STILL ACHIEVING:

Far From Hollywood, a Boxer Whose Dreams Died in the Ring (RICK LYMAN, 3/09/05, NY Times)

The night after she and her sister finally saw "Million Dollar Baby," Katie Dallam woke up screaming with her arms flailing, but she quickly went back to sleep and awoke the next morning with the nightmare wiped clean from her memory.

For Ms. Dallam, who has lost the use of a large part of the left side of her brain, such forgetfulness happens all the time.

Ms. Dallam, 45, had been reluctant to see the film, an Oscar-winning drama about a Missouri woman born into poverty who turns to boxing in her 30's only to end up disabled and suicidal. In 1996, Ms. Dallam was in so many ways that woman - a Missourian born into poverty who turned to boxing only to become disabled and suicidal after taking a savage beating in her first professional fight.

"It was hard to watch, but it was good, too," said Ms. Dallam, seated on a sofa in the front room of her sister's 150-year-old farmhouse in this small town just southwest of the Kansas City metropolitan sprawl. "I tend to be pretty hard on myself, when I can't remember things or I get lost. But after the movie, I thought, no, I've come a long way. I should focus on what I achieved." [...]

Maggie, in the story, had a crusty and protective trainer who became a surrogate father and who reluctantly and heartbreakingly helped her die. "That guy in the movie played by Clint Eastwood took the easy way out by killing her rather than having to deal with what her life would have been like," Stephanie Dallam said.

Which is the dirty secret of assisted suicide--it's about the assistant, not the suicide.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 10, 2005 9:00 AM