Tribute To An inspirational Life: The Life of Mark O'Brien

 Why do we read about the life of other people? In the most positive sense, we try to learn about the life of others to gain insights that will guide us and inspire us in leading our own lives.

I have had the intent of writing an essay about this inspirational figure of mine for quite a while. I discovered him by accident rather late, in 2011, after I had ended up in a nursing home in Secaucus, New Jersey. 

The summer was on its wane, and I had escaped to Manhattan. I was visiting the DVD section of the mid-Manhattan New York Library Public Library, rolling on my wheelchair, feeling sorry for myself, when my eyes were stirred by the cover of a singular DVD. At first I thought it was an astronaut of some sort. I have always had that unfulfilled dash for space exploration. In another place at another time I had once fancied myself as the one who would first set foot on Mars - since someone had beaten me to the moon. 

But then the grand eponymous title made that presumption oxymoronic. Breathing Lessons: The Life and Work of Mark O'Brien.

 

I checked with apprehension. Spoiled ignorant me who had lived in such fortunate circumstances as not to even to know what an Iron Lung was!

 

Before I go any further on this , I just want to pause to say thanks to my Physical Therapist at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital, Anna Schroepfer Kandoyan, where I have been receiving outpatient physical therapy for a year now, for taking the pictures above at the David J. Sencer CDC Museum in Atlanta last year to show me exactly what an iron lung looked like. I cannot thank Anna enough for all the things she has opened my eyes to over the past year. Sometimes you meet a person and, before you know it, your life has changed for the better. Anna has been such a person to me. I will probably write a separate post and on Anna and my "Spaulding family" at another time. 

Back to O'Brien.

I quickly borrowed the DVD and watched it several times that night. I went online and checked all references about him. I found out that he was a poet!  He had written, no, he had sung, from the cage that had constricted him all his life, great songs of freedom; that man for whom the basic act of breathing could be a most canutian task. 

The man in the iron Lung, Mark O'Brien (July 31, 1949 – July 4, 1999) was a journalist, poet, and advocate for the disabled. He contracted polio in 1955, very unfortunately it seems,  just after the polio vaccine was discovered,  and spent the rest of his life paralyzed and requiring an iron lung

After a number of years in a nursing home, he managed, still in an the iron lung, to attend UC Berkeley. He produced poetry and articles, and became an advocate for disabled people.

He co-founded a small publishing house, Lemonade Factory, dedicated to poetry written by people with disabilities.

He wrote of several volumes of poetry, including Breathing, and an autobiography entitled, How I Became a Human Being: A Disabled Man’s Quest for Independence.

So far there have been two Oscar/ Academy Award nominated movies about his life. The first one that introduced him to me was the 36 minutes documentary I refer to above, Breathing Lessons: The Life and Work of Mark O'Brien by Jessica Yu, that won an Oscar in 1997. The second one The Sessions is a 2012 feature film written and directed by Ben Lewin. It is based on O'Brien's article "On Seeing a Sex Surrogate" describing his experience hiring a sex surrogate to lose his virginity. John Hawkes and Helen Hunt star as O'Brien and sex surrogate Cheryl Cohen-Greene, respectively.
The film debuted at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Audience Award (U.S. Dramatic) and a U.S. Dramatic Special Jury Prize for Ensemble Acting. The Sessions received highly positive reviews from critics, in particular lauding the performances of Hawkes and Hunt. Hunt was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role at the 85th Academy Awards (for 2012 films).

We often believe that it is through therapy and medications that we get better or healthier. I have always believed that people who move me, and inspire me to be better, do for me, over the long run, far more that any medicine, any treatment, any therapy could ever aspire to. It was a most serendipitous development for me to be engrossed about the circumstance of this figure at that particular time, in those particular circumstances.

His dignity, and yet the openness with which he had engaged the most private and dehumanizing aspect of the long, simmering suffering that had been his whole life, elevated a heroic dimension on an almost Christ like scale.

Through his example, the closet poet that I had been in my soul for a while found the courage to commit to writing, both as an artistic form of self expression, and as a means of self healing. I committed to write of things that mattered to me, but in a way that enrich the human awareness of universal issues. 

This led me to a journey of open and unbounded creative artistic exploration that continues to this day. In the process, I regained a more optimistic outlook on life, a sense of grace, and gratefulness for all that I had been gifted with, and which I had never fully taken stock of. I gained resolve, and a more resolute sense of purpose.

I write this post to express that profound feeling of gratitude for him having shared a life that could  light a flicker of hope in my own life at a time of darkness, but also in the hope that his example could inspire others to do better. If he could endure what he did endure - I always try to remind myself when alone with my own conscience - how do I dare complain too much? 

I try to remind myself to be committed to the task of forcefully pushing for the rights of weak and disenfranchised as aggressively as O'Brien did, to vigorously push against all those who take advantage of perceived weakness of the less well endowed, to enable the marginalized live fully enjoyed and fulfilled and productive lives, to the maximum of their attainable abilities.  

 If he could achieve all that he did achieve, in the circumstances he was reduced to, how do I measure?

We do not always control the circumstances of our life, the forks our lives take that stray us from the path which we may feel destiny had otherwise chartered for us. Whatever happens, what Mark O'Brien demonstrated was that as long as the mind remains cognizant and engaged, we can choose courage, dignity,  we can choose to continue to contribute to the edification of a better human kind that will outlast the degeneration of our wretched bodies.And that is a worthwhile ideal to aspire to.