Writing in the Washington Post, Colman McCarthy says he met Eunice Shriver at a pickup basketball game in her backyard more than 30 years ago. An excerpt:

She truly believed, and she instilled in those [Special Olympics] events, the idea that it’s not what you achieve in life, it’s what you overcome. A morally driven and politically astute woman, she sprung open doors globally for the mentally disabled and opened minds that had too long been closed to accepting people with Down syndrome and other disabilities.

… Eunice Shriver had no taste for fame-seeking. She had no publicist, no agent, no handler. All she had was energy, of a steeled kind that never stalled out. It was Olympian energy, special in its grace.

Earlier posts here.

From the Boston Globe (with video) and elsewhere:

“If I (had) never met Rosemary, never known anything about handicapped children, how would I have ever found out? Because nobody accepted them anyplace,” she told National Public Radio in 2007.

International champion for people with developmental disabilities and Special Olympics founder Eunice Kennedy Shriver, 88, died this morning at a hospital in Hyannis, Mass. Shriver was the fifth of nine children in the Kennedy clan which included President John F. Kennedy and Sens. Robert F. Kennedy and Edward M. Kennedy.

Mrs. Shriver was credited with changing the public’s perception of people with intellectual disabilities by publicly acknowledging her sister with developmental disabilities, Rosemary, and founding the Special Olympics in 1968.

Her family said in a statement, “Her work transformed the lives of hundreds of millions of people across the globe and they in turn are her living legacy.”

‘‘My sister, Rosemary, is retarded,” she wrote in Parade magazine in February 1964. ‘‘But I cannot help her with pity – or serve with sorrow the 5 1/2 million others like her. Only by facing the facts and resolving to meet the challenge head-on can something be done. Only if we broaden our understanding can we help the mentally retarded to escape into the sunlight of useful living.”

In a statement, President Obama described Mrs. Shriver as “an extraordinary woman who, as much as anyone, taught our nation –and our world — that no physical or mental barrier can restrain the power of the human spirit.”

See also:

Remembering Eunice Kennedy Shriver — The Atlantic

Eunice Kennedy Shriver, Founder of Special Olympics, Dies at 88 – New York Times

Eunice Kennedy Shriver, Founder of Special Olympics, Dies at 88 – Washington Post

Eunice Kennedy Shriver Dies At Age 88 – By Joseph Shapiro on National Public Radio

Eunice Kennedy Shriver Dies at 88 – Wall Street Journal

Eunice Kennedy Shriver, JFK’s sister and champion for the mentally retarded, dies at 88 – Los Angeles Times

Eunice Kennedy Shriver dies – CNN

JFK’s sister Eunice Kennedy Shriver dead at 88 – MSNBC

Eunice Kennedy Shriver dies at 88 – USA Today

Statement from Special Olympics on death of Eunice Kennedy Shriver – Boston Globe

From the Los Angeles Times:

Marcella M. Meyer, a prominent deaf advocate who helped found the Greater Los Angeles Agency on Deafness and ran it for almost three decades, has died. She was 84.

Deaf since contracting scarlet fever at the age of 6, Meyer fought to expand civil rights and establish social services for people with impaired hearing. She pushed for TV closed-captioning in the 1970s, and was instrumental in opening up jury service in Los Angeles County to the deaf and hard of hearing in 1981.

Roz Rosen, director of the National Center on Deafness at Cal State Northridge, called Meyer “visionary, radical, straight-shooting, compassionate and caring.”

“She conceptualized the consumer-based community service centers serving deaf and hard-of-hearing people and created the statewide network much respected and revered by so many, within and outside of California,” Rosen told The Times in an e-mail. “Her energy, enthusiasm and empathy were boundless.”

(Los Angeles Times photo)

From the Boston Globe, Galveston County [TX] Daily News:

Charles Sabatier, who became a nationally known advocate for disability rights after being wounded in Vietnam, has died of cancer. He was 63.

“My goal is equal citizenship,” he told the Globe in 1988 as he prepared to step down as executive director of Boston’s Commission for Persons with Disabilities. “Nothing less is acceptable. We’re looking for equitable treatment, although not necessarily identical. A disabled person should have the same options as everybody else. I came within an inch of giving my life for this country. The idea of being denied equal opportunity because it might not be cost-effective is utterly reprehensible to me.”

As head of Boston’s disability commission, Sabatier improved access around the city and helped get an elevator installed in Faneuil Hall. A lawyer, Sabatier also challenged degrading treatment on airlines and served as senior policy adviser in the federal Department of Labor’s Office of Disability Employment Policy.

From New York Times, Associated Press/Greensboro [NC] News & Record, Charlotte Observer, Winston-Salem Journal, Shelby [NC] Star:

Martha Mason, author of the memoir “Breath,” died in her North Carolina home last week shortly before her 72nd birthday. Mason had lived more than 60 years in an iron lung after a childhood bout with polio left her paralyzed from the neck down.

Mason was one of the last handful of Americans to live full-time in an iron lung. An official from the March of Dimes said there was no documented case of any American who had done so for quite so long.

From her horizontal world – a 7-foot-long, 800-pound iron cylinder that encased all but her head – Ms. Mason lived a life that was by her own account fine and full, reading voraciously, graduating with highest honors from high school and college, entertaining and eventually writing.

She chose to remain in an iron lung, she often said, for the freedom it gave her. It let her breathe without tubes in her throat, incisions or hospital stays, as newer, smaller ventilators might require. It took no professional training to operate, letting her remain mistress of her own house, with just two aides assisting her.

Mary Dalton, an associate communications professor at Wake Forest University, produced a documentary about Mason’s life in 2005. “She always wanted people to see she was a person, separate from the iron lung,” she said. “Once you got engaged in a conversation with her, you forgot about the iron lung. … She was really funny, she was really smart … She never wanted to be pitied.”

(Photo from the Charlotte Observer)

From the New York Times:

Theologian and sociologist Nancy Eiesland, an associate professor at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta, has died of lung cancer.

Eiesland wrote the 1994 book, “The Disabled God: Toward a Liberatory Theology of Disability.” She had a congenital bone condition and spinal scoliosis.

So why did she say she hoped that when she went to heaven she would still be disabled?

The reason, which seems clear enough to many disabled people, was that her identity and character were formed by the mental, physical and societal challenges of her disability. She felt that without her disability, she would “be absolutely unknown to myself and perhaps to God.”

Colleagues described Eiesland as a leader of disability studies within the context of religion and Christianity.

(Emory University photo in the New York Times)

From the New York Times:

Acclaimed Irish author and poet Christopher Nolan, 43, died Friday in Dublin. Nolan produced a highly praised volume of verse and short stories at the age of 15, then went on to take the prestigious Whitbread Prize for his autobiography, Under the Eye of the Clock.

Nolan had cerebral palsy, and was unable to speak and virtually unable to move voluntarily. Family members said the cause of death was food trapped in his airway.

Nolan had been able to communicate only through eye movements until the age of 11, when a new drug was found to relax his neck muscles. He began writing through the use of a “unicorn stick” strapped to his forehead, typing a letter at a time on a keyboard as his mother held his chin in her hands.

A prominent Los Angeles producer wanted to make a film of Mr. Nolan’s life story. Mr. Nolan turned the offer down.

“I want to highlight the creativity within the brain of a cripple,” he wrote to the producer, “and while not attempting to hide the crippledom I want instead to filter all sob-storied sentiment from his portrait and dwell upon his life, his laughter, his vision, and his nervous normality. Can we ever see eye-to-eye on that schemed scenario?”

(Photo from the New York Times)