‘What is There to Live For?’

Other problems began to snowball. “I couldn’t get a job,” Coelho said, “At that time, job applications specifically asked if you had  epilepsy and I couldn’t find anyone willing to hire me.”

The companies that had been trying to recruit him just a month before suddenly didn’t have any job openings. He gave up the job search and became depressed.

“I started drinking,” Coelho said. “I was drunk every day. And it was quick. It didn’t take long, just a matter of weeks before everything fell apart.” Before long, he started thinking about committing suicide.

“I loved my church. I loved my family. But all of a sudden, I thought, you know, what is there to live for?” Coelho remembered. “God had rejected me, the church had rejected me, and my family had rejected me.

“I thought it was so unfair that everything was taken away from me. But there was no appeal,” he continued. “In those days, so what if they discriminated against me because I had epilepsy—there was no one to appeal to.”

“When I authored the Americans with Disabilities Act, it was because of my own experiences,” he said. He said he will never forget the day he describes as the day he “snapped out of it.”

“Like every other day during that time, I was drunk,” he started. “I was on a hill looking over a park, specifically at a merry-go-round. I used to go there a lot to get drunk.

“And I’ll never forget listening to the music and then actually looking at the merry-go-round and looking at the kids that day,” Coelho continued. “I snapped. I said to myself, that’s the answer right there—being like those kids—believing. Not letting people get me down.”

So, from that day forward, he pushed aside those other, darker thoughts and started believing in himself.

‘The Good Lord Was with Me’

As great as it is to believe in yourself, it doesn’t pay the rent. Coelho still needed to find a job. A friend of a friend of a friend let him know that Bob Hope was looking for someone to live with his family. “So I jumped at the chance,” Coelho said. “He became my mentor.”

America’s favorite comedian liked to take long drives and Coelho would join him. “We did a lot of talking and it was Hope who finally suggested I look to politics as a way to reach people the way I had planned to do in the priesthood.”

It was because of Hope that Coelho began to work on the staff of Rep. B.F. Sisk (D-Calif.) in 1965. Two years later, he met Phyllis Butler, an aide to Rep. Andy Jacobs (D-Ind.), and fell in love. He was apprehensive though, because of his epilepsy and decided not to get too seriously involved—he didn’t think he could take it if she rejected him because of his seizures.

But she didn’t reject him. She loved him, too. And soon, the two were married. Coelho’s political career was also going well. After being on staff for five years, he became Sisk’s top assistant. By the time he resigned to run for Congress himself, he was fairly well-known by staff and members of the House alike.

In 1978, Rep. Sisk decided to retire and Coelho took the opportunity to seek election for the seat Sisk was vacating—California’s 15th Congressional District. During that first campaign for election, Coelho’s opponent raised the issue of epilepsy in public. He asked how people would feel if Coelho went to a meeting at the White House and had a seizure.

“The press called me and the good Lord was with me,” he said. “Off the top of my head I said, ‘Well in the 13 years I’ve served in Washington I’ve known a lot of people who have gone to the White House and had fits. At least I’d have an excuse.’ It was a great line.”

It killed the issue. There were no more snide comments about epilepsy from his opponent and by January 1979, he was in Washington, D.C., as a new member of the U.S. House of Representatives.

“I think I was very lucky to have had 13 years as a staff member with Representative Sisk,” Coelho stated. “I didn’t come in totally awed by all of these people who were already there.”

Coelho was determined to use his inner strength to be effective. And being effective meant making life better for the individual people in his district.