Help for Heroes
The last seven days have been a bit strange.
Hearing about the assisted suicide of Daniel James while on the road touring my girlfriend Karen Darke was very depressing. For those who don’t know, Karen’s in a wheelchair, paraplegic following a climbing fall when she was only 21 and so the sudden media interest in poor Daniel and his family had a slight edge to it. Personally I think assisted suicide - allowing people to die with some dignity - should be available in the UK, but I suppose the growth of more militant right wing religious groups probably means we won’t see it for many years. But like many, when I heard about Daniel’s suicide I thought about how soon after his accident this had come, and how, if you had a child suffering from depression, and who wanted to take their life, you would try and stop them until maybe they could see the light.
I suppose it’s easy for us to think like this with the privilege of normal lives, but Karen just said that we have no way of knowing how terrible and hopeless life without any real movement could be (Daniel was paralyzed from the neck down). Looking at Karen now, her life full of fun and adventure, winner the day after day, and never ending battle to live a normal life it’s easy to judge Daniel and his parents harshly, but visiting Karen’s mum and dad at the weekend the conversation was shut down with the single sentence from Karen’s mum “Don’t judge them - no one knows how it feels to have a child who has been paralyzed in an accident”.
When Karen talked about suicide I wondered if she had felt that same urge, all those years ago, when the initial horror of loosing almost everything she loved had hit her.
The yesterday I was in the climbing shop Outside, when a man came up and asked about me and karen climbing El Cap last year, and if I had any advice for a friend who had been paralyzed by a mortar round in Basra. Major Phil Packer is planning on raising a million pound for Help For Heroes, doing such things as the London Marathon. He’d been thinking about a climb in the UK to help rase money, but was unsure of how or where to do it. “I’ll climb El Cap with him” I said, half joking and gave him my email address.
On the way home I thought about how when we skied across Greenland in 2006, Anne Mccormack had said that we should make everything we’d learned available to other disabled people, so they could do the same, and how maybe getting this knowledge out, not to mention coverage that this things are achieved by disabled athletes. Maybe doing this could help take some of the darkness out of peoples lives.
And so when I got home I penned 4000 Pull Ups (how to climb el cap when you’re in a wheel chair) to do my bit.
Then I got an email asking if I was serious about going to climb El Cap with Phil.
I was.
— October 21, 2008 09:36 AM
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