WHY MAY 4th MATTERS: "FOUR DEAD IN O-HI-O"

It was 13 seconds that changed so many things. The way Americans viewed the Vietnam War. The reputation of a university. The lives of four families who would never be the same.

May 4, 2015 marks the 45^th anniversary of the Kent State shootings. When National Guardsmen -- called in to quell Vietnam War protesters -- shot their weapons in the air for 13 seconds, killing four students, and wounding nine others.

Americans were shocked and angered. Every parent of a college student froze in fear.

Artists, writers and musicians created works inspired by the tragedy. The Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young song, “Ohio”, still gives me chills.

I feel compelled to reflect on this milestone, to write about it because I went to Kent State University.

To be precise: I am a proud Kent State graduate.

I enrolled 12 years after the shootings, after the Vietnam War ended, when the go-go 1980s Reagan Era was picking up steam. When Levis bell bottoms had given way to designer straight-leg jeans. When hair got big instead of long and stringy. When classic rock faded and New Wave ruled.

So why does May 4^th matter to me?

Because Kent State matters to me. I got an outstanding education there. Just as importantly, Kent is where I learned to stop being apologetic and ashamed of my disability.

I hired my first personal caregiver at KSU. I befriended a lot of other folks with disabilities, many of whom used wheelchairs.

Kent is where I found my identity as a disabled woman and as a writer. It’s where I met my future husband.

All four years at KSU, I lived in the same dorm: Room 111, Prentice Hall. I say with equal parts humor and pride that I lived in Prentice Hall’s first-floor gimp ghetto. Prentice was the only girls’ dorm made disability accessible. If you were female and used a wheelchair, your address was going to be Prentice Hall.

Lots of kids with disabilities attend Kent State because of its welcoming, inclusive environment. Kent began making dorms, bathrooms and classrooms accessible and providing door-to-door paratransit service years before law mandated it. Many years before a lot of other schools realized they’d better start building ramps and buying vans with wheelchair lifts.

My dorm room window looked out onto the parking lot where Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer and William Schroeder died. Four students who, like me, had come to get an education. By most accounts, two were simply walking to class. The other two were peaceably exercising their right to protest the war. Perhaps the way I might have demonstrated in favor of disability rights.

When I was a student, a candlelight vigil began at the stroke of midnight each May 4^th. The parking lot was cleared, and four spaces were roped off at precisely the locations where the students fell. Where students in 1970 felt their eyes burn from tear gas. Where they heard gunfire, and then the screams.

At each May 4^th commemoration I witnessed -- through the night and into the next day -- volunteers would take shifts standing silently in those spaces. In the gap between the bottom of my dorm room curtains and the window ledge, I’d watch the undulating beams of candlelight. I’d watch four silhouetted figures standing there, sending the message that those who died will never be forgotten.

I haven’t forgotten. I doubt I ever will.