"There are two aspects of any such relationship. One involves the actual giving of life-sustaining and pain-abating physical and sometimes psychological care, the whole messy and immensely fatiguing business of bedpans and vomit and changing sheets, of dealing with sores or tantrums or wandering incoherence, of giving medicines and bandaging wounds. The other is a matter of the role of the proxy for those disabled who are unable to speak for themselves. The proxy's role is to speak for those thus disabled both inside and outside the community in just the way that that particular disabled individual would have done so for her or himself, had she or he still been able to speak. The radically disabled individual needs someone who will speak for her or him as, so to speak, a second self. And, since we are all potentially liable to this extreme condition, we all of us now or later may need someone to be our second self, to speak for us."