Helen Keller: Life, Death and the Influence on the World

When I first started my paper I was nervous and a little intimidated to be working on something that I thought was going to be hard and a lot of work. Once I started learning about Helen Keller I was amazed and got very interested in her story, but It’s not really a story it’s a lifetime. A lifetime that was lived to the fullest, and shared with the world. This was a lifetime that inspired many, and through it all was a girl a girl who had dreams and wanted to live her life normal, but that wasn’t what God intended for her.

Helen Keller was born June 27, in 1880. She was born in Tuscumbia Alabama. Tuscumbia Alabama was a wonderful place for a little girl such as Helen to grow up in. Helen grew up there with her parents Arthur H. Keller and Katherine Adams Keller, and her siblings. She had a younger sister and three older step brothers. Helen got sick one day and she was diagnosed with a illness called brain fever, and then at 19 months ( only a little after a year ) Helen sadly lost both her sight and hearing. As you could probably imagine this was a hard time for Helen and her parents. Her mom decided, to hire someone to help Helen out. There answer was soon given to them because in 1886, her mom came across somebody by the name of Anne Sullivan. Anne Sullivan started helping Helen on March 3, 1887.

Anne went to Helen's home to start helping her learn. She began by teaching six year-old Helen fingerspelling, starting with the word 'doll,' and then other words would soon follow. At first, Keller was curious, then she became unwilling to cooperate and would go into fits of screaming or sometimes uncontrollable laughter. As you can imagine this was probably a very difficult process for the young child. To help Helen, Anne moved her and Helen to a small cottage so she could work day and night with Anne so that there were no distractions. In 1890 she bagan speech lessons at the Horace Mann school for the Deaf in Boston ( the school is still going on to this day and they continue to help children and teenagers that are deaf and blind ). She then went to college. She attended the Cambridge School for Young Ladies. After college Helen Keller tackled issues, including women's suffrage, pacifism and birth control. She testified before Congress, strongly recommended to improve the welfare of blind people. In 1920, she helped found the American Civil Liberties Union. After all this she married a man by the name of Peter Fagan and they didn’t have any children.

Helen loved to travel and when traveling, she shared her story with many people. She lived in New York and Connecticut with Peter Fagan. Helen Keller wrote a book called The Story of My Life, which started a TV series called Miracle worker which then turned into a Broadway play with the same name. Helen was awarded with many awards and one of them was the Distinguished service medal in 1936. She was also named a fellow of the educational institute of Scotland. She was awarded the presidential medal of freedom in 1964 and she also received doctoral degrees from several universities all over the world. Helen Keller died in her sleep on June 1, 1968. Helen helped so many people and she turned her sickness into something that changed people's lives even to this day. Helen showed us what hard work, imagination and determination can do. She showed us that someone with a sickness can do it all. I was so inspired by Helen Keller in so many different ways.

She taught us all a valuable lesson and I hope I was able to share this lesson with you. Helen Keller said this quote and I wanted to share it with you because I feel like I’ve found myself trying to live by it day to day: “The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched - they must be felt with the heart.” Isn’t that amazing? Something that got her through these hard times was love. You can’t see or touch it but it’s beautiful and if everyone in the world could use it the way it was intended we could be in a beautiful world like she said What we have once enjoyed we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us.