I thank you all.
While I can make the best of all of your well wishing, I am beside myself for her.
I thank you all for your moments of compassion.
I am going to have a time before I get past this one thing. I think of all the things I have given up and most I never even think about again. This one person will take some time to give up. I still feel her as the amazing pleasure that she was.
again, thanks.
Was she the woman you talked about in the shoutbox last year?
She is the only non-verbal autistic I have known closely, as far as I know.
I do not know that many non-verbal autistics, despite trying to take part as much as I can in some local classes. I actually only know eleven in person and I have only talked about my own kin, for obvious reasons.
I grew up around her though. I do know quite a lot. I kept her when she was an infant. I was a very young man. As I have come to realize, I never really knew her.
I was hoping for a time when I could be with her, with my present level of understanding of autism.
The last time I was with her, I tried to play a kid-game upon her, by hiding a card, using sleight of hand tricks, much as one would do with any other child. I pretended to eat a card she had given me, just as one might play with another four year old (she was twenty something at the time, but assessed as a four year old)
She attacked me, viciously, and pried my mouth open to retrieve the card. It hurt!! She was strong and having her try to rip my mouth apart to find her card was quite painful. I showed her the card in my "sleighted hand" and she grabbed it away from me and turned her back on me, "forever." As I said, I had no idea what a pure "BLACK AND WHITE" understanding of the world could entail at the time. You could NOT joke with her. SHE was SERIOUS!
She was also amazing in so many ways. Her speech was broken and spotty, but the simplicity of her interactions inspired many people. She was honest as a sunrise, as harsh as ice and sometimes, as warm as the sun on a flower's face, but you could always expect that she was NOT joking with you. She was serious.
