This Fresh Air interview with Hanif Kureishi had me riveted from the beginning, for one reason, and then at the end for a different reason. Kureishi is best known as the author of the 1985 British rom-com My Beautiful Laundrette. During an illness in 2022 he fainted, fell on his face, broke his neck, and woke up paraplegic. His account of what that’s like resonated deeply.
Soon after we moved to Santa Rosa a decade ago I became close friends with someone who had suffered the same fate. Until the age of 30 Stan Gow was a rodeo rider, mountain climber, and ski patrol hotshot.
Then he dove into a shallow pool, broke his neck, and spent the next 40 years in a motorized wheelchair.
Before an accident like that you’re an autonomous person, then suddenly and forever after you’re as helpless as an infant, wholly dependent on others who feed you, clean you, dress you, hoist you into the chair in the morning, put you to bed at night, and turn you over in bed during the night.
“You feel like a helpless baby,” Kureishi says, “and a tyrant too.” I saw this happen with Stan. When you have to ask caregivers for everything it feels shameful and embarrassing. Those feelings can convert polite requests into angry demands.
The only escape from that condition, for those lucky enough to be able to own and use one, is the motorized wheelchair. Kureishi has just enough use of an arm to be able to drive himself around the neighborhood. Stan did too, and over the years we walked just about everywhere his wheels could go. Tagging along I gained a deep appreciation for that miracle of mobility, and for the consequences when it’s thwarted by stairs that lack ramps and curbs that lack cuts.
The interview brought back powerful memories of my time with Stan, who died a few years ago after outliving expectations for an injury like his by decades. And then it took a turn when Terri Gross asked about the ethnicity of Kureishi’s caregivers. He was in Italy when the accident happened, and nearly everyone in the hospital was white. When he returned to England it was a different story.
The whole of our huge NHS is run by people from all over the world, and it’s just incredible to lie in bed to be changed and washed by someone and you have these incredible conversations with somebody from Africa, from the Philippines, from India or Pakistan. One of the things you become aware of in these British hospitals is our dependence on immigration.
It’s not quite like that in the US, but much more so than in Italy. During my mother’s final illness one of her caretakers was a Haitian nurse. Mom was a linguist who spoke and taught French, Spanish, and Italian. She’d been unresponsive for a few days, but when the nurse spoke to her in French she perked up like one of the patients in Awakenings.
Paraplegia is rare but helplessness is universal. We all begin that way, we all end that way. Demonizing immigrants is wrong for so many reasons. Among them: who else will take care of you in your time of ultimate need?
Such powerful words that come from a place of compassion and knowledge of what these people went through. And why we need those amazing people who are there to help, no matter their nationality.
A powerful and compassionate insight coming from personal experience, showing how much we need those people who choose to become caregivers, no matter what their nationality is.
Thanks for this post, Jon … in a culture that so prizes individual autonomy and agency, we become uneasy when contemplating the prospect of dependency on others. It is actually the default position of our nature. Our life begins, and most likely ends, with complete reliance on the care and generous love of others, sometimes of others who are very different from ourselves.
I somehow missed that episode of Fresh Air, but am going back to the original full broadcast, which was actually on March 3 … https://www.npr.org/2025/03/03/1235624347/fresh-air-draft-03-03-2025