Thanks Elizabeth!

These postcards are from someone very special.

A few months ago I read an article on the BBC disability site by a woman named Elizabeth McClung. Beth is in a wheelchair and she was writing about living with a disability. From the article, I discovered her blog, Screw Bronze, where she also wrote about her life. What I discovered is that Beth has a PhD in English and has written a book. I found that she loves fencing and boxingand that she is married to a wonderful woman named Linda. But what I also discovered is that Beth has a very serious illness, so serious that no one who has had this illness has survived more than a few very difficult years. The illness is Multiple System Atrophy (MSA) and is causing Beth’s body to slowly fail. You can read more about it on Wikipedia.

The postcards are one of the ways that Beth stays attached to the outside world. She and Linda went to Japan in the spring because it had always been Beth’s wish to go there and the progressive nature of her illness makes it less likely that she will able to go as time passes. Some of the postcards were sent from Japan. Beth tells us that it takes a long time for her to write postcards because she has difficulty controling her hands but also because she works hard to pick out a postcard that she thinks the person will like. Beth also decorates the postcards with stamps and stickers. All of the postcards she has sent to us (and our Beth and Mikey) are very special to us.

If you would like to get a postcard from Beth and help her to have a happy day, you can go to her website and send her an email. She will be happy to add you to her postcard list and you can send her a postcard too. Thanks!