{"id":59730,"date":"2025-01-31T10:11:24","date_gmt":"2025-01-31T10:11:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/activist\/carol-gill-on-the-day-of-her-memorial-gathering\/"},"modified":"2025-01-31T10:11:24","modified_gmt":"2025-01-31T10:11:24","slug":"carol-gill-on-the-day-of-her-memorial-gathering","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=59730","title":{"rendered":"Carol Gill \u2013 On the Day of Her Memorial Gathering"},"content":{"rendered":"


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Carol Gill<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

On August 31st, Carol Gill, my long time mentor and friend, passed away. Some, perhaps many readers of this blog may not be familiar with Carol\u2019s work<\/a> or role in the years leading up to my founding of Not Dead Yet. Below are the thoughts I sent to be shared on this day of her Memorial gathering in Illinois:<\/strong><\/h3>\n

The closest times I had with Carol were in the late 1980s so I went looking around and found that the Online Archive of California contains a transcript* of an extensive interview with Carol, a treasure trove really. In it, she actually talked about the protest that is part of Not Dead Yet\u2019s origin story, where we met in 1985. Carol explained:<\/strong><\/h3>\n

As one part of the disability community\u2019s response to the Elizabeth Bouvia case [an early \u201cright-to-die\u201d case], a bunch of us actually formed a picket line and picketed in front of the building of the southern California ACLU because we were so pissed off with them about not seeing this as a political issue and only interpreting it through medical-model understandings. We did our best first to educate them, to appeal to rationality, emotionality, whatever; we tried to dissuade them from their position, and they continued to help her die legally, so we picketed them and sang, \u201cWe Shall Overcome.\u201d Some of them came to the windows and cried because they couldn\u2019t believe, these good progressive liberals, that any group would be protesting them and singing, \u201cWe Shall Overcome\u201d against them; some of them were quite shaken up. <\/em><\/strong><\/h3>\n

In time, we became friends and companions. Carol, Larry, disability movement photographer Tom Olin and I used to hang out together many weekend evenings in Van Nuys, CA. More than anyone else, Carol taught me everything I knew about disability culture, disability pride and, of course, assisted suicide. She was a highly respected expert on the issue and, in April \u201996, she was invited to testify about it in a House subcommittee, but she didn\u2019t want to travel and ask me to co-author the testimony<\/a> and do the trip. The weekend before testifying, I started Not Dead Yet.<\/strong><\/h3>\n

The long and short of things, like for so many others, is that Carol\u2019s intelligence, wisdom and insight set the course of more than three decades of my life. Carol continued, with colleagues like Paul Longmore and others, to carry the weight of challenging the growing push in professional journals to embrace assisted suicide based on illness and disability. Her articulation of the disability discrimination that fuels a public policy of assisted suicide has made its way into the federal courts in an ADA challenge<\/a> to the California assisted suicide law brought last year by the United Spinal Association, Not Dead Yet and others, and continues to guide our struggle.<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Diane Coleman<\/strong><\/h3>\n

*https:\/\/oac.cdlib.org\/view?docId=hb0j49n407;NAAN=13030&doc.view=frames&chunk.id=div00067&toc.depth=1&toc.id=&brand=calisphere<\/a><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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