Farewell Tim Curry, in all your disabled glory

I’ve been a Tim Curry die-hard for most of my life now. I watched The Rocky Horror Picture Show with my siblings at a way-too-young age, and kept watching it obsessively into my teens. Nigel Thornberry was one of my favourite cartoon characters; Clue is a mainstay in my Letterboxd top four films.

So I’m sure you can imagine that my inbox was blowing up last week upon the announcement of his passing. My friends checked in very kindly, as if he had been my close and personal friend.

But your social media feed might have been like mine – flooded with photos almost all from Rocky Horror. Something about this irked me, but I couldn’t exactly pinpoint why. He’s played hundreds of characters, I thought. I guess this is the problem, that they’re all representations of characters and not the human behind them. It was not until my sibling posted this photo on their story that it hit me.

There he was, in all his disabled glory, my hero, Tim Curry. It was surprisingly moving to see him praised and loved for exactly who he was at the time that he passed. My feed hadn’t shown me any memorial photos of Curry following his 2012 stroke. Instead, I saw eyeroll-inducing posts of him with captions like, “You are free from your chair, Mr. Curry.” It’s extremely frustrating to watch the way that disability is treated and framed in death. This is not to say that Curry’s stroke wasn’t a source of incredible pain and frustration – he was paralysed and had to learn to speak again – but it wasn’t the end of his life. He continued to act on screen, write a book and lend his voice to many more characters.

The strength, resilience and presence it takes to re-learn not only a life-long skill but a multi-Tony Award-winning skill is nothing short of miraculous. Being able to rebuild something so iconic is testament to the person who delivered so many memorable roles – a person who made a living in expressing his full exuberant, brilliant, playful self. Disability does not inherently take away our exuberance – it forces us to be creative, to transmute our skills; to find ways to not only survive but to continue to share our gifts with the world, despite whatever challenges we face.

When people say that Curry is “free from [his] chair,” what their disabled friends are hearing is that there was no true value in the last 14 years of his life. That he was less of a person, that his skills were diminished; that he, and we, are better dead than disabled. Curry referred to his chair as “silly,” but didn’t speak disparagingly of it, so why should we? His wheelchair is what assisted him in moving independently while strengthening his cognitive and visual abilities. It may have extended his life significantly. As someone who uses numerous aids to manage my autism, I can confidently say that mobility and assistive tools are not burdens. They are helpful and necessary.

There’s a temptation when someone dies to share photos from them at their “peak,” which would be all well and good, but I must ask, who gets to decide what someone else’s peak is? Who gets to decide what someone else feels about their life, body, age or disability? We enforce able-normative structures when we assign negative attributes to disability, and to minimise the very complex disabled experience in this way is incredibly reductive and unhelpful. Furthermore, there is a very clear link between ableism and ageism, and both of these injustices must be tackled in relationship to each other. We are so afraid as a society to really see disabled people, and even more so when they’re older. Growing old is a privilege not afforded to us all, and I am grateful for all the time that we got to spend in awe of Tim Curry’s presence here on earth. I will miss marvelling at the fact that we shared the same timeline for a short while. And I will miss him.

We must refrain from erasing disability from someone’s legacy when we are mourning them. We must ensure that people are remembered as they were. There is nothing wrong with being disabled but there is wrong in how the world treats us in response.

I wonder how people will talk about me when I die. Will they say that I finally escaped my autism? Now that my Long COVID is gone, I can run and leap in heaven? I never liked running anyway. My disabilities have shaped my life beyond what I could have imagined, and only I get to decide what that means to me.