Waist-High in the World: A Life Among the Nondisabled, by Nancy Mairs (Beacon, 212 pp.; $20, hardcover). Reviewed by Elizabeth Cody Newenhuyse, the author of many books, including Cooked to Perfection: How to Respond When Life Turns Up the Heat, published this month by Zondervan.
My husband's aunt was as close to perfect as you can get, at least by society's
standards. Attractive, fit, beautifully dressed, wealthy, and well connected,
she was an achiever who quickly rose through the ranks in the telecommunications
business. It all could make a person jealous, except that she was genuinely
kind and a delight to be with.
She is still attractive, still delightful company. But she isn't perfect
anymore. You wouldn't know it to look at her, but for the last several years,
Marsha has had multiple sclerosis. She tires easily, lacks sensation in her
feet, can't maintain her former CEO pace. But there is something
in her very imperfection that seems to have given her life new depth and
poignancy.
Nancy Mairs would understand. Mairs, an essayist whose immune system turned
traitor in her twenties, is now wheelchair-bound from MS.
In this memoir, Mairs, now fiftysomething, writes of what it is like to live
with a disability, what the disabled would like the rest of us to understand,
what "physical, emotional, moral, and spiritual elements shape the 'differences'
founded by disability."
These issues, as she points out, are becoming increasingly urgent in our
society (and, I would add, in the church). We are living longer, but at a
cost: "Life expectancy has increased more than thirty years since the turn
of the century, a span that offers all kinds of new possibilities—among
them, alas, the chance that illness or accident will permanently ...
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