BEOWULF SHEEHAN; ROBERT SCIARRINOfather always told me, “I’m your fall guy.”
e’d taken a karmic hit big enough for the
oth of us and I’d assumed — counted on
t, in fact — that it meant I’d skate through
ife unscathed. It wasn’t that I thought his
ronouncement would get me through
ithout heartbreak or the other upsets and
ome upon a person. I knew I’d have my
share of those disasters. But I did believe, on the strength of my
father’s say so, that nothing would physically hurt me.
My father’s life changed when he was 20. After recovering from
a severe flu-like illness, he woke up one morning and tried to reach
for the glass of water on his nightstand. But nothing moved. Not
his arms, not his legs. He couldn’t lift his head from the pillow. He
called out to his Aunt Molly, who’d been caring for him during his
illness. When she hooked her arms under the crook of his armpits
and tried to hoist him into a sitting position, he was a dead weight.
Upright, he slumped like a rag doll and gasped for air. Whatever
was happening was affecting his lungs. Molly called an ambulance
and it took him, sirens blaring, to the hospital. By the time the
orderlies hauled him onto a bed, he was hardly breathing at all.
My father was almost dead. By now he needed more than a venti-
lator — he needed an iron lung. Incredibly, the key to the store-
room where the hospital’s mobile equipment, including respira-
tors and iron lungs, were kept wasn’t on its hook in the nurses’
station. Eventually, someone found it and hurriedly pushed one of
the long rocketlike machines, wobbling and clattering on its little
wheels, down the corridor and parked it beside my father’s bed.
Four nurses used the bedsheet to hoist him inside it. Sealing him
in, they flicked the switch and listened as the machine’s bellows
slowly inflated and began breathing for him.
When the doctor arrived for his rounds the following morning, he
read my father’s chart, concluded a short examination and delivered
the cruel verdict. Polio had rendered 95 per cent of the muscles inAn MS diagnosis sawCAROLLEWELLYN’s high-flying dream life
in New York quickly unravel. But an in-the-moment mantra is
helping the writer piece it all back together
CHANGED MY LIFE
THE YEAR THAT
Delivering the opening
remarks at a PEN World
Voices Festival event in 2010.
Opposite page: With Philip
Roth on the Philip Roth
Newark Bus Tour in 2009.52 HARPERSBAZAAR.COM.AU April 2019