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Mark O'Brien July 6, 1999: Mark O'Brien, a Berkeley writer whose determination to work and live independently from an iron lung was captured in an AcademyAward-winning documentary, has died. He was 49 years old. Mr. O'Brien, who died on July 4 at home of complications from bronchitis, was the subject of "Breathing Lessons: The Life and Work of Mark O'Brien," which won an Oscar in 1997. The film described Mr. O'Brien's long struggle to escape hospitalization and his often comic determination to live on his own and work as a writer. By the late 1990s, his failing health restricted him to the iron lung for all but a few hours a week. Mr. O'Brien, who was born in Boston and grew up in Sacramento, contracted polio when he was 6 years old. The disease shriveled his lungs and paralyzed his limbs. Doctors placed him in an iron lung so he could breathe. At first, he used it all the time. Then, after a year, he became strong enough to use it only at night. "This allowed me to grow up - to leave home and earn a B.A. at the University of California," Mr. O'Brien wrote in an essay published in The Examiner in 1998. "But halfway through graduate school, I was boomeranged by post-polio syndrome. Weaker than ever, I was forced to spend my days and nights in the iron lung, forced to quit school." Mr. O'Brien, who enrolled in UC-Berkeley in 1978, became a familiar figure on Berkeley's streets as he navigated his motorized gurney between the campus and his apartment. He received a bachelor of arts degree in English literature in 1982, with help from note takers, home health care workers and the staff of the Center for Independent Living, a Berkeley advocacy group for people with disabilities. He began his career as a writer in 1979, when Co-Evolution Quarterly published his essay on independent living. The essay caught the attention of Sandy Close, executive editor of Pacific News Service in San Francisco, who hired him. As a correspondent, Mr. O'Brien wrote about sports, religion, his life-changing session with a sex therapist, Steven Hawkings, and the culture and politics of being disabled. "At first, he wrote stories by dictating," Close said. "Then he wrote by manipulating a stick with his mouth to press the keys, first of an IBM Selectric and then a word processor, as he laid in the iron lung with his neck stuck outside. He would lay his cheek on the platform that stuck out from the machine." She said Mr. O'Brien "had a remarkable way of accepting every good thing that came his way, with delight." Close, who produced the documentary film on Mr. O'Brien with money from a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant, said his twin passions were baseball - in particular, the San Francisco Giants - and Shakespeare. In the film, Mr. O'Brien alluded to the strength his Catholic faith had given him: "Disability causes me to believe more strongly in a duality between body and spirit - 'cause if I'm a soul, I'm just as good as you. And if I'm a body, then I'm up shit-creek, ain't I?" Director Jessica Yu, who became friends with Mr. O'Brien after finishing the documentary, said the friendship was an unexpected gift that allowed them to wage friendly bets on baseball games. When Mr. O'Brien lost a bet with Yu on a Dodgers game, she mailed him a disposable camera and a Dodgers cap. "I think you know what I want you to do with this," she remembered telling him. "He sent me back a picture of himself sticking his tongue out with the Dodger cap on backwards. He was completely rebellious." Yu and other friends said Mr. O'Brien was known for his irreverent and ironic sense of humor. Yu said she was moved by Mr. O'Brien's poetry, which she described as eloquent, totally honest and human. In the title poem from "Breathing," a collection of his poems published by Little Dog Press in 1990, Mr. O'Brien wrote about air, breathing and the machine that kept him alive: "All I get is a thin stream of it / A finger's width of the rope that ties me to life / As I labor like a stevedore to keep the connection." In 1997, Mr. O'Brien co-founded Lemonade Factory, a small press in Berkeley that specializes in publishing poetry written by people with disabilities. Lemonade Press has published two volumes of Mr. O'Brien's poetry: "The Man in the Iron Lung" in 1997, and "Love and Baseball" in 1998. Mr. O'Brien is survived by his father Walter; brother Ken; sister Rachel Jordan of Colfax; and long-time attendant Bruce Ward. by Kathleen Sullivan 1999 San Francisco Examiner http://www.sfgate.com/ janet paterson 52 now / 41 dx / 37 onset snail-mail: PO Box 171 Almonte Ontario K0A 1A0 Canada website: a new voice <http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Village/6263/> e-mail: <[log in to unmask]>