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continuum, I now operate from a standpoint that allows me to see a wide spectrum of ability. I was forced to acknowledge how fleeting ability and good health can be, and therefore how dangerous disability and illness are perceived by a culture that seeks to discipline and contain the body and all of its unruly messes, dysfunction, and decline.
    The experience of illness and/or disability can be likened to a body of water most of us will be submerged within, either as the sick or the caretaker, at one point or another. As Wendell writes in her work,
The Rejected Body,
“Unless we die suddenly, we are all disabled eventually.” Some of us are only temporarily dunked into the depths, while others will bob among the crests and troughs for our entire lives. Either way, the majority of us end up wet eventually. This impending shared experience can be used as a point of departure for temporarily abled bodied people to work towards a more viable solidarity with sick/dis/abled people. As Wendell also notes “Realizing that aging is disabling helps non-disabled people to see that people with disabilities are not ‘Other,’ that they are really themselves at a later time.”
    When able-bodied/well people acknowledge their own tenuous grip on the states of health and temporary ability, those struggling to keep their heads above water won’t have to struggle so hard to keep afloat. Recognizing our shared commonality is crucial in order to bear witness to each other, to craft communities that are accountable to all of our different abilities. People living with illness and dis/ability need spaces in which our voices can be heard and our bodies recognized. We need spaces in which our complicated narratives can be shared, validated, and heard. In our social justice and radical struggles, abilities related to health and the body must be taken into account just as much as race, class, sex, gender, sexuality, and nation in the fight against multiple systems of domination.

“A LETTER TO FAMILY & FRIENDS WITHOUT HEPATITIS”
SARAH HUGHES
    My dad battled chronic Hepatitis C for five years. He wrote the following letter three months before his first coma that sent him in and out of hospitals for six months, eventually leading up to his final breath.
    At the time he sent this letter-May of 2004- to us, he was relatively fine; but what does a word like ‘fine’ mean four years into a chronic condition like cirrhosis of the liver? His body began deteriorating shortly after his diagnosis and attempt of treatment in 1999. He could not stay on the treatment, as his illness was far too advanced, and his body could not handle the medication in such a way that would allow him to deal with his life. Chronic illness is expensive. With such great insurance and supportive, understanding employment, he continued working and quit the treatments. The first apparent physical deterioration began in November of 2000. His teeth slowly fell out, a side effect of his interferon treatments. So began his body’s steady decline. Then the HCV began its course. Nothing prepared me for the more permanent, physical ways his disease would act on his body. When he lost his teeth, he just got dentures. But there were symptoms that could not be easily covered up in this way. Shortly after his teeth, his belly expanded and hardened, as fluid accumulated in his abdomen. The lean man I had known for eighteen years of my life was forever altered. By 2003 his lower legs swelled, turned purplish, and developed open sores from a kind of diabetes that comes with liver disease. These developments in his illness were always horrifying at first, and then with time it just seemed normal, like it had always been that way. He continued to drive to work each day, drive home each day, nap each day, and live with it all each day. Austin Against War was a local activist group he participated in, proudly displaying his signs in the yard. Some weekends my