The name Claire means ‘light’ or ‘bright’.
There is a sweet french 1800’s folk song I sang to my girls when they were round faced, fat little pink baby girls. It’s called Au Clair de la Lune, which means light of the moon. My mother taught it to me when I was a girl, singing it to me in the evenings, sitting on the side of my ‘youth bed’ in her lovely lilting french voice.
So I named my eldest daughter Claire; my bright light.
Claire, at 21 years, is a sight to behold. She is in a wheelchair. She is powerful.
With long, dark hair and wide, knowing eyes the color of Elizabeth Taylor’s, Claire enters a room with the grace of an earth angel. Some likely notice the wheels first. Perhaps others barley notice them at all.
She is translucent, miraculous, a siren.
No matter that her legs are like rubber now, and nearly immovable at the ankles. No matter that she struggles mightily to adjust to a step-happy walking world.
It’s barely noticeable, her brave, quiet struggle. She is energy and light, edges glowing like an angel-shaped cloud; like the moon.
When Claire got sick at aged 10, she was an aspiring ‘cheerleader’, a gymnast, her little sister’s ‘choreographer’, a cart-wheeling ferris wheel on the verge of flying at any moment. She was unstoppable. I called her my ‘whirling dervish’.
She was dancing with her little friends at a Halloween party. She was giggling. She was tired. She fell. Her legs never worked again. In a mere moment, her legs gave up, overcome by a prank her own autoimmune system would play on her. And that was it. No more walking, dancing, running, cartwheeling, back-bending, twirling, tree climbing.
Later, at the hospital, after several days and tests and tears, they explained. She had transverse myelitis. It’s unkind. It’s sudden. So rare. Irreversible.
We could have stayed blocked, since in the beginning, the shock acted as an immense, mountainous one – a block that could keep us from looking over and ahead to the possibilities, a block that might keep us stuck in the ‘what do we do now with all of our dreams?’ mode.
But after that initial shock (and make no mistake, it was stunning) we chose differently. We chose to stay open. We climbed and stumbled over the blocks, at first, it’s true. Sometimes we fell flat on our faces. And sometimes we wiped out so badly that the sheer scope of the changes ahead seemed insurmountable.
We were scared. We were novice. And we were determined not to stop laughing.
So, eventually, we looked up and found ourselves steadfastly on the other side.
On the side of the possibilities.
Claire is not a child anymore. She’s a senior at a major university with an attainable dream of having her PhD in psychology. She has a beautiful, mature relationship with a handsome young man who is traveling Europe as I write this. She drives a little red car that suits her fiery personality. She has friends, by the bushel, who gladly carry her and her chair when the world makes it too difficult for her to get from point A to B.
And, perhaps most profoundly, she has a spitfire of a little sister who is her steadfast guardian angel. All because she and the people around her who love her refused to let what could have been seen as blocks, as obstacles, as deterrents, take precedence over an abundance of precious possibilities.
So we, instead of ‘disabled, we call her ‘possibled’.
She is whole, she is light – and she is Claire.
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