Last month, friend and colleague Laura Hershey started a new blog hosted on the website of the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation titled “Life Support.” Laura is a (quoting from her website) “writer, poet, activist, consultant.” She is also a board member of Not Dead Yet and a friend. She will be posting bimonthly.
Her latest entry is related to a recent one here. Laura has posted a blog entry titled “Remembering Two More Heroes.” She opens with the news of the death of Paul Longmore, and provides links to tributes and information about his life.
The bulk of her blog is given over to a tribute to Barb Knowlen, a long-time activist and advocate who died in late July. As Laura notes, very little attention has been paid to her passing.
As I mentioned in my earlier post on Barb Knowlen, I knew her work, but had never met Barb at all. Laura has intimate knowledge of Barb Knowlen’s work and the impact it had on people.
If you really want to know about the impact Barb Knowlen had on people’s lives – working to that end until shortly before her death – then you should really go read Laura Hershey’s latest blog entry. You might want to bookmark the blog itself while you’re at it. Blogs that are hosted on websites don’t always show up google news feeds reliably – just go check it yourself once a week or sign up to subscribe to the rss feed. –Stephen Drake
Thanks for the link, another. (I was unable, so far, to post a comment for Laura Hershey…still learning tech skills…)
It is true that women don’t get obits as often as men and yes, I have noticed sexism in the disability community, for over two decades.
I enjoyed reading about Barb Knowlen.
On finding out about someone having died: some years ago, Womyn’s Braille Press, a feminist library, (gone now), suggested
that we each make a list of people we would like notified that we’ve
died, keep it where folks can find it after we die. It is not that unusual that there’s a time lag in finding out, indirectly that one of our “peeps”, comrades, colleagues has died – particularly those of us who are not “celebrities”.