On September 27, Pope Leo XIV addressed pilgrims consisting of the sick and their caregivers at the Shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes on the subject of assisted suicide, speaking of it as false compassion. In the wake of that event, I bring to your attention two women of our country.

Helen Keller (1880-1968) became deaf and blind at age 19 months. She was approaching age 7 when Anne Sullivan (1866-1936) became her “miracle worker,” teaching her how to communicate. Keller graduated from Radcliffe in 1904 and lived 88 years.

In a moment, I will describe the world-wide acclaim the story of Keller and Sullivan attained. Why all this attention? Because Helen Keller, despite being both blind and deaf, lived a good life and contributed to our lives. She was an inspiration to all, those with disabilities and those able-bodied.

Apparently no one told the story of Keller to the Belgian identical twins Eddie and Marc Verbessem, age 45, cobblers both, who sought and obtained assisted suicide in Belgium in December 2013. (See NBC News, Hastings Center for Bioethics, and International Business Times.) Belgian law requires unbearable pain. The men’s pain was mental, not physical, namely, that they were deaf and becoming blind. They were not yet blind. Being 45, they were not near the end of their natural lives. Their conditions were incurable but not terminal. Apparently, too, no one told the story of Helen Keller to Jacqueline Herremans, a member of the Belgian Commission of Euthanasia, who said about the twins that “they would not have been able to lead autonomous lives, and that with only a sense of touch they had no prospects of a future.” (The senses of smell and taste were ignored.)

And no one told the Verbessem twins about the cosmologist Stephen Hawking (1942-2018), who was diagnosed with ALS at age 21. No one told them of Haben Girma, deaf and blind, who graduated from Harvard Law School in 2013, a half year before the Belgian twins committed suicide. (She wrote a memoir six years later titled Haben: The Deafblind Woman Who Conquered Harvard Law.)

It was with good reason that Not Dead Yet was founded in the mid-1990s. The members of the group are persons with disabilities advocating against assisted suicide and vehemently opposed to Professor Peter Singer’s articulation of criteria for what constitutes a human being.

Now to return to the description of the world-wide acclaim: While Keller was in college, she told the story of her childhood in her 1903 book Story of My Life. It was translated the same year into German (Die Geschichte meines Lebens) and into Swedish (Berättelsen om mitt liv). It has been translated into 50 languages.

Keller’s childhood was also the subject of the 1959 Broadway play The Miracle Worker, and the 1962 film by the same name starring Patty Duke (1946-2016) as Keller and Anne Bancroft (1931-2005) as Anne Sullivan. (For this film, Duke won Best Supporting Actress at age 15 and Bancroft won Best Lead Actress.) There were 1979 and 2000 remakes of this film for television. In the 1979 version, Duke played Sullivan and Melissa Gilbert played Keller. Gilbert was age 15 and starring in Little House on the Prairie (1974-1983). The 1979 film won three Primetime Emmy Awards, Duke won Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited Series or Special and Gilbert was nominated for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited Series or Special.

There have also been films about Keller’s life after childhood. The 90-minute silent 1919 film Deliverance covered her young adulthood in addition to her childhood. Remarkably, Keller and her teacher, Anne Sullivan, appear as themselves in some of the film. The 1984 TV movie The Miracle Continues depicted Keller’s college and young adult years.

There have been books and films about Keller and Sullivan outside the United States, including in Germany: H.J. Kaeser, Helen Keller (1969); in Japan, the film Helen Keller Monogatari: Ai to Hikari no Tenshi (The Story of Helen Keller: Angel of Love and Light, 1981); and in India, the film Black (2005). There have been theatrical productions in South Africa, Bangladesh, and Serbia.

In 1964, President Johnson awarded Keller the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Her native state, Alabama, honored Keller by renaming a hospital after her in Sheffield in 1979, arranging for an image of her on the U.S. quarter in 2003, and placing statues of her in the U.S. Capitol in 2009 and the state capitol in 2025. Stamps bearing Keller’s image have been issued by the United States in 1980 (with an image of Sullivan), Brazil, India, Spain, and Mauritius. Two towns in Massachusetts have statues. There are streets named after Keller in Tuscaloosa, Zurich, Vienna, Getafe (Spain), Lisbon, Caen (France), Lod (Israel) and Sao Paulo. There are schools and parks named after Keller or Sullivan.

The Belgian twins, their family, their doctors, all missed this. Reading of the story of the Belgian twins, I was reminded of my paternal grandmother who became blind when she was a young mother. But she raised five children, and all three of her sons served in WWII — two of them saw combat. I was also reminded of my good fortune in appearing in Juvenile Court in Cook County (Chicago) on the Child Abuse and Neglect “calendar” before Judge Stephen R. Yates. After Judge Yates received a diagnosis of Lou Gehrig’s Disease (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or ALS) in 1997, he continued to judge and to teach until he died in 2000 at age 60. He did not die of assisted suicide.

I assert that the Belgian twins could have lived, and lived well, despite being blind and deaf. Note that they were becoming blind over several years so they had plenty of time to prepare for their new situation. Apparently they used two years of this time to shop for a doctor who would help them commit suicide.

But let me turn your attention now from the people with disabilities to their doctors, relatives, caregivers, and teachers. Many people associate the word Talladega with NASCAR racing and the movie Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby. My background — as someone who lived three years with 11 teen-aged boys with mental and physical disabilities (see my report on these pages here), who served as general counsel of Americans United for Life and for five years as a director of the Chicago Bar Association’s Legal Clinic for the Disabled, Inc., housed in the renowned Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, and who authored Quiet Killings in Medical Facilities: Detection & Prevention — causes me to associate the word Talladega with the town’s famous Alabama Institute for Deaf and Blind.

The inspiration for the staff of this Institute was Anne Sullivan, “the miracle worker,” who, as I wrote above, was played in the 1962 film by the late Anne Bancroft and in the 1979 remake by Patty Duke. Sullivan had grown up destitute and in an almshouse. She was 20 years old, nearly blind herself, and a graduate of a school for the blind, when she traveled the 1,200 miles from Massachusetts to Alabama to teach the 7-year old blind-and-deaf Helen. She and Helen Keller were to become companions for decades.

As mentioned above, Keller wrote a 1903 autobiography. This book includes details about Sullivan’s successful methods. Twenty years after Sullivan’s 1936 death, Keller published Teacher, Anne Sullivan Macy: A Tribute by the Foster Child of Her Mind (1955). Others have written about Sullivan, this greatest of teachers. In addition to children’s books, they include:

• Nella Braddy, Anne Sullivan Macy: The Story Behind Helen Keller (1933),
• Joseph P. Lash, Helen and Teacher: The Story of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan Macy (1980),
• Sarah Miller, Miss Spitfire: Reaching Helen Keller (2007),
• Marfe Ferguson Delano, Helen’s Eyes: A Photobiography of Annie Sullivan, Helen Keller’s Teacher (2008),
• Janice Larsen, Perseverance: The Story of Anne Sullivan Macy (2008), and
• Kim E. Nielsen, Beyond the Miracle Worker: The Remarkable Life of Anne Sullivan Macy and Her Extraordinary Friendship with Helen Keller (2009).

At Sullivan’s passing, Keller held her hand. And so, Keller had switched roles and had become Sullivan’s caregiver.

For their part, the Belgian twins decided that they would rather commit suicide than care for any other human being, including their surviving parents and brother. No one seemed to have pled with them, in Dylan Thomas’s words of his 1951 poem, “Do not go gentle into that good night…Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.”

[A link to Pope Leo XIV’s Sept. 27, 2026 address to the sick and their caregivers at the Shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes is here.]