Coded green.

Wednesday 4 October 2006

Battered flower on stony ground

Pic of the day: Picture from real life. Make of it what you will.

One relative less

My oldest brother called. Since I rarely speak with members of my family except when there is some change in the size of the family, I at once wondered if someone had died. After all, the current generation of Itlands seems to have reached its maximum, and if the next has begun to grow it may be too far removed for me to keep track of them.

My suspicion was partly true. My uncle, my mother's only brother, died from two successive heart attacks, aged 79.

Now before all my friends write their condolences, let me tell you that we barely knew each other. To the best of my knowledge, he barely knew anyone, but this could be just that he could not express it. He was fully autistic, completely unable to speak or communicate and probably completely uninterested in it. It is not a kind of muteness, but rather it seems that the real autists lack our instinct for speech in general. There is currently a trend of clumping various social abnormalities under the label "autist spectrum" or similar. There may be some reason for this, I don't know. But true autism is a completely different beast. There is really nothing like it.

The utter alienness of his condition, and the fact that his parents kept him hidden from us, caused me to fear him greatly during my childhood. I guess I feared not so much that he would harm me, but more that somehow mysteriously I might become like him. Perhaps I too would be hidden away if I was not smart enough? Perhaps I too would stop speaking and thus stop existing as far as everyone around me was concerned?

Ironically, this man may be the one in my extended family that I can most easily compare with in terms of lifestyle. In that regard it is somewhat comforting that he made it to 79. We both have lived solitary life, more than just single, without sex and without pets and without much of a social network. None of us smoked and in practice none of us have been drinking alcohol either. (I have tried, seriously I have, but I keep forgetting to do it and the drinks grow too old to use before I remember them again.) He probably had even less physical exercise than I for most of our lives. So living to almost 80 is pretty impressive. Of course, anyone can die at any time. At least he did not have a job so repulsive it could not even be mentioned in public. But he wasn't much mentioned in public himself, anyway. And now he is gone.

No matter how alien he was, he was still a human being. The loss of any one of us makes the world just a little poorer. It was probably too much to hope that he would live into a time when we could truly understand men like him (it is almost always men). But hopefully other children who are born like him, will have a less lonely life. (Unless that is what they really want.)


Yesterday <-- This month --> Tomorrow?
One year ago: Fast forward
Two years ago: Elderly Sims
Three years ago: The examined life
Four years ago: Be(a)st game ever?
Five years ago: "Unbreakable" laws
Six years ago: Ethically impressed
Seven years ago: Philosophical reflections

Visit the archive page for the older diaries I've put out to pasture.


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