As I've previously mentioned, my grandmother grew up on a farm in Småland.
Her father had hired a farmhand to help with the cattle and the farm work. The farmhand had a disabled brother named Gunnar.
This was back in the 1930s, so Gunnar didn't have any diagnosis or anything. But his body simply didn't allow him to do heavy lifting and physically demanding jobs. He also seems to have had a poor immune system. And so he struggled to make a living. Working as a farmhand was one of very few career opportunities for a man with no (formal) education back then. (At least in that area.)
So the able-bodied brother asked if Gunnar could come and work on the farm, despite not being able to do hard manual labor. And my great-grandfather agreed to this.
Gunnar started helping my great-grandmother around the house. He was physically unable to do "a man's job", but he turned out to be incredibly good at "women's" work. My great-grandmother had been feeling lonely, working alone in a big farmhouse all day. Gunnar didn't just help lessen the burden of running a household. Him and my great-grandmother became close friends. They talked and sang and drank coffee in the comfortable silence between people who truly know, trust and love eachother.
My grandmother was an only child for most of her childhood, and Gunnar was her best friend. He always had time to tell her a story, or to play with her, or to just let her sit in his lap while he drank his coffee. And she loved him to bits.
According to my grandmother, nobody could tell as good stories and fairy tales as Gunnar. He had a way of bringing any story to life, to make you feel like you were there, with the prince in the enchanted castle. (He also accidentally put her off eating liquorice for an entire lifetime, but that's a story for another day.)
I never got to meet Gunnar. He died when I was just a child. (My grandmother actually brought me along to the funeral.) But despite never having met him, I still feel like I know him, because my grandmother has told me so much about him.
The only thing she didn't tell me about until very recently was his disability.
Because it simply didn't matter. Not to her, and not to the rest of the family. He wasn't "the disabled one" - he was just Gunnar. And if Gunnar couldn't do heavy lifting, someone else could do it so what did it matter?
Gunnar had his own responsibilities on the farm. He was allowed to work and contribute to the survival of the farm pretty much on his own terms. He wasn't forced (or expected) to do things that hurt his body. He was allowed to focus on the things that he could do, and he was respected for doing them.
Gunnar was not a burden. Gunnar was a skilled and diligent worker. He was also a good friend and a loving member of the family.
I wanted to share this story with y'all because I feel like this is a perspective on disability that's almost never brought up.
