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The Spectator
Autism Awareness Month: The Personal Side
Giving the Scientific Facts of Autism Context in the Lives of the
Families of Those Affectedby Elijah LaChance '10
Science & Technology Editor
Over the past month, I have covered a number of issues associated with autism. I have explained why autism is a problem in society, and I have explored the associated issues of the discredited MMR vaccine connection and the complexities of savant syndrome. This week, although Autism Awareness Month is officially over, I want to explore what I consider to be the most important issue associated with this disorder: loving a person with autism.
Some readers might be aware that my sister, Grace, was diagnosed with autism when she and I were both small children. I will never be able to express how much growing up with Grace as a sister has changed my life. I was the first person to notice that she was regressing into a world of silence. I asked my mother why my sister no longer wanted to play with me. I hung on doctors' coats asking why she was so different from the playmate I had once had.
As I grew up, I worked many hours with Grace in a padded room, trying to get her to look at me, interact with me, or make a few sounds that sounded like syllables. I was there when she said the first syllables and words of her new life. I was there as she grew and struggled with immense challenges, working for every tiny improvement. In my adolescent mind, I believed that I did all this because I loved her, and I believed that my love would be justified when she was cured.
As my sister grew older, she learned to type. Although slow and laborious, her typing is much clearer than her speech. When I was seventeen, she asked, "Why do you love me?" It is a question almost every sibling asks at one point or another, but with Grace it had a whole new set of connotations: Why do you love me (she seemed to ask) when I have all these things wrong with me? Do you love me for myself, or for the challenge of curing my disorder? I answered that I loved her because she gave my life purpose. She replied, "That is why I am useful. Why do you love me?"
I was not able to come up with a good answer that day, to my everlasting shame. It always takes the longest time, it seems, for people to articulate those things that mean the most to them. I am no exception, and now I feel a responsibility to pass on what I eventually realized: caring about someone based on what they might be does not make sense. It ignores the wonderful things this person already is. We would not say to a person with one arm, "You'll be a great person once you have your other arm." Why would we say to a person with autism, "I love the person you will be once you are cured?"
Love does not need to be justified, nor is it based on ability. It is not based on biological ties. It exists in the fact that my sister and I had spent so much time struggling toward a mutual goal; whether we ever reached that goal was immaterial. Like soldiers in a war, we loved each other because we were both still there. The love of a person with autism is the purest kind of love I know. I can only hope to show the same kind of love back.
At Hamilton, the Upstate Cerebral Palsy (UCP) program, run through HAVOC, allows Hamilton students to work with children with autism. Hamilton also offers a semester-long internship program at the New England Center for Children, offering a more intensive indoctrination.I encourage everyone to volunteer, and to feel the love of a person who, though unable to speak, understands those truths that are unspeakable far better than we, whose lives are cluttered by words, could hope to. Who knows what you might realize.