It is important that every adult with a disability be registered to vote. MDRC offers free voter registration help.
Kathleen Johnston-Calati in our office is available to register you to vote or to change your voting address. You may contact her at 517-333-2477 x 313 or johnston-calati@mymdrc.org.
On the last night of her husband’s life, Yoshiko Dart walked with him in the garden of their Washington, D.C., apartment complex. As always, they looked at the trees, birds, squirrels, and then the sky. “Sometimes we can see the moon and stars,” Yoshiko says. “He was looking down.
“I said, ‘Darling, just look up at our universe.’”
“I can’t,” Justin told her, “I have a pain in my neck.” Yoshiko said she’d help him, and she lifted his head up.
“Oh yeah,” he said, and he looked up. “Let’s have a universe kiss.”
They kissed for so long that Yoshiko became afraid. “He was not breathing well and if he kissed me too long he might just finish it right there,” she says. “But I guess he was ready.”
Back at the apartment, Yoshiko and the Darts’ Japanese foster daughters helped him into bed and one of the girls went in to talk to him—she wasn’t doing so well in her school work and Justin gave her a pep talk. “But he couldn’t talk, his voice was very small,” says Yoshiko. “He couldn’t breathe. He was mumbling almost and telling her about his own failure in high schools.” Justin went through seven high schools without actually graduating from any of them. But he shared with the girl that he’d never given up. “He tried this thing and then that thing, saying, ‘Look what I have done.’ That was so beautiful,” Yoshiko tells me.
Justin asked Yoshiko for a glass of wine and she told him if he drinks too much the doctors say he’d choke. “I appreciate their advice but give me a wine anyway,” he told her.
“So I gave him his wine and I helped him to eat and he started choking,” she says.
She helped him cough and he said, “Thank you for helping me, darling.” Those were his last words to his wife of 35 years.
“The universe. Until the last day we really contemplated about our life and relationship with the universe and humanity,” Yoshiko says.
What came next for the couple marked what Yoshiko calls “the turning point in his life, and mine.” They visited hospitals and an orphanage in wartime Vietnam—this was in 1966, six years before Jane Fonda did the same. “He thought he’d make a report to Rehabilitation International, and have a nice photo op,” Yoshiko says. Instead they faced what she calls “a real atrocity. The ones who are lucky enough to get inside the orphanage die in their own urine and feces, swarming with flies. Many more are dying in the streets, crawling to get inside.” A little girl reached out to Justin, held him with her eyes, clung to his arm as if he were the saint who could save her. The experience shook him, hard. “A counterfeit saint,” Justin called himself later that night.
“We went back to the hotel and Justin got very drunk,” Yoshiko says. He had seen real evil. He told her, “I am part of the evil. It’s not just somebody else. I am a part of it.” The truth confronting him now was quickly becoming more real to him than his own place in faraway American society.
The Vietnam trip horrified his genteel parents. His women and his drinking they could take, but visiting a country with which his own was at war? Using a family company to push for women’s rights and free disabled kids from institutions? It was too red for their blue blood. Justin, a scion of American capitalism, should be content to make money, not foment revolutionary ideas. Suddenly, without warning, his mother ordered Justin to liquidate Dart Card and told her son his life’s work was worthless. He was devastated.
In the universe of “things we’d like to know” about women veterans and how they experience periods of unstable housing and homelessness, one of the things we want to know more about is the often-opaque relationship between Intimate Partner Violence (IPV), formerly known as Domestic Violence (DV), and homelessness. There are far more questions than answers, and to date very little research has explored this relationship.
In 2015, when I first started surveying women veterans across the country about their experiences of homelessness after military service, a surprising number of women veterans reported “staying in an unsafe relationship,” such as one characterized by intimate partner violence, during periods of housing instability. The first survey had 400 respondents, but the second one, begun two years later, has many more respondents — over 2,500 to date — and yet this choice continues to be the second most prevalent accommodation chosen, by a new set of women veteran respondents, from the same array of more than a dozen choices. In fact, it’s so prevalent only couch-surfing is mentioned more often; sleeping in vehicles comes in a distant third. So clearly, there’s an important relationship of some kind between IPV and homelessness in women veterans — but just what is that relationship, and how much do we know about it?
In 2005, our son Nicholas was admitted to the palliative care team at our local Children’s Hospital. Nick’s severe cerebral palsy was complicated by uncontrolled pain, epilepsy and respiratory complications. Everyone in our family, especially Nick, was desperate for comfort, rest and end to the nightmare of constant suffering.
As our son’s mother and his principal caregiver, I never stopped advocating for treatment solutions to alleviate Nick’s pain. That said, my husband and I promised that there would be no more surgery or painful interventions – we sought comfort measures and ways to enable a rich life, though restricted, for everyone in our family.
The backdrop to our home drama was the Latimer case. In my book, The Four Walls of My Freedom, I wrote “Back in January 2001, I had written a letter to the editor of the Ottawa newspaper supporting the Supreme Court of Canada’s ruling on Robert Latimer’s sentence. I believe that the public would have reacted very differently if Tracy Latimer had been able-bodied, or if she had been suffering from the effects of cancer, for example. It seemed evident to me that because many people were repulsed by the awfulness of giving total care to someone as disabled as Tracy, they assuaged their guilt by supporting Robert Latimer — exalting him, even. People who supported Robert Latimer were so afraid of dependency that they were pleased to erase the evidence of it.”
Tracy Latimer’s disabilities were similar to those of our Nicholas in many ways and in 2005, her case still pervaded the public imagination. For us the possibility of tasking medical professionals to manage our son’s pain and offer our family ways and means to live a good life was a challenge. Nicholas was almost ‘written off’ as not worth treating.
Poverty is associated with higher rates of inpatient stays for pediatric patients, and hospital reforms can help address the problem, according to an article published this week in Health Affairs.
The study focuses on Hamilton County, Ohio, which includes Cincinnati and has a population of about 190,000 children. For the period 2011 to 2016, the researchers collected data from all pediatric hospitalizations at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, then paired each pediatric patient with a Census tract.
"Poorer communities disproportionately bore the burden of pediatric hospital days," the researchers wrote. "If children from all of the county’s census tracts spent the same amount of time in the hospital each year as those from the most affluent tracts, approximately 22 child-years of hospitalization time would be prevented [annually]."
Bed-day is a key metric in the study and is calculated by dividing the number of days that children from a community are hospitalized by the total number of children living in the community.
Bed-day data shows that pediatric patients from Hamilton County's low-income areas are disproportionately more likely to be hospitalized:
The researchers identified several poverty "hot spots" near the medical center, and the 628-bed facility has launched several initiatives to better serve the disadvantaged neighborhoods.