Access All Areas
James Borrowdale I Sunday Star Times I Waikato Times I September 17, 2023
There are more than one million New Zealanders living with access needs. Minnie Baragwanath tells James Borrowdale how facing her own challenges drives her to change how we think about disability.
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Close to the end of Auckland’s second Covid-19 lockdown, as her brother stopped by for a socially distanced visit in the garden of her Freeman’s Bay home, Minnie Baragwanath, 53, suffered a heart attack. That night, in hospital, she underwent another.
“I felt terrified,” she writes in her recently published memoir, Blindingly Obvious, “and certain my life was over.”
But again, she found herself returning to the world, awaking to a tight scrum of medical professionals and the beeping of the machinery to which she was connected.
Later, Baragwanath would be in “no way surprised” to hear what has been a “constant refrain” throughout a life lived far from the thick waist of a bell curve: she might have a “rare and unusual condition”, later diagnosed as spontaneous coronary artery dissection, an untreatable condition that can cause arteries to tear at any time.
Blind author Minnie Baragwanath tells James Borrowdale about her big vision for a more inclusive Aotearoa. ABIGAIL DOUGHERTY / STUFF
This time, it had happened in her heart but it could occur almost anywhere throughout her body.
“It is easy,” she writes, “to become terrified at the possibility of a sudden seemingly random reoccurrence”.
Death, and the approach of hers, then, looms large in the pages of Blindingly Obvious – as it does in the life behind the words, perhaps as it does in any examined life.
But death, as Saul Bellow wrote, “is the dark backing a mirror needs if we are to see anything”, and Baragwanath – diagnosed in her teens with a degenerative disease of the eyes that would leave her legally blind – found in that reflection an “overriding sense of urgency.
This need to write just consumed me and I just thought that whatever else happens, I have got to write whatever the story is that’s bubbling up inside of me.”