Wonderful, Wonderful Carla

Alan S. Miller

January 29, 2005

My friend Carla-Ellen Toth was born with cerebral palsy. She filled her 42 years with graceful living and diligent achievement but sadly chose to end it when physical disability established new limits that she had never before been forced to accept.

“I prefer to think that the tragic way in which Carla died was an accident, that she was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Throughout her life, Carla seized every opportunity that came her way. She lived her life to the fullest. Although she was wheelchair dependent in most of her activities, she learned how to ski with a specially constructed rig so that she could sit as she sped down the hill. Her exploits on the ski slope were described in a film at a documentary media festival in 2002.

For more than twenty years, she rafted many of the great rivers of the west: the Stanislaus, the Colorado, the Green and Snake and Yampa. She was known for her fearlessness in running rapids and facing the challenges of the wilderness. Carla was a published poet and essayist in spite of the fact that writing was for her an enormously demanding activity. With her permanently clenched hands, she could type only by poking out the letters with a stick or a twisted finger. At different times, beginning in her student days at the university, Carla did editorial work with the Sierra Club, Terrain Magazine, and the Rainforest Action Network. She was splendidly creative with words and images.

I was her academic adviser in the Conservation and Resource Studies program at the University of California, Berkeley. Carla began that program in 1981 and, in spite of all manner of delays occasioned by illness and the limited number of class hours she could take in any given semester, graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in science in 1995.

For all that time, she came by my office a time or two most every week to discuss everything of importance in her life: her academic program, an occasional love affair, her poetry, her many joys in being able to learn about and to celebrate life.

My wife Barbara and I went with Carla to Hertz Hall on campus for noontime concerts. We visited the University Art Museum and once joined other “disabled” folk for a “hike” around Angel Island in the midst of a torrential rainstorm.

Until the last year of her life, Carla grabbed every moment that came to her. In spite of the severe physical limitations of her disease, she did her best to expand the boundaries that had forever surrounded her.

Sadly, physical problems more severe than any she had so regularly faced and conquered during her life suddenly presented new hurdles. Wrist and arm problems, coupled with her life-long frustrations with people not understanding her way of speaking, made it almost impossible for her to continue her writing. And writing, the detailing of her life and experiences and observations, was like life-blood to Carla. Without that means of expressing herself, a large hole opened in the center of her life.

Then, a few months before her death, Carla fractured her leg. For an ablebodied person, the break would have been a manageable problem, but for Carla it presented both pain and another enormous new obstacle in her desire to live with relative independence.

Coupled with the daily sense of rejection she felt from most people in the community—that ego shattering reality that her toughness had enabled her to overcome most of her life—Carla found herself more and more separated from the larger community.

Those of us who are able-bodied, who have not felt the indifference of strangers, the unwillingness of other people to take the time to listen to our halting speech, cannot understand the shattering loneliness felt by those who feel rejected at most every turn in life.

Of course, Carla had good friends who supported her with love and care and concern and who continued to see her almost to the end. She had a loving attendant who helped over many years with the daily tasks of living. She had family who loved her and did their best to help her.

But somehow the connections that had for so long bound her to her longtime support community began to fray. One of her friends, Andrew Livsey, described the impact of her leg injury on the quality of her life.

“Carla’s fall ... opened up a hairline fracture in her soul, and in the following months her life gradually seeped out. No amount of psychic crazy clue could stop the flow. We all know that this moment—this rude eviction from the cozy confines of time and habits—will come for us one way or another, but Carla couldn’t wait for the engine of her life to run its course. She chose, or felt compelled, to abandon the chaos of living for the unknowable peace of oblivion, and we are left behind scratching our heads.”

A few days after her death, a group of us met on the lawn outside Giannini Hall on the Berkeley campus, next to the giant gingko tree that had been Carla’s favorite place in the not so wild locale of the city of Berkeley, to remember and honor her.

The remembrances were provocative and moving. This tiny, powerful woman had profoundly affected and changed the lives of virtually everyone she met. We remembered her hilarious laughter as she skied in tight turns down difficult slopes at Lake Tahoe.

We remembered her joyously jerky dancing in her walker at departmental retreats. We remembered how the gingko tree, under whose branches we bid farewell to Carla, had been so central in her life.

She celebrated that tree. She decided that it was the place for the special recognition service the university sponsored for her on the day of her graduation. Just months before her death, under the gingko tree, she listened to the music of suffering tribal people in Africa with one of her faculty friends. She understood that music and how people can celebrate even in the midst of struggle and toil. Under that tree, we read again Carla’s comments on the nature and central place of writing in her life:

“My writing sounds so very strange at times, so smooth like a flowing river or a piece of silk, blowing in the breeze. This makes me laugh—it sounds so alien, so unlike my choppy, slurry, slow speaking voice. Is it like the Gingko Tree, beyond the ownership of anyone? As soon as I write something, it seems to take off and soar like a bird far above my chair, far beyond the constraints of my speech, my everyday reality.”

I prefer to think that the tragic way in which Carla died was an accident, that she was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. But as she was in control of her life in most other ways, I suspect she was also in control of her death.

Whatever the forces were that emptied Carla’s life through that little crack in her leg, and in her mind, she continues to soar above us in our memories.

She will always be there with us and for us—cackling with glee, jerkily dancing, screaming as she races in the snow or shoots the rapids, grinning as she tears across campus in her chair, but always, always, gracefully moving through our lives with power and with passion.

Copyright © 2005 Alan S. Miller
Last updated: March 20, 2005