University of Alberta Edmonton, Canada May 30, 1997

Latimer case inspires student to write "Return to Sender"

Play opens June 12 in Bernard Snell Hall

By Deborah Johnston

Heidi Janz lives her life by what she can do, not by what she can't.

She can't walk or move independently, but she can press the keys on a special computer in a small room at the back of her parents' home. It is here, surrounded by books, stacks of papers and countless framed photographs of smiling people-that Heidi does what she can do well: she writes.

When I first attempted to interview Heidi Janz over the telephone, I barely got past hello. This 30-year-old playwright has a master's degree in English-and cerebral palsy. The same muscle failure that disables her body also impedes her speech. I could not understand her.

We agreed to conduct the interview through e-mail. "It's kind of cool," she writes, "it gets that 'speech impairment thing' totally out of the way." And, over a two-day period, Heidi sent volumes of insight. Through 16 pages of e-mail, she revealed a deep intellect and unabashed honesty. This time, I understood every word.

Heidi composes her messages one key at a time. She says it can take up to four hours to type a single page, coaxing her often uncooperative hands to find each key. It took two years, and the same exhausting process to write and re-write a 43-page play entitled Returned to Sender. The play previews June 12 in Bernard Snell Hall. It's about two teenagers who-like Heidi-are severely disabled by cerebral palsy.

Heidi says she was inspired to write the play after closely following the story of the Saskatchewan farmer, Robert Latimer, convicted in 1994 of murdering his daughter, Tracy. Tracy was extremely disabled by cerebral palsy. Like Heidi Janz, Tracy depended on her parents to look after her. Like Heidi, Tracy could not eat without extreme difficulty and often vomited her food. Tracy's death hit Heidi very close to home. "The comments [about Tracy] could have very well been said about the way my parents have to 'do things' for me."

"What angered me most was the wording," Heidi says of the media reports on the Latimer case, "Robert Latimer was not accused of killing his daughter, he was accused of killing his severely disabled daughter, as if Tracy's disability was automatically a mitigating circumstance in her being killed. So I wrote this play, in part, to try to counteract the general mindset of focusing on the disability rather than on the person."

Although Heidi's play is not about Tracy Latimer, it raises some of the same "quality of life" issues. The main character, Amanda, loses her life to her well-meaning father who wished to end his daughter's suffering once and for all.

The play rings eerily close to the Latimer case, but also to Heidi's own life experiences. She is "totally dependent on others for everything from dressing, to feeding, to going to the bathroom."

Heidi says as a child she regularly attended funerals for classmates. In the special school for children with disabilities, many were not expected to live. "There were times when I felt really guilty about being the one who would actually get to have a life beyond high school."

Her life beyond high school has been amazingly full. Heidi believes "you should do the most with what you've got, instead of wasting time whining about what you don't have." She has certainly not wasted any time: she earned a BA and MA in English, and is currently working on her PhD. Her first play, Crips Against the Law of Gravity, was produced by Concrete Theatre for the 1994 Edmonton Fringe Theatre Festival. "I discovered early on that writing was one of the few things that I could do truly independently," she says. "It was also the one foolproof way of ensuring that I could say what I wanted to say without any kind of mediation."

That mediation usually comes through Heidi's mother, Emma. When the words come out impossibly unintelligible, her mother easily provides them.

The woman who sustains her

Heidi's mother, Emma Janz, is 66 years old. "I'm spending my life with her," she says with a soft German accent, "I just want to take care of her." She tends to all Heidi's needs-feeding, bathing, dressing her. It can't be easy: she is smaller than her daughter. On some level, Emma can understand the Latimer's torment in caring for their disabled child, as she recalls her own. "When Heidi was little, people would say 'give her up, give her up.' I was crying all the time. Every mother wants a healthy child." (At this, she casts Heidi a sincerely apologetic look and reaches across to touch her arm). "Cerebral palsy. I didn't even know what that meant. What would life bring to her?"

"They told me she would never walk," she recalls, "and I've never seen any improvement [in her physical condition.] But they never told me this would happen," she declares triumphantly, gesturing around the room at the scores of books and articles lining the shelves, the photos of Heidi in graduation cap and gown. She shows me the 300-page novel Heidi has written. "She is so bright," she says, proud as any mother.

"My husband is 72, not a young age anymore. It's hard to lift Heidi. Sometimes my back hurts-but I would crawl on my hands and knees, I won't leave her alone. I can't imagine life without her," she says. "She is my best friend."

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