“People aren’t either wicked or noble. They’re like chef’s salads, with good things and bad things chopped and mixed together in a vinaigrette of confusion and conflict.” — Lemony Snicket, The Grim Grotto
He needn’t have had polio. Jon was 10 years younger than me, and I’d had a polio vaccine injection, and then a booster administered on a sugar cube before Jon was born. The vaccine was available by the time he came along. But his parents hadn’t had him vaccinated against the dread disease.Jon was quadriplegic. He used an electric wheelchair, one that placed a sensor close to his mouth. Jon had no use of his hands, so a joy stick was not an option. He had a “sip & puff” control, and it took cues from intentional inhalations and exhalations. It was not called a suck and blow device, though Jon did use such a descriptor now and then. With simple binary inputs, everything was ponderously slow.
Controls now would be vastly superior to those available in the 1980s. Of course, the adaptive equipment available to him then was worlds better than what had been available before. In today’s world, there would be speech commands. Jon could talk.
And talk he did. My role was assessing and documenting his eligibility criteria for certain services. It was pro forma, but it was something that needed to be done. Jon and I talked.
Without me bringing it up, he made it clear that he knew that polio vaccine might have spared him the ravages of the disease. His parents just didn’t get it done. Jon didn’t think it was out of some quirky set of beliefs. It was, he said, just a failure on their part to provide for his needs when he was a child. He attributed it to what he called laziness and lack of organization. They weren’t opposed to vaccination. They just failed to get it done.
Jon was bitter about this. The vaccine was available. Free of cost. There were, in those days, massive amounts of publicity about the polio vaccine. There was even an animated bee, called WellBee, who stressed the importance of the vaccination.
That would have meant, for Jon’s parents, someone would have had to have taken him to a site, like a school or a church, where the vaccines were given. There would be some waiting in line. But Jon’s parents never got around to it.Jon was a bright guy. He did well in high school, and went on to college, which was when I came to know him. He didn’t talk often about his disease or the ramifications thereof. He was angry with his parents, perhaps furious, though restrained in his expression of it. He never forgave them. He said that explicitly, in a quiet, yet forceful voice.
In what had to have been a well thought out plan, Jon killed himself before he was 21 years of age. He used his wheelchair to end his life.
I thought of Jon often as I read Phillip Roth’s excellent Nemesis, his novel of the devastation of the polio epidemic in Newark. And I think of Jon now, with vaccination so much in the news.
Mr. Basura, thank you for sharing a story, I’m sure, was hard for you to write. Sorry for your loss of a friend and for him to endure the physical and mental pain and anguish to take his own life. A sad story indeed.
Thank you. It’s been a long time, but you’re right: it still makes me sad.
Powerful, thanks. for the story.
Painful, poignant, and profound read. A tragedy caused by willful neglect. I pray we don’t have too many cases like this as the roll out of COVID vaccine blossoms throughout the country. Thanks for the writing of this sad story.