Resilience is the ability to recover or adjust to misfortune and change.

I interviewed Daniel York because he is an individual who exemplifies resilience. He is an elder law attorney practicing estate planning, emphasizing people in the latter half of life. How each of us lives the second half of life is very personal. Daniel uses a counseling approach to estate planning. Unsurprisingly, he scored high on counseling skills in pre-college aptitude testing. He enjoys what he does and said, “it is very constructive to help people, and you get to know your clients and their families.”

When Daniel was four and a half years old, he contracted polio while living in British Honduras (now Belize) in Central America. No one else in his family contracted the disease. The polio vaccine had been available for four years before Daniel caught the disease, but Daniel does not know if he received it. Belize had one iron lung, which Daniel needed to breathe since he was seriously afflicted with two types of polio. However, no one in the country was professionally familiar with its operation, so it was decided that Daniel would be transferred to the United States for better care. That was a problem since commercial airlines refused to transport him, his mother and siblings due to the infection nature of his disease. The American Consulate in Belize got involved and the U.S. military made the transport to the U.S. for Daniel with his mother and three brothers.

Daniel’s father remained in Belize because of his responsibilities as a missionary. The transport happened so quickly that his mother did not have time to pack much of anything, so the only dress she had was the one she wore. Every night during Daniel’s stay in the hospital in Florida, she hand-washed her dress so that it was fresh for the next day.
I asked him what it was like to be a four-year-old with polio. Daniel replied, “that he was like any kid at that age.” He remembered telling his mother that the iron lung “kept him warm.”

From the ages of 6 to 16 he underwent one major surgery per year and he credits his orthopedic surgeon for making it possible for him to sit without a brace. However, he remains unable to stand or walk and his left arm is not functional, but he is thankful. He is not angry; he just forges ahead.

Daniel went to school from first to seventh grade in San Francisco in a progressive school for disabled students. When it came time to integrate at a regular school in eighth grade, his seventh-grade teacher, Mrs. Duffy, was tough. She would pile on a lot of homework, telling her students, “You are going out in the world, either step up or get run over.”
In addition to his teachers, Daniel credits his parents as his heroes. His parents were both college-educated and expected all their children to go to college, which Daniel sees as being significant in people’s lives.

“College exposes you to differences in thought with the variety of courses you take and makes for more critical or evaluative thinking.” Daniel’s mother taught him and his siblings to strive for improvement and insisted he be included in everything. “Why can’t we take Danny there?” she often asked.

Even to reach a beach party accessible only by a steep cliff, Daniel was carried in his wheelchair by others. In buildings without elevators, his mother would ask about freight elevators; if there weren’t any, she made sure he was carried up. Giving up was never an option. Daniel trusted her decisions and was treated like his siblings, facing the same rules and expectations without excuses.

Before 1990, when the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was enacted, public places were not designed to accommodate people with disabilities. Wheelchair users faced significant physical challenges. At that time, college classrooms, laboratories, dining halls, and dormitories were often inaccessible to wheelchairs, necessitating great effort and determination.

It was the disabled students at the University of California, Berkeley—where Daniel later attended—who advocated for accommodations to improve campus accessibility. Daniel credits them as the true pioneers of this important change.
Perseverance and resilience, demonstrated by Daniel York, result from the support of parents and teachers with high expectations and a belief in perseverance. This article honors Daniel’s parents, who treated him as an individual with aspirations and instilled in him the confidence needed to pursue his goals while setting a standard for grit and achievement.