A Sad Reminder

A Sad Reminder

A Sad Reminder

From the Editor: All of us have had the

painful experience of having someone dismiss us as unimportant or insignificant or

incompetent simply because the person didn't bother to focus sufficient attention on us to

see the truth. It happens to blind people all the time, but it occurs to other people as

well. Because it is such a common experience for us, it seems to me that I should be less

inclined to dismiss other people out of hand than those who rarely have to fight to be

taken seriously themselves.

At last summer's convention I conducted

several meetings in which a woman named Laurel Buck took part. Once she even called and

left a message on my hotel room telephone, but I never returned the call. She spoke

haltingly and with little inflection to her voice. I found it difficult to listen to her

words long enough to catch her meaning. I knew nothing about her, not even where she came

from, and I didn't take the time to find out or even answer her questions with attention.

As it happened, Laurel was dealing with

massive problems stemming from head injuries she sustained in a car accident. She had

already adjusted to losses I can't even conceive of, and just to go on with her life, she

had to muster courage and determination every day that I can only imagine.

I did nothing to compound Laurel's problems,

but neither did I extend myself to get to know her or offer her encouragement. Now it is

too late to do so. But it is not too late to remember her whenever I meet someone else who

is carrying a particularly heavy load. Laurel committed suicide on New Year's Eve. There

are many others in our Federation family and beyond who deal with problems every day that

would stagger me. I for one have been reminded to be more alert to both the needs and

abilities of those I meet. Here is the moving story about Laurel Buck by Susan Levine that

appeared in the February 4, 1998, edition of the Washington Post:

Ending the Struggle To Rebuild Her Dream

Laurel Buck Saw Life as an Adventure, But a Car

Crash Forced an Uphill Journey

by Susan Levine

At 10:35 p.m. on New Year's Eve, miles away from

the pricey hotel party for which she and her boyfriend had paid weeks before and an

eternity away from the future that had held such promise, a Rockville woman named Laurel

Buck was pronounced dead at Suburban Hospital. She was thirty-four.

On his report the medical examiner wrote

"suicide." Sometime the previous day Buck had swallowed forty-five shiny

blue-and-yellow capsules of Verapamil, a drug often used to lower blood pressure. Each was

240 milligrams strong and built to detonate round-the-clock. By the time she confessed her

action and handed her boyfriend a note saying that "nothing particular

happened," the pills had been in her body for hours.

Of course something had happened, although it had

occurred nearly a decade earlier as Buck made an ill-timed left turn and was broadsided

just two miles from her parents' home in Prince George's County. Those who knew her well

wonder now if suicide was the inevitable, tragic consequence of that moment, which

fractured her face, destroyed much of her vision, and led to major brain injury. At the

least her overdose became the final chapter of her struggle to rebuild her damaged body,

to prove she still had value.

"She really, really wanted to participate in

society, and she wanted to be productive," said a friend, Judy Rasmussen. What Buck

apparently saw as her inability to do so should be a lesson for others, her brother Rick

believes.

"Society," he said, "must do more

to let marginal people live non-marginal lives."

Once she had been far different, an independent,

adventurous spirit who delighted in the experience of life. She spent her junior year of

high school in Japan and scaled Mount Fuji. She moved on to Bryn Mawr College, tried her

hand at both wrestling team statistician and radio deejay, and graduated as a smart but

unfocused geology major.

In 1985 she joined the Peace Corps, teaching in

the parched land of Botswana. For two years a hut was her home, a washtub turned upside

down her table. When she wasn't with her students, she hitchhiked across that country and

much of southern Africa, lugging a village chieftain's chair all the way to Cape Town so

she could take it to her parents one Christmas. She laughed generously. She could tell a

joke in four languages.

But on July 23, 1988, having finally returned

from her far-flung wanderings, the world shattered as she turned her beloved '67 Mustang

off Indian Head Highway on the way home from the library. With only a lap belt for

protection, her head smashed violently against the dashboard. The damage would be

tremendous and largely permanent.

There was the loss of her right eye, of any sense

of smell and taste. She stumbled often with a badly unbalanced gait; her rapid-fire speech

became laboriously slow and slurred.

And though she eventually recovered speed and

clarity, unnatural pauses between her words prevented them from flowing smoothly, which

many people took as a cue to finish sentences for her. Even worse was when they listened

too briefly and, Buck felt, concluded that she was stupid. As a final cruelty last year

the already minimal vision in her left eye began deteriorating rapidly.

Yet, through more than six months of

hospitalization and nearly two years of special rehabilitation, her humor remained intact;

her intellect survived; and, according to friends and family, so did her matter-of-fact

way of dealing with adversity and her dogged determination to be part of life. In the

early '90's, Buck pushed herself to move out on her own. She maneuvered the Metro alone

and tried white water rafting and skiing. Despite her arrhythmic speech, she went with the

local chapter of the Federation of the Blind to lobby legislators in Annapolis.

She also held a job as a computer assistant at

the National Naval Medical Center, a position that meant much more to her than a

paycheck—perhaps too much, as it turned out.

"She didn't let herself off the hook,"

Noreen O'Grady, a friend from Peace Corps days, reflected last week.

There'd been nothing dark or brooding about her

before the crash, and until she came home from work on the afternoon of December 30, few

saw any hint of a well of despair. "It's almost as if I had a daughter who was quite

unique," said her mother, Nancy Buck, "and then I had another daughter who was

also unusual. And now they're both gone."

Two memorial services were held in January for

Laurel Susan Buck, one at a small country church not far from where her parents now live

in Anne Arundel County, the other at the medical center chapel in Bethesda.

"It is not my place or yours to judge the

heart of another person," the minister told her family and the nearly five dozen men

and women gathered at the church service two Saturdays ago. They'd traveled from Vermont,

California, Nebraska, and New York, friends from college, from the Peace Corps, from the

Federation. Her Braille teacher came, as did another head-injury victim Buck had once

encouraged.

The distance of time was reflected in the stories

shared, but nobody appeared surprised by any of the tales. One person recalled how Buck

had gotten her pilot's license and soloed over the Chesapeake Bay the summer after

finishing college. Tina Vine drew laughter when she described Buck's sense of style in

Botswana. "Who else would even think of taking fishnet stockings, lace gloves, and a

clutch purse?" Vine asked.

Memories also were volunteered at the other

service, but most people at the Naval Medical Information Management Center knew far less

about the woman who had tried to work alongside them for nearly six years. They were not

aware of Buck's deepening frustration over how little she seemed to be given to do. In the

absence of other tasks she tried to take charge of certain responsibilities. Every morning

in the kitchen for her section, she would practice making the coffee and refilling the ice

trays.

She sensed that some employees shied away from

her. Some were more polite than others. Lieutenant Commander Andrew Porter acknowledges

painfully conflicted feelings about her extreme disabilities. He was the administrative

officer whom Buck approached last fall for help in getting some computer equipment

designed for the visually impaired. The order accidentally got set aside and then

forgotten, and not until mid-December was it delivered to her office. It is unclear

whether it was ever installed at her desk.

"I felt terribly guilty," Porter said

last week. "In the back of my mind I'd like to think you have a chance to really

change someone's life, to really give them hope, to really inspire them. I had that chance

with Laurel, and through my...failure to take up her cause, I contributed to the

mess."

Certainly she had several close colleagues, who

were stunned by her suicide. Her supervisor, Zahur Alum, describes her as a "very

special person." Her friend Alice Barkley says she misses Buck terribly. Nearly every

morning Buck would stop by Barkley's cubicle for confirmation that her clothes looked all

right. She joined Barkley's Wednesday lunchtime Bible study, and many evenings Barkley

gave her a ride to her Grosvenor high-rise.

"She made me learn to listen," Barkley

said. "I don't know of anyone who could have reconstructed her life as many times as

she had." Maybe, Barkley suggests finally, "she just got tired of the fight and

the battle."

In a corner near the front door of the condo Buck

shared with Sean Sullivan, the long and slender opaque wand with which she made her way in

the world still leans against the wall. On the floor, neatly paired, are her low black

suede pumps, exactly where she put them when she walked in from work December 30.

"It's like I'm waiting for her to come

home," he said.

The two had been together since 1992, and the

forty-seven-year-old Sullivan, a country club groundskeeper, asked Buck to marry him on

more than one occasion. As it was, they frequently struck friends as a comfortably married

couple. He was solicitous, protective. "I accepted her for what she was," he

explained. "To me she was complete."

Sullivan feels certain that suicide had been an

option, however remote, for years. Although Buck never voiced any bitterness or

complaints—no regrets about the Foreign Service career she might have

pursued—"it was so painful and so difficult [for her] to accept what life had

become," he said. At the same time he wants to believe that her overdose was a rash

impulse and that a remark she made in the hospital emergency room about changing her mind

meant, too late, that she wanted to pull back. If his crosscurrents of thought sound

contradictory, he says, well, conflicting emotions and agendas run through many lives.

Still, like the others grieving Buck's death, he

is haunted by questions. Why or, more specifically, why now? In the last few weeks she had

seemed even more beaten down by day's end. She had worried aloud to her mother recently

that her memory seemed shakier.

On the other hand, the night before she had gone

shopping at White Flint Mall for a sweater to match jewelry that Sullivan had given her

for Christmas. She was looking for something in green cashmere. She was excited about

their New Year's Eve plans.

Then he picked her up at work that Tuesday, and

within an hour the world collapsed.

"She kept on pushing and pushing and

pushing." Richard Buck, a pleasant but reticent man, views the youngest of his three

children as a kind of Sisyphus. "She kept on pushing the rock up the mountain...and

the rock finally rolled back on her."

Ultimately his daughter must have assessed her

limitations in similarly bleak terms. In the contents of her desk at work— five years

of hopes and disappointments that were returned to her parents that afternoon of their

memorial service for her—her mother found a poem. She is sure Laurel is its author.

I saw the end of the world

On my TV last night;

It preempted the National Anthem.

I watched it half dazed

Through popcorn and beer;

Stunned by the color of death unfurled.

When the time was over,

No announcer came on

To tell me what was not left to feel.

So I smiled a tear;

And saluted the heroes

Who evolved to make gods.

Jesus, why did You forsake me when the power went

off?