A Thorn in My Pocket: Temple Grandin's Mother Tells the Family Story (32 page)

And parties on porches, with flowery women and men in red linen pants, my father-in-law tucking a bachelor’s button in his button hole, and sallying forth to joke with old friends. Tennis in the day and dance music on Saturday night. That’s what Dick dreamed of in the heat of WWII. He didn’t think of his life as privileged. He thought of it as home.

Then suddenly, unbearably, home was savaged. Autism was an appalling enemy. If I couldn’t see that, then I, too, must be the enemy. His obsession grew monstrous; he went to battle to destroy us for our own good and, in the end, it led him to dedicating his life to proving God didn’t exist.

Yet, through it all, he never lost his faith in the stock market. At night he would lull himself to sleep, adding up figures from the financial page, writing them down in long columns on the flyleaf of whatever book was handy. To this day I still open books and find those deeply incised columns of calculation. Reliable, enduring.

Whereas God, like a young dogwood, might not make it through the winter.

Before he died, Dick left word that his body was to be given to a medical school, not so much for the edification of medics but to prevent a Christian burial. But burial ceremonies are for the living. After the medics had finished with his invaded body, his children laid his ashes to rest in Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge.

I remember, when I was a child, how the oculist used a dense black velvet cloth to graph my ocular blind spot. He told me to stare at the white dot in the center of the velvet, while he moved a silver pencil across it.

“Tell me when you can no longer see the pencil; then tell me when it appears again.” Each time I told him, he’d put a pin into the velvet. Again and again, until, suddenly, the pins had formed a circle.

“There,” the oculist said. “That’s your blind spot.” But the blind spot wasn’t on the velvet; it was in me.

It’s taken me all these years to understand that the rigidity, the tension, the temper, the obsession—the traits Dick so despised in his daughter—they were all his own. And who was there to help him in his childhood, long before anyone had coined the word “autism?”

Now at last I see it. My rage is gone; sorrow hits, and I ache to forgive.

Fifty years ago, Anthropologist and Naturalist Loren Eiseley wrote about the extraordinary change that took place in us, back in the lost eons of man’s early human development.

He was becoming something the world had never seen before—a dream animal—living at least partially within a secret universe of his own creation and sharing that secret universe in his head with other, similar heads. Symbolic communication had begun. Man had escaped from the eternal present of the animal world into a knowledge of past and future. The unseen gods, the powers behind the world of phenomenal appearance, began to stalk through his dreams.
*

When you look at it that way, yes, we’re dream creatures. Even our alphabet is a dream. Twenty-six little symbols we put together in different combinations to say the words that express our feelings. Here on these pages I’ve arranged those words to conjure up what is no longer a phenomenal reality, but a memory dream. And this kind of conjure with its inferences, its contradictions and ironies, is deeply puzzling to people with autism. Theirs is a painting-by-numbers world, recognizable, but never quite the real thing. It’s the “never quite” that makes autism such an unsettling disorder.

The other night I went to see
Big River
, a musical version of Mark Twain’s
Huckleberry Finn
. Half of the cast was made up of actors from the Theatre of the Deaf, and the other half were hearing actors. The hearing sang for the deaf; the deaf, who can lip read, lip synched. Everybody “signed.” The singing, the synching, and the signing were so effective that it took a little time to catch onto who was actually singing and who couldn’t hear the music.

Suddenly, all music, song and sound cut off, and there was utter silence. Unaware of it, the cast went right on synching and signing. The audience watched, stunned. The deaf actors were so good at our hearing world that we’d forgotten it wasn’t theirs, that the kid playing Huck was dancing, not to the music, but to the vibration of the stage floor.

Like autism, total deafness is a world unto itself.

In spite of Temple’s conviction that she has no feelings, that she relies on reason and logic alone, Temple does have her dream side. In particular her “little door” dream, which goes all the way back to her years at Hampshire Country School. Autistic young people, if you remember, have trouble with prepositions; that is, until they’ve experienced them literally.

There was a little construction door in Temple’s school dormitory that led to the roof. When she finally dared to step “through” it, she found she was actually out on the sloping roof, a bit unnerved by the height but deeply moved by the starry night sky. From that night on, “going through the little door” became Temple’s symbolic act of preparation for the next step in life. Even now, she walks herself through various doors. Today I’m astonished by Temple’s worldly accomplishments, but what I love most about her is her courage. Despite the hazards of her autistic landscape, she’s never hesitated to go “through the little door,” with no guarantee that what’s on the other side will ever make sense to her.

Temple’s other dream—perhaps her most intense one—is of cows in their final step. She takes great pride in her slaughter construction, a design of her own that conducts them to a painless oblivion. She calls it her stairway to heaven and gets down in the walkway herself so she can identify with the cows as they amble, one behind the other, unaware of the moment ahead that will turn them from living creatures into meat.

Has Temple changed me? Yes, of course, and continues to. After conferences, we often have dinner together and share our adventures. Despite her extraordinary accomplishments, she knows that some part of the dream that I call “life” lies a little beyond her. It accounts for her hunger to have me understand
her
dream: that she won’t be forgotten. Her longing for some kind of permanent recognition is so palpably real, she moves me deeply with it.

As if love were too mysterious and shaky to rely on.

Yet despite her insistence that she will never know what love is, I see that what I’ve said about her father at our joint autism conference weighs deeply on her.

“I know what you think of Daddy,” she says as she buys herself a
Wall Street Journal
in the airport where we’re waiting to fly away from each other. “But he sent me the
Wall Street Journal
every day I was in boarding school. And I still read it.”

Whatever she thinks she feels or doesn’t feel, she holds on tight to that precious connection.

But Temple is only one of my children. I’ve told how doctors, therapists, teachers and neighbors helped Temple but not how the siblings helped her. I’ve shared my difficulties with Dick, but not those the siblings had to suffer, both when they were little and after Dick and I were divorced. Young or adult, whenever the year or whatever the place, the siblings always protected Temple from her father.

Yes, Temple’s changed me, but the siblings, with their generous laughter, their talent and warmth, have also changed me. I’ve held to my promise in that I’ve kept their role in this story intentionally vague, but they are not vague.

All four children lie at the heart of my feeling brain.

*
Erik Erikson,
Insight and Responsibility
Norton, New York 1964, pp.162-165.

**
Referring to Descartes and his school of philosophy, 1637.

*
Phantoms in the Brain
, Ramachandran & Blakeslee, Quill, William Morrow, New York, 1998.

*
Illustration by Dean Gardei, (c) Intelligence Amplification, Inc. Used with permission.

*
Antonio Damasio,
Descartes’ Error
, Avon Books Inc., NY. 1994.

*
Ibid

**
Temple Grandin.
Thinking in Pictures,
Vintage Books, Random House, NY.

***
Ibid

*
Jerome Groopman, M.D.,
The Anatomy of Hope
, Random House, 2004.

*
Loren Eisley,
The Immense Journey
, Vintage, 1946.

Acknowledgements

My gratitude goes first to my four children. Uniquely talented, they have each traveled an individual path, each triumphed over obstacles, each realized fulfillment.

A special thanks to Temple for being Temple, also for persuading me to join her on the autism lecture circuit, a road to which she’s deeply committed. Special thanks to Wayne Gilpin, president of Future Horizons, for inviting me to lecture for him and for supporting me, not only in the lectures but in the production of this book.

The first inkling for the book came from friend and New York agent, Fifi Oscard, of Fifi Oscard Agency, Inc., who, on hearing my story, said, “You must write this.”

Michael Denneny, New York freelance editor, has been invaluable in helping me weave a multitude of lectures into a coherent whole. Lyn Dunsavage, Future Horizons editor, has contributed her astute eye and judgment. Victoria Ulmer, Editorial Coordinator, has carried off a load of publication details with good nature and amazing dispatch. Layout artist Matt Mitchell has transformed the manuscript into a book.

Professional friends who’ve advised me through various drafts are Sue Lawless, Lois Bianchi, Beulah Robinson, and Dorothy Emmerson.

Doctors who’ve taken the time to educate me personally are Eric Hollander, M.D., Mt. Sinai; Nancy Minshew, M.D., Professor of Psychiatry and Neurology and head of the Autism Project at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center; David E. Reiser, M.D., psychatrist/psychoanalyst of Salt Lake City; Barry Gordon, M.D., Ph.D., professor of neurology and cognitive science, founder of the Memory Clinic, holder of an endowed chair to study the treatment of brain disorders at John Hopkins Medical Institutions, Baltimore, MD.; Eveyn Davis, M.D., Behavioral Development Pediatrician, Dept. Of Pediatrics, Dept. of Child/Adolescent Psychiatry, Harlem Hospital Center, Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York, NY; William M. McMahon, M.D., Principal Investigator, Tourette Research Dept., The University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT.

Autism Center Directors who’ve encouraged and educated me are Gary Mesibov, Ph.D., Director of TEACCH, Chapel Hill, NC; Raymond B. White, Chief Operating Officer, and Marilyn Hoyson, Ph.D., Director of The Watson Institute, Sewickly, PA; Catherine Lord, Ph.D., Director of University of Michigan Autism and Communication Disorder Center, Ann Arbor, MI; Ruth Christ Sullivan, Ph.D., President of Autism Services Center, Huntington, WV; Bernard Rimland, Ph.D., Director of Autism Research Institute, San Diego, CA.