Martha Mason will be carried to her grave in Lattimore, North Carolina. Mason was the single person to survive the longest in an iron long, lying down for over 60 years in a metal cylinder that weighed 400 kilograms and breathed for her. But it was her courage and curiosity that inspired countless people and turned her into a legend.

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Martha Mason will be carried to her grave in Lattimore, North Carolina. The whole of Lattimore will be in attendance, first at the funeral service at the Baptist church and then at the graveside. Mason is to be buried next to her parents and brother in Pleasant Ridge. The dignitaries could be travelling from far away to attend. Martha was a legend. For giving courage to those in good health who take it for granted that they can walk. And she put others to shame, because she taught people to walk upright and to laugh about life.

One last time, children will ask their parents how Martha was able to live for over 60 years lying down in a metal cylinder weighing 400 kilograms without being driven mad by the rhythm of the machine that breathed for her by constantly adjusting the pressure on her chest. As an 11-year-old girl, she was paralyzed from the throat down by polio, and grew to be a woman buried alive in a 2.1 meter-long coffin, trapped like a forgotten insect in a specimen jar.

The eulogists will say one more time that there was nobody like Martha Mason and that nothing in Lattimore was left unmoved by her example, and they won’t be telling flattering lies either.

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Last Monday, Martha Mason died in her sleep, one month before her 72nd birthday. Her neighbour, Polly Fite, said that she had been very tired. On the previous Sunday she had visited Martha, whose breathing was troubled by allergies. Polly urged Martha to send for a doctor, but she refused. “We brought the world to her,” said Fite. And Mason congregated the world around her with dinner invitations and political and literary meetings; she ran a salon and made everyone forget what they saw.

Martha’s visitors came from Lattimore, a town of 400, and following the release of her autobiography, “Breath” in 2005 they came from all over the world. She was interested in everyone. She gave people courage and always wanted to know what they had planned next. She enriched without expecting anything in return. Ginger Justice and Melissa Boheler, two nurses who cared for Martha for over many years, were her greatest fans and closest friends. They washed and changed and turned Martha like their own baby.

Martha’s father died in 1977 after remaining bed-ridden with heart disease for years under the care of his wife Euphra. Martha’s mother suffered a number of strokes and a decline into dementia in the late Eighties. In her worse days, Euphra hit and verbally abused her helpless daughter, eventually passing away in 1998. Martha remained loyal to her mother to the final days, organizing her care and moving her into her home. Payback time; both parents martyred themselves for Martha and her education. With home-schooling, Martha finished high school at the top of her class and graduated from two North Carolina colleges with honours by participating in lectures via intercom from a building on campus. She never lost her iron casing.

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Friends described Martha as a boyish, athletic girl when the polio epidemic reached Lattimore in September 1948. Her 13-year-old brother Gaston died from the illness and Martha became stricken with the disease ten days after his burial. She spent the following year in hospital. Eventually, the doctors sent her home in an iron lung with the prognosis that she had no more than a year to live. At that time, iron lungs filled entire stations in American hospitals. The machine, which was first used in 1928 in Boston, protected patients from suffocation. Iron lungs were monstrous in their weight and size, but simple in their operation. They have long since become anachronisms, nearly museum exhibits. The modern breathing machine outmodes the iron lung the same way a laptop compares with the earliest computers which filled entire rooms. Martha always attributed her survival to her endless curiosity. There was always too much to learn for her to die.

It remains unclear why Martha never exchanged her horizontal life for a more mobile form of artificial ventilation. There could have been medicinal reasons, for instance her body’s inability to cope with the invasive methods required to make the switch. She may have explained the choice in her book, “Breath”, which was released by a small regional publishing company and has been out of print for a long time now. Martha appeared in two documentaries: In the Oscar-nominated film, “The Final Inch” she appeared among other polio-patients, while “Martha in Lattimore” made a portrait of her that elevated her hometown to an elixir without which Martha could not have survived.

America’s mythology of the kind-hearted small town, where everybody helps one another and people live and let live, enveloped and protected Martha in the same way her iron casing protected her. Her wisdom lay in the fact that she did not want what she could not have. She didn’t have to go anywhere. She could stay where she was and let the world come to her. She loved a good gossip, but also devoured avant-garde film and challenging literature. Her curiosity and her intellectual desire made her occasionally lonely in Lattimore, and writing was her greatest love. At first she dictated to her mother and, later, in the mid-nineties, her passion became emancipated by means of a voice activated computer. The internet allowed her to enter the virtual world and to leave her body, and her thoughts were more liberated than ever.

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