One of the blogs I make sure I check every morning is Elizabeth's. I check because I want to read what she has to say and I check because I want to make sure she's still alive.
I started reading it because I liked her novel Zed. I've stuck around because her voice is compelling (though usually NSFW) and she makes me think about what it means for an athlete to move from figuring out how to make it onto the Olympic fencing team without a sponser to figuring out how to live, really live, in a wheelchair with a progressive, terminal, rare, and poorly understood medical condition.
If you read Elizabeth's stuff you'll learn a lot about goth lolly culture and anime, wheelchair sports (sadly not as egalitarian as you'd expect), despair and cutting, the underbelly of the Canadian health care system, the limitations of home care agencies, disablism, memory loss, rage, and most important, determination. (If you ask, she'll send you a labour of love and hope: a postcard that takes much effort to put together.)
What's that got to do with the photograph? The man in the wicker wheelchair: that's my great uncle Vernon. He died the year before I was born. And since my family loves secrets, it was many many years before I learned that he had probably died of ALS and more years before this snapshot came my way.
When I first got the photograph what I saw was the chair. Now what I see is Vernon: smiling, open, and as mischievous as he was in boyhood photographs. And in an odd, round about way, that is Elizabeth's gift to Vernon: I see him.
Heather