Disability is by nature anti-establishment. It's the very lack of so-called normal expectations, the absence of the possibility that Walker and I can ever “achieve” much or even disappoint each other, that frees us from the established and the status quo, to be who we actually are with each other, rather than what society says we are supposed to be. A rare and often impossible form of love lies in that small hollow.
Genetic tests are a way to try to eliminate the imperfect, and all the pain and fear that comes with imperfection. (Especially our own.) But imperfection is not just pain and agony.
On his good days, Walker is proof of what the imperfect and the fragile have to offer – a reminder that there are many ways to be human, and that judgment is our least valuable human capacity.
In terms of physical human evolution, he is a mistake, an error. But he is peerless as a way of developing what Charles Darwin himself in The Descent of Man deemed the evolutionary advantages of “the social instincts … love, and the distinct emotion of sympathy.”
I see him for three days every two weeks, now that he lives mostly in an assisted-living home. When he does come home, I try to take him for a walk down Bloor Street, the big city artery nearest our house, him in his chair and me on foot.
I lean down and push the chair with my elbows, so I can talk in the ear hole of his soft foam helmet. “Look, Walkie,” I say, “look, the white micro-miniskirt is back this summer!” Or: “That Hungarian butcher has had that same side of meat hanging there for a year – let's never eat in there.”
I say all sorts of things, whatever comes to view. I am pretty sure he understands none of it, rationally. But he knows we are having a Conversation, and he knows he is on one end of it. The wriggling, blasting laugh of pleasure our yakking always gives him reminds me again and again how important it is to make that gesture – to engage another, to try to reach the Other, no matter how remote the likelihood of any return or result or reward.
It doesn't matter that Walker will never pass his genetic test. What matters is that I pass his test, that I had a chance to be a human being, a friend, a chatting buddy, a decent if doltish dad, and that I seized it.
I am ashamed to say I regret many things in my life. But I never regret those pointless but utterly unpredictable strolls, those strange, lifting afternoons on the hot city sidewalk with the test-failing boy. They're just one more way of measuring what we might be.
Ian Brown is a feature writer for The Globe and Mail.
