because I think the act of telling the secret, of being loud about the secret, undid some of the damage of the secret. … Eventually I came to feel that not holding secrets lets you let go. It’s the secrets that are so toxic.”
Books can have such amazing ability to challenge the way you think, make you feel things you didn’t know you could feel, teach you things you never dreamed of learning. Run, Hide, Repeat is the epitome of all that. A powerful book, and I’m proud to number the author among my friends.
[Note: I’d planned to write about Pauline Dakin’s book, Run, Hide, Repeat, in this post until I realized that Lesley Buxton is giving a webinar in less than a week. See end of post for details and link.]
I knew of Lesley Buxton before I met her. A friend and colleague of mine in Ottawa, where Lesley lived at the time, had shared the unimaginable story of her losing her only child to a rare neurological disease. This had happened just over a year before she began the MFA program (class of 2016). I was, and remain, in awe of her resilience.
I remember when Lesley began writing her book, One Strong Girl: Surviving the Unimaginable—a Mother’s Memoir (Pottersfield Press, 2018). She didn’t want to tell her story in chronological order because everyone would know the ending before they began.
Instead, the book opens a few months after her daughter, India, has died. She and her husband are on a plane to Japan, with which India was obsessed, to celebrate what would have been her seventeenth birthday. They’d had a speck of their daughter’s ashes baked into 16 colourful glass beads that they planned to leave in places she would have loved to visit. When I heard this story, I thought that was a far better idea than anything else I could think of doing with the memory of a child, especially one who’d seemed destined to do creative and interesting things.
Lesley’s story then goes back to a time when India was just 10 years old. It’s the day the first symptom of India’s illness appeared, remarkable only for the fact that Lesley had a dental appointment that day, until India inexplicably fell. Their journey began, the journey that every parent hopes will never begin for them.
From there, the story moves back and forth in time, sort of the way grief moves back and forth, taking us from the present to a memory in the distant past to thoughts of the future to a memory in the recent past, in no particular order.
“Mark and I decided, when we headed west through the States to Vancouver, a stop on our way to Japan, that if we wanted something, we’d treat ourselves. By the time we returned to Quebec in the middle of June, the back seat of our car was heaving with souvenirs …
“In Gibson’s, British Columbia, I bought myself a dress on a whim. The dress had a halter top and a wide 1950s skirt. It was sky blue and covered with pirate flags. I knew she would approve, though she probably would have told me it was too low cut.
“I never censored India’s taste. A romantic with a flair for the dramatic, she favoured Manga-inspired outfits over low-cut t-shirts and short skirts. She often looked as if she’d stepped out of an anime movie.
“We still have her clothes. Everything is packed in big blue Tupperware boxes. Among them, a cream-coloured satin Regent style wedding dress she liked because it looked like it belonged to a Jane Austen character, and a Goth evening gown which, when she was sick, she used to watch TV in. I have no idea what will become of these things.
“Whenever I buy clothes, the first thing I ask myself is if India would approve. She was very opinionated about how I should dress. Once when I was wearing white pants, she told me, ‘Mummy, you can’t wear white. You’re not Beyonce.’ I’m not sure what I said, but I’m pretty sure I laughed. Now I don’t ever wear white. Too afraid. India might strike me down with a lightning bolt.”
A few years after India died, Lesley and her husband, Mark, moved out to BC, where her sister and parents still live. A few years after that, Mark was diagnosed with cancer; he died in 2022. I remember being in awe of Lesley’s attitude after he passed. I live with depression and often struggle with thoughts of suicide, and all three of my children are still alive and well. I don’t know how I would manage in Lesley’s circumstances. But a short while after Mark passed, Lesley wrote on Facebook that continuing to live well and enjoy life would be her way of honouring Mark and India. It’s what they would want for her.
It’s no wonder India was one strong girl. Her mother is one strong woman.
It’s hard to believe it’s been nearly a decade since I graduated with the inaugural class (2015) of the MFA program in Creative Nonfiction at University of King’s College, and nearly as long since I re-launched my website with a blog called “Start Now.” That title referred to something a friend told me once when I was feeling down and I wished I could start over. She said, “You can’t start over, but you can start now.”
When I started this blog, my goal was to write about people who’d started new careers in midlife, like Claire Sower and Guenther Krueger, the way I started a master’s degree in my late fifties. And if I happened to write a few posts (like this one) on the topic of my book (a concussion I experienced in 2003 that left me with daily headaches I suffer to this day), so much the better.
All my writing stalled in 2016, about a year after I separated from my husband of 30 years and suffered some mental health issues, and that stall continued for several years. I finally finished my book in 2023, a decade after starting the MFA program. (Read excerpts from my unpublished manuscript here.) I’ve had a couple of publishers say great things about it; the problem, they say, is marketing.
Marketing was why I started this blog, along with a Facebook page devoted to concussion research, as well as accounts on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. Then life happened. Over and above the separation, Twitter turned into X and I no longer use it. My Facebook account was hacked, and I had to start a new one. I simply neglected LinkedIn and Pinterest. And I haven’t posted to my blog since 2016.
So here I am, starting now—again. And the best way I can think to do that is to write about all the other people who have gone back to school, most of them like me in their forties and fifties, to tackle a book project—in most cases, their first.
In the time since I did the master’s program, some 50 people have published the books they started while doing their MFA at King’s. I’ve read nearly two dozen of them. They are unfailingly good. Some have made it to the bestseller list. Several have won awards. I’m still looking for a publisher for my book, considering whether to self-publish. But whether it’s ever published or not, I’m proud to be among the writers who completed this program.
First up: Pauline Dakin, author of Run, Hide, Repeat.
I’ve been incredibly busy with work for a while, not much spare time for blog posts, though I have a couple in mind that I want to write soon. But today I came across this, from a Facebook page called Death Cafe and it seemed about as fitting as any words could be for a blog called Start Now.
In his book, Here Be Dragons: Telling Tales of People, Passion and Power, Peter C. Newman relates a well-known story about author Margaret Laurence. “The magnificent Ms. Laurence was a proud professional, offended by anyone who didn’t adequately respect her craft,” he writes. “Once at a Montreal reception, a distinguished gentleman came up to her and gushed, ‘Oh, I’m so glad to meet you. I’ve read everything you’ve written. I’m a brain surgeon, and when I retire, I’m going to do novels, too!’ She looked at him with pretend enthusiasm, grabbed him by the elbow, and bellowed, ‘What a coincidence! When I retire, I’m going to be a brain surgeon.’”
I saw this on Facebook the other day and, as a writer of 30 years myself, I immediately nodded in recognition. I try not to get annoyed when I’m at some sort of social gathering where someone asks me what I do and I say, “I’m a writer,” to which they respond, “I’m a writer, too. I write in my journal every day.” No, I’m sorry, that doesn’t make you a writer any more than my balancing my cheque book or doing my own taxes makes me an accountant. It makes you literate. There’s a difference.
At the same time, though, it occurred to me when I reread that Margaret Laurence anecdote that, although I understand the sentiment, the reality in the early third millennium is not the same as it was when she made that statement. In this era, it is feasible for people to retire from whatever they’ve been doing all their lives and become writers. Numerous current students and alumni of the MFA program in Creative Nonfiction Writing at University of King’s college fall into that category. Some of them are likely to finish and publish at least one book, if not more.
Self-publishing makes it even more possible for people to retire and become published writers. It’s easy to say that’s just vanity publishing, but I edit a lot of authors who hope to be traditionally published but are willing self-publish, as well as many who choose a self-publishing model from the start, and I’m often impressed with the quality of writing and the story ideas that come my way, regardless of which publishing model the authors are pursuing.
My point is that, particularly in an era in which people are living much longer and often remaining productive until close to the end of their lives, the notion that one might retire from one profession, move on to another, and attain some degree of success—sometimes a considerable degree—is not unrealistic.
Look at Claire Sower, whom I’ve written about here—a successful writer for many years who is now thriving as a visual artist. And Guenther Krueger—another successful writer who earned his PhD in his late fifties/early sixties and worked at his dream job for the last three years before he retired. Clark Elliott, who wrote The Ghost in My Brain, is a gifted professor of artificial intelligence, not a writer, yet he published a book last year.
The whole point of this Start Now blog is to tell readers that it’s never too late to start something new. There are writers who not only did that but became very well-known and widely admired for their writing: although both Charles Bukowski and Laura Ingalls Wilder started writing earlier in life, neither were published until they were in their fifties, and Frank McCourt didn’t publish Angela’s Ashes until he was 66.
It’s also not unusual for doctors to become writers. Think Oliver Sacks, Norman Doidge, and Peter D. Kramer. (Is it a coincidence they’re all psychiatrists?) On the other hand, my son and daughter-in-law are both in medical school and I can’t imagine anyone retiring and becoming a doctor, never mind a neurosurgeon. I can imagine a person starting in medicine perhaps as late as 40, but it’s at least a nine-year process (after completing a four-year undergraduate degree, usually in the sciences) from starting basic sciences to completing a residency, comprising long, stressful hours every step of the way. So, no, I can’t see a person retiring and becoming a physician.
That’s not to say I don’t see Laurence’s point. I work hard at my writing. I’ve been told I have a gift, which I think is horseshit. I’ve spent over 30 years learning my craft, most recently in a master’s program that had me working harder than I have in years. I have as little patience for people who think writers have a gift and writing comes easily to them as I do for people who refer to themselves as writers just because they’re literate. (I have even less patience for people who use these wrong-headed perceptions as excuses not to pay writers adequately.)
So right after I read that old Margaret Laurence anecdote and nodded my head in agreement, I had to think twice about what she’d actually said and whether it still applies. The spirit of it? Yes, unfortunately, it still applies. But the letter of it? No. It’s increasingly apparent that it is possible to retire from a career, take up writing, be serious about it, finish one or more books, find one or more publishers, build an audience, and maybe even win awards.
I’m glad about that, because it gives me and a lot of other people an opportunity to believe that if we work hard at it, we will be able to achieve what we’ve always wanted to but never before had the time or opportunity to do so directly. But I’d also like it if people would get the message beneath Laurence’s quip, which is as valid today as it was when she said it: writing is hard work and deserves to be taken as seriously as any other craft, art, or profession.
If you’re not a professional writer but you aspire to become one, more power to you. But before you say “I’m a writer, too” or “I plan to become a writer when I retire” to someone who’s already been doing the work and paying the dues for decades, ask yourself if you’d say the same thing to an accountant just because you balance your cheque book every month and do your own taxes every year. And maybe then consider saying something a little more appropriate, like “I write in my journal every day, and I often think I’d like to write more when the kids are grown and I have more time. Tell me what it’s like to be a professional writer.”
[Edited] Since posting this, the book has been launched. I thought I had the book trailer inserted here, but the link wasn’t working. However, you can see it yourself at http://www.nikikrauss.com/?page_id=1096.
I’d also like to add (and I hope it’s not unforgivably immodest) that the author just sent me a copy of her book with a lovely inscription and this paragraph in the acknowledgements:
The editor’s red pen can feel a dagger to a writer. Not so with Lynne Melcombe, who edited my very rough first draft. Your constructive criticism and carefully crafted corrections helped me to find my voice as a writer. You were not only editor but also teacher. Thank you for your gentle and respectful awareness of how fragile I often was. You have a gift. Thank you for sharing it with me.
Thank you, Niki, for allowing me the privilege of editing your very moving memoir (not to mention touching my heart and making my day). I hope it sells well and, above all, I hope you keep writing. I don’t doubt for a moment you have many more things to say.
In 1999, Clark Elliott, a professor of artificial intelligence at DePaul University in Chicago, was in a “minor” rear-ender. With no external injuries, he initially thought he’d escaped unscathed. It took some time for him to realize how wrong he was.
His symptoms, including spatial disorientation, dizziness and nausea, uncoordinated movements, balance issues, short-term memory issues, and much more, disabled him for the next eight years. But nothing about his injury was straightforward, as is often the case for concussion sufferers.
According to Parachute Canada, a nonprofit organization devoted to injury prevention, nearly 3,000 people in Canada reported to a hospital emergency department with a concussion in the fiscal year 2010–2011. However, as most concussions go unreported, that grossly underestimates the number that occur every year. In the US, the CDI estimates 1.7 million people sustain a traumatic brain injury (TBI) annually, about 75% of which are “mild” TBI, also known as concussions.
The CDI further estimates that direct and indirect medical costs of TBI, such as lost productivity, totaled an estimated $60 billion in the US in 2000. (I estimated the income I’d lost from my 2003 concussion when my lawsuit went to mediation in 2007; it was substantial, and has grown every year since then.)
Elliott describes himself as fortunate in having an accommodating employer, so for him, at least initially, financial loss wasn’t the biggest concern, as it is for many people. Good thing; his symptoms, which he describes eloquently based on copious notes written throughout his ordeal and recovery with a scientist’s eye for detail, gave him more than enough to deal with.
The first chapter opens with one such description:
Just before nine o’clock, on a frigid night in early 2002, I completed my three-hour lecture on artificial intelligence at DePaul University’s downtown campus. I was exhausted, and ready to head for home, but it took me another two hours to make my way to the sixth floor of the building across the street, then crawl down the hall to my office and there rest in the dark and the quiet until I was able to attempt my journey north to Evanston. Finally, at eleven, I left the building again and headed off through the brutal wind, intending to walk the five blocks to my car, parked near the lake on Columbus Drive.
He goes on to write that his progress toward his car was slowed by snow flurries, which disoriented him in a city with which he was very familiar. He felt the onset of a visual distortion similar to the “dolly zoom effect” used by cinematographers. It took him an hour to reach his car, and another half hour to overcome the disorientation enough to unlock the door and climb in.
He then sat with the car idling until 2 am, resting enough to drive home safely. But once in his driveway, it took him another hour to get to his front door, though it was only 40 feet away. By the time he’d rested enough to get to sleep without getting sick, it was over seven hours since his class had ended.
It sounds too bizarre to be true, but I know from experience how easy it is for others to think concussion sufferers are exaggerating. On the outside, they may look and act fine, while on the inside, they are battling a crippling headache, overwhelmed with confusion, or trying to keep their balance in a room that won’t stop spinning.
The Ghost in My Brain conveys two important messages. First, the lasting impacts of concussion are, for some people, long and torturous. (I’ve read many sad concussion stories while collecting research for my book, but this recent one from the Toronto Star is particularly tragic.)
And second, even years after the injury, there is hope for recovery, as Elliott discovered eight years after his concussion when, on the verge of giving up his career, his home, and custody of his children, he made a last-ditch attempt to find someone who could help him.
He found a clinical psychologist named Donalee Markus who had worked with NASA and developed visual exercises designed to create new neural pathways to replace damaged ones. In her foreword to Elliott’s book, she writes:
Clark Elliott was a mystery to me when we first met. Observing him through my glass front door, I saw that it took him two minutes just to find the doorknob with his hand. When I gave him the simplest of my assessment tests—copying a geometric line drawing—his body went into bizarre contortions as he struggled to complete it. It hurt me to watch this brilliant man put so much effort into such a trivial task.
“The plasticity of the human brain is both its power and its weakness,” she writes. Although life-sustaining functions are hard-wired, cognitive functions, like thinking, hoping, planning, and controlling behaviour, are not. However, when damage occurs to these parts, it is usually diffuse and microscopic, so it is not visible through current imaging technologies and therefore difficult to diagnose, to treat—even to believe.
Because of her unique skill set and persistence, Markus believed Elliott and was able to diagnose and treat him (and many others). She did not do it alone, however. As it was clear visual perception was a significant aspect of Elliott’s dysfunction, she referred him to Deborah Zelinsky, a neuro-optometrist and innovator in the use of visual assessments to diagnose brain trauma, and treat it with a series of therapeutic eyeglasses.
(I haven’t interviewed Zelinsky, but I suspect the glasses she prescribes are similar to those Hilary Clinton was seen wearing after her concussion in 2012, but more advanced than the single corrective, rather than therapeutic, pair I was prescribed in 2004.)
The Ghost in My Brain is a fascinating read, though there are places where it bogs down, notably when Elliott includes long segments from his detailed notes. (This makes sense; he was not writing these for a reading audience but for his own edification as a scientist.) Yet those details were vital to the treatment that finally got his life back on track, and remain important to our growing understanding of what concussion is and how millions of people might benefit from similar treatment.
Perhaps my biggest frustration after reading the book (twice, to absorb as much as possible) is realizing how few people have access to such treatment. I consider myself lucky to have stumbled upon the only neuro-optometrist in British Columbia, who is now retired. There are some other practitioners in Canada and the US who offer similar services, but they are few, far between, and hard to find.
Moreover, in most cases, patients have to be financially equipped to travel for treatment and pay out of pocket for their services, which are unlikely to be covered by most medical plans. That means many of the “concussives” Elliott refers to as the “walking wounded” have little recourse but to accept disability for the rest of their lives—and the rest of us have little choice but to accept the cost of everything we lose when people we care about can no longer contribute fully to our relationships with them, or to society.
