Wheelchair warrior

QUAD legend Ari Seirlis had vague plans of launching his self-published memoir, Wheels of Fire: A Story of Courage, Triumph over Adversity and Civil Action, at a pop-up stall on the beachfront at last Saturday’s Park Run.

He was on a trip back to Durban, where he lived nearly all his adult life, from Sedgefield in the Western Cape, where he relocated earlier this year.

However, things ended up being too rushed for the pop-up. Seirlis, 60, had come up for a wedding and there just weren’t enough hours in the day to do much more than wheel down Memory Lane in the company of old friends, on one of his favourite old weekend routines.

However, a chance encounter at Pirate’s Lifesaving Club had the feel of an intimate launch ceremony when he ran into octogenarian Kenny Craig, the local running legend who has run 40-consecutive Comrades Marathons and held the John O’Groats to Land’s End record for the run down the full length of the UK.

Craig had been an important visitor to Seirlis as he lay in Addington Hospital after breaking his neck while diving down a waterslide for a beachfront film shoot in August 1987.

Seirlis had shared a ward with Craig’s now-late son, Terry, who died of cancer last year.

On presenting Craig with a signed book, Seirlis turned to page 89 and read out: “Night times were particularly lonely and stressful for me.

“Evening visiting time ended at 8pm and all visitors were shuttled out of the hospital. I dreaded every night.

“I shared a ward with Terry Craig, who was just a bit older than me and was also spinal cord injured, but he recovered slowly every day and eventually walked out of Addington. That was my dream.

“Sometimes we would have long conversations well into the night and that helped. I remember on one or two occasions that song would play over the radio, I Will Survive by Gloria Gaynor, and when the words ‘I will survive’ were sung, we would belt it out loud together.”

Seirlis’s book begins a record of his life’s journey: growing up in Ladysmith, attending boarding school at Highbury, in Hillcrest, and Hilton College, national service as an officer and seeing action in Namibia and Angola and his student days at the University of Cape Town.

Then it’s about the next two-thirds of Seirlis’s life in a wheelchair as a quadriplegic.

He threw himself hook, line and sinker into the local and international disability rights movement.

The pages are filled with accounts of trials and achievements relating to his campaign for people living with disabilities, in development, education, access to qualifications and employment, exposing Seirlis’s eye for entrepreneurial gaps and attitude towards opportunities.

While he was CEO of the QuadPara Association of SA (Qasa), he went out to hear the stories of people living with disabilities, from the poorest of poor rural areas and engaging with presidents to the bright lights of New York, meeting the likes of tennis star John McEnroe and actors Robin Williams and Christopher Reeve.

Seirlis said: “Certainly I have a story to tell and the story doesn’t start when I become a wheelchair user.

“I think the story starts with the experiences I had before, which gave me the resilience I needed to deal with a catastrophic injury.

“I think people will realise, once they have read the book, that civil courage is a very powerful thing to own and moral substance as well. If you have moral substance and civil courage, change can happen quickly.”