FINDING DAD

1 Corinthians 2:9 But, as it is written, “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him."

The grass is beginning to grow and cover the earth. Beneath it, a few feet down, is my husband's casket. Only a flag and its holder, placed there three weeks ago, marks the spot. It is time, I tell myself, to order the grave marker, another step on my widow's walk.

I've asked the kids their opinions. Dennis had none, just names and dates. Bonnie wants John 3:16, Ron's favorite verse, and an eagle for Ron's favorite team. Allen, whose presence on the autism spectrum has made his father's death a difficult concept to grasp, has refused to respond. 

But that was three weeks ago. Allen and I have had a good--but busy--day. With a school holiday courtesy of All Saints Day, we have managed to make our way through a long list of errands. Allen even got his hair cut, a task that was daunting back in June but which he now takes in stride. He even accepted a different barber, telling Rachel how he wanted his hair cut and politely shaking her hand
and thanking her when she was done. 

We are driving past Long Croft Cemetery, our trunk full of groceries, the last of our errands completed. Allen, who finds social interactions taxing, is already half-asleep in the passenger seat. But it's been a good day--such a good day--and I feel I can push him just a little more.

"I'm going to order Dad's grave marker on Monday," I say and motion to the cemetery.

"I'm not coming," he murmurs. There is a sigh and a pause. "Why do people do that."

"Do what?"

"Put--you know--markers on people's graves. What's the point?"

Those on the ASD spectrum tend to think in terms of absolutes. What would be a concrete reason I can give? "Well," I say, "I think it's so families can find where their loved one is buried. So they can bring flowers. So they know where they are." I push a little more. "So we'll know where Dad is."

"Dad's not there," Allen says quietly. "Just his old, broken body is there."

I feel a lump in my throat. The fine art of magical thinking has convinced Allen that his father would come back if only he found the right formula. For thirteen weeks after Ron's death, Allen and I spent every Saturday hunting for clues, looking for Ron. We visited Linvilla Orchards and found the strongest horse, sprinkling a few hairs from Ron's brush along the path. We located the tallest tree at Rosetree Park, wrapping a ribbon around its trunk. We explored the oldest bridge at Smedley Park, leaving one of his father's shirts behind. Marking spots where Ron might return. We waited at the station for a train that never came and for two weeks used Google Earth to track the route of a ship on the Delaware with a mysterious symbol that, said Allen, "meant something."

Allen didn't find his father, but he found a way to the other side of his grief. Two weeks ago, the magical journeys ceased. Allen said he was transferring his "sad memories" about his father's last, painful year into his newest and strongest sword. He was done, he said, looking for Dad.

And it seems to have worked. In the last two weeks, any conversation about Ron has been happy: the way he loved to play board games but always cheated, his booming laugh and warm hugs, his crazy dance movements known in the family as "doing the Ronnie."

Autism grief is not neuro-typical grief. Allen has needed time to figure it out. I have tried to be wise enough to let him. We seemed to have arrived at a good place. But it's been a good day, a really good day, so I venture one more question.

"If Dad's not at the cemetery and he's not on the boat and he's not on the train, where is he?"

Autism grief is not neuro-typical grief. But with enough time, enough magic, enough faith, and enough love, we can all find what we need.

My son looks at me with tears in his eyes. "Well," he says, "sometimes I like to pretend he's across the street at the firehouse, talking to the guys. Because that helps me. But," and he lets a few tears fall, "I know he's in heaven. And I know he's okay."

And Allen, too, will be okay.

FADING MAGIC

The magic thread of its huge haunting spell,
And that linked his life to magic kingdoms
And to lotus-land
--Tom Wolfe

He'd tried his best. For the last twelve weeks, he'd hung his father's shirts on the branches of a tree at Smedley Park, watched a horse race across the field at Linvilla, set his Dad's shoes out on the porch, waited for a train that never came, and watched a ship with a mysterious symbol on its hull float down the Delaware River. He'd kept hope alive in his heart, even as it grew fainter with each passing day, trying to read into the world around him clues about his father's return.

Despite it all, despite his fervent wish, despite the magical thinking that kept him from grieving too deeply, his dad hadn't come back. And now, as more and more pieces of his father were packed up and put away and the sounds of his father's voice became fainter in his memory, he began to think that maybe the magic wouldn't work. Maybe, wherever his father had gone, he just wasn't coming back.

"Why wouldn't Dad want to come back?" Allen asks me one evening.

Inwardly, I sigh. It has been a common theme of our conversation the last three months. Patiently, I give him the same answer I have been giving him all along.  "I'm sure he wants to come back," I say in a level tone. "But I don't think he can. It's like he's in another dimension in heaven. He just can't take a train or a boat to get back to us."

"Sounds stupid to me," says my son who lives on the upper edges of the autism spectrum and understands the world in the most concrete of terms. "If he wants to come back, he should be allowed to."

Ever since Ron passed away in his sleep, quietly slipping from us while my daughter and I were visiting my father, I have struggled to help Allen accept the finality of death. It is a concept illogical to most on the autism spectrum who find comfort in the ability to control the world around them, a world they often find too loud, too colorful, too busy. I have tried to make Allen's life predictable again with routines for the two of us: who cooks dinner, who cleans up, who does the laundry. Every Friday night is market night and take-out supper; every Monday night is pasta and a movie. The routines help Allen whose emotions have been scrambled by his deep loss (Indiana University, 2019). 



And I have accepted the pieces of magical thinking that has found us spending most Saturdays searching for clues to Ron's return, seeing each of Allen's ideas as a step he needed to take in order to mourn his dad. I have put no time table on it, resolving to participate in the magical journeys as long as Allen needed them.

But the magic appears to be fading. It has been two weeks since we have waited at a train station or checked the shirt Allen hung on a tree. 

"The thing that really bothers me," and Allen pounds his fist on the table to make his point, "is that the night Dad...left"--his voice catches on the word--"he didn't say good-bye. " His voice drops to a whisper. "I wish he'd said good-bye. Then I could have said good-bye to him."

"I know," I tell my son. "I wish that, too. But I don't think Dad knew he was leaving, that God was going to call him to Heaven. I don't think he had time to say good-bye."

"I was just upstairs," says Allen. "If he'd called me, I would have come downstairs."

"I know," I assure him. "And Dad knew you loved him."

Allen nods his head sadly and is silent for a few moments. I wait, giving him time to process. Then he heaves a huge sigh--full of loss and pain--and closes his eyes. From experience, I know that he is putting his words together carefully. "I guess," he says after a while, "the only thing left to do is to find a way to honor him."

My heart soars. This is a huge step towards acceptance. I nod my head.

"What would you suggest?" I ask.

He shrugs. "Well, maybe like once a month we could cook his favorite foods and play his favorite game," he says.

"That would be good."

"And at Christmas we could still hang his stocking."

"Definitely."

"And once in a while we can go outside at night and look at the stars. And think that Dad is looking at them, too."

I hold back my tears and nod. "Sounds good. And when Bonnie and Dennis are here on Sunday for your birthday, we're going to go put the flag from the VA on Dad's grave."

He is thoughtful. "My first birthday without Dad."

"I know. It's sad, but we'll all be together."

"Okay. Maybe we can sing the birthday song in the off-key crazy way Dad had."

"Of course," I say. "It's a family tradition."

Allen smiles at me and walks into the kitchen to get a snack. "I'm making you tea!" he says.

"Nice," I say. Magical thinking may not bring his father back, but it has been helping Allen cope with his loss and move into a world without his father at his own pace and in his own time. I hear him in the kitchen now, talking to himself as he fills the tea kettle, takes a mug from the cabinet, gathers up the creamer and the sugar. Step by step, he reminds himself what needs to be done. He gets to the other side of the task.

He, like his brother and sister, is getting to the other side, beginning to imagine life without Ron.

I look at the family picture on the shelf next to my desk, a photo taken years ago when the kids were small and Ron was well. On some plane, on some level, Ron still exists. Then I feel a tear escape from my eye. I, too, am learning to move into a life without my husband. 

I think I am going to miss the Saturday journeys. Even though I knew Allen's magical thinking would not bring Ron back, it was nice to keep the magic alive just a while longer. 

VOICES FROM THE EDGE: RULES FOR GRIEVING

Therefore, you too have sorrow now; but I will see you again, and your heart will rejoice, and no one will take your joy away from you.

John 16:22

"Can I have Dad's blanket?" my son asks.


 It is a hot day in July and I cannot imagine why Allen wants a blanket brought from a hospital visit but it has been a draining week and I haven't the energy to form a question and listen to a response.

"Okay," I say. "I washed it this morning. It's in the dryer now." Allen heads to the basement and I think of the soiled laundry I dragged downstairs a few hours ago; shorts and T-shirts, bed pads and sheets. Things to fold and place into neat piles and think of giving away.

Allen is back in a few minutes, the white blanket in one hand, a purple sheet in the other. "Can I have the sheet, too?" he asks and I nod. "They're just what I need," he says happily and carries them up to his room, the place that holds an assortment of eclectic items important to Allen.

I heave a sigh and settle into a chair, a pile of mail in my hand. An ad for tires. A credit card offer for Ron. Irony at its best. Four cards, all addressed to "Linda and Family." I open each one and cry a little, then place them in the basket Bonnie has designated "the card holder."

I hear Allen in his room, moving things around, murmuring to himself. While I am proud of all three of my children and the love they displayed this week, I am particularly proud of my youngest son, whose Asperger's Syndrome makes sensory input and social interactions painful. Yet from Saturday night when EMT's flooded the house and the blue-lights of emergency vehicles revolved outside to the burial at the cemetery five days later,  he has--with the utmost of strength--kept himself together and with us. His siblings and I have allowed him to process things in his own way.

Like all of us, he's had to find his own way to say good-bye to his father.

Bonnie and Dennis stood on the back deck, arms around each other, openly sobbing as paramedics tried and failed to save Ron. Allen sat in a kitchen chair, an ice cube in each hand, letting the sensation of cold block out the cacophony of sensory overload. He seemed calm and detached, but inside his neuro-atypical brain was trying to make sense of the insensible. Order and preparation are necessary tools on the autism spectrum, but death always catches us off-guard.

We'd had conversations about it. All three children had seen their father struggle through many surgeries and hospitalizations, seen his  body grew weaker, seen the pain he suffered on a daily basis. We talked about the "some day", never giving a name to it, hoping that by not naming it we could prolong its coming.

It didn't work.

On Saturday, July 13, at 9:45 according to the policeman who stood vigil, Ron passed peacefully away, the soda and pretzel Allen had gone up to WaWa to get him two hours before on the tray table next to him.

 Lynne Soraya, writing for Psychology Today (2014), says for those on the ASD spectrum, there are just no blueprints for some situations that have the potential for sensory overload. The death of a beloved parent--particularly when it occurs at home, where safety and security are assumed, can easily throw an aspie into a meltdown. Karla Fisher (2012) explains the "meltdown model" in her own reaction to her father's sudden death. A meltdown may not be an outburst--screaming, kicking, acting out--but an inward processing failure. The four emotions readily recognized by most autistics--happy, sad, anger, fear--collide and entangle in ways foreign and strange to neuro-typicals.

Those on the spectrum, like the rest of us, need to process grief in our own way. Dennis, our oldest, holds himself together carefully, afraid to let any cracks show lest he fall apart completely. He keeps his feelings in check, but sketches things out on scraps of paper. He hangs onto the things he shared with his dad, like trips to the Spectrum to see the WWF, and the complicated games Ron invented. I am grateful he has Laura to help absorb his grief.

Bonnie --Daddy's Little Girl--throws herself into projects, sorting through photos for favorite pictures of Dad, creating a memory box to stow precious moments. She spent most of the first, awful week with me, the same way she dealt with each of her father's surgeries and hospitalizations, project bag in hand. I am grateful to Jared who keeps her grounded.

I read and write in my journal, call my best friend every day, knit and watch movies I do not pay attention to. I think about what life will look like now for Allen and I. I think, irrationally, of painting the kitchen cabinets and getting a rug for the living room, now that Ron's walker and wheelchair can no longer catch on it.

And Allen, whose life is still here at home, asks me a hundred times a day if I am okay. I am his touchstone. If I am okay, he can be okay. When someone asks how he is doing, he says, "Mom knows." Right now, it is all that matters to him.

Well, that and a few of his father's possessions he carefully guards: a blanket, a sheet, a card game, a golf club, the chess board he and his dad used to make up a zany game with GI Joes.

Allen knows his father is gone. He knows we buried Ron's broken body at Lawncroft Cemetery last Thursday. But in some part of his being, beyond the senses and the need for ice cubes in his hands, he knows that death is not really the end. He told his therapist just yesterday, when she asked him how he felt, "I know what everyone says. I know they all say my dad is dead. I just want Dad to know that if he wants to, he can come back. 'Cause we love him."

It's not quite John 16:22. But it's close.

It is evening now and we have picked at a supper. Allen has joined me in the living room where I am knitting and pretending to watch a movie. He has his dad's blanket and the chess board. He sits at Ron's tray table, playing by himself the complicated game he and Ron made up. He turns to me and asks,"Do you think Dad is playing with your dog that died?"

"Yes," I say.

He nods and smiles. "All I'm asking," he says seriously, "is for you to believe in the possibility that we'll see Dad again. Maybe not for a really long time, but that we WILL see him again."

I nod. Tears spring to my eyes. "I can believe that," I tell my son.

In fact, I'm counting on it.