The Abduction

 Danny wasn't the same person anymore. The Danny you knew and loved, your little boy, was gone. Autism had stolen him. 

--JP Delaney, The Perfect Wife

This strikes a chord with me. A sad note of enduring torment. I have not spoken of this previously in any detail because it has always been too painful, and because my son, who always read this journal, would have felt angry and betrayed. My precious son, you see, my beloved little boy was taken from me by autism around about the time he entered puberty. 

Before that time, when he was just a little child, we were as close as could possibly be. We were father and son, but we were also best friends. Maybe you remember the old song from the TV show, The Courtship of Eddie's Father. "People let me tell you 'bout my best friend, he's a warm hearted person who'll love me 'til the end." We did everything together. We went everywhere together. And then suddenly he was gone, just as if he'd been abducted. I often thought of it that way. Some evil had abducted him and was holding him prisoner. And I so very, very badly wanted him back. 

My son, according to the doctors, suffered from high functioning autism, Asperger's syndrome. He withdrew into himself, became artificial, socially crippled, fixated on matters beyond the ken of normal thought patterns. Speaking became an effort, full of grunts and throat clearings. He washed his hands endlessly until they bled. In public, he walked next to walls with his arms tucked in, his head down. He would not meet my eyes. He possessed an intelligence much higher than that of his age group, and yet he could not (or would not) tie his own shoes. When he spoke, it was no longer the give and take of a normal conversation. It was a monolog, a speech. The boy who had camped with me, fished with me, wrestled with me and laughed with me was gone. 

I thought at first that maybe I could bring him back (what other option was there than to hope so?). Maybe through patience. Maybe through counseling. Maybe through a psychiatrist. Maybe through a medicine. And, at last, maybe through prayer. But his abductor had taken him far away and hidden him well. In fact, for the next 30 years, and until he died, I did not see him again. I saw where he was supposed to have been--in his body--and yet he was not there. This was someone else, whose mission in life seemed to be centered on discomfort, difficulty, and alienation--suspicious of people, mired in various paranoias, inclined toward magical thinking, the world shaking importance of the position of a plate on a table or a book on a shelf, the time on a clock--and, always, the imaginary filth that threatened him from all sides; not literal filth, he once explained, but spiritual filth. 

Of course I fashioned a relationship with the person who was present, in as far as he would allow a relationship, and yet I longed still for my son, the person he was supposed to have been, the person he had once promised to be. Was it some sort of sin to feel disappointed like this? To hold him to something that had not happened and to consider reality a cruel mistake? I don't know. Like the woman in the novel, I just knew that he was gone. And I missed him forever desperately. 

Does it sound shallow, hard-hearted, inflexible, selfish, unrealistic? I don't know. I only know how I felt, how I feel. I only know the sense of loss, of panic, of anguish, of lost hope. Of personal failure. 

"I'd say she was traumatized by what happened to him," Delaney writes. "The outside world saw the beautiful, positive woman who just got on with it. The amazing mother who took everything in her stride. In this room, I saw a woman struggling to come to terms with heartbreak."

Those words ring, they hurt--for it happens to men, to fathers, too.