The Importance of Being........Kind

If your parents are like many, you grew up hearing, "Be kind." As a small child, you might have considered "being kind" to mean doing the opposite of what you were doing because you only heard it when your parents thought you were being unkind. You could have been staring at someone in a wheelchair out of normal childhood curiosity because you had never seen someone in a wheelchair. Your mother or father might have said, "Don't stare. Be kind. He's crippled!" Thus you learned that to not look at someone in a wheelchair is being kind. Generations have been taught to not look at people in wheelchairs. Throughout life, we have learned in many ways to not be kind through no fault of our own. Over generations, people in wheelchairs have been made to feel invisible, incapable of handling their own affairs and unimportant. My mother was terminally ill with pulmonary fibrosis, a lung disease that restricted her lungs ability to provide oxygen to the blood. Because of her low oxygen levels, she had to use oxygen delivered through a tube to her nose. She also used a wheelchair because her disease made her too weak to walk more than a few feet before she became extremely sh0ort of breath. My mother loved to go shopping. It was physically taxing to go often but we would go occasionally and then go to lunch. There were so few pleasures in her life and it made me so happy to take her shopping and out to lunch even though I don't like shopping. She would look for what she wanted, find it and with joy, have me push her to the customer service where she would get ready to pay for the items she selected. My mother was a very intelligent woman. Her mind was sharp until a few moments before she died. Still yet, when I pushed my mother up to the counter, the clerk or customer service assistant would invariably ask ME how she/he could help me although my mother was holding the item and placing it on the counter. This invariably made me angry......this refusal to acknowledge my mother, this denial of her existence. My mother died in 2001, about 5 weeks after the 9/11 bombing of the World Trade Center. It has almost been 11 years since my mother died, but I still remember how my mother was ignored, never looked at, denied dignity. I would always tell the clerk, "Ask my mother. She is the one that is buying.". Unbelievably though my mother was intelligent and capable of handling any and all transactions, the clerks eyes and attention would again drift away from her and discussions were directed to me. I really wanted to shake the person and tell them to treat my mother like a normal person! Let me set the record straight for all of you: It is not kind to NOT look at a person in a wheelchair. Look at them. Talk to them. Smile at them..........just like you would with a normal person, because that's who they are......Normal People! They just happen to move around in a wheelchair.