Two years ago when my brother-in-law, John, died in a freak accident, I learned, not for the first or last time, that life goes on in autism’s shadow and light–and death, too.
I couldn’t push the accident out of my mind for more than a few hours at a time. Six, even eight months later, I still read and reread the police reports, traffic citations, eyewitness accounts, tributes, family emails, news stories, organ donor papers, and obituaries. I could not make peace with it. The one night I set aside each week to write I spent writing about the accident—arranging and rearranging the facts at hand, telling and retelling the story, as if I could reach a different ending.
