The names of those involved have been withheld to protect their privacy during this difficult time.
I’ve found that having those serious conversations with my son is a little more difficult than talking to a neuro-typical teenager – which isn’t exactly easy either. Because of his limited vocabulary and understanding, conversations involving drugs, girls, etc take a remarkably different tone and level of conversation.
Getting the Call
However, yesterday we had to inform my eldest son that a friend of his from school had passed away. One of his teachers called my wife, as she was calling all the other parents, to give them a heads up about it.
She especially wanted us to know since my son was friends with her. He would go up to her and engage her in conversation the best he could over the last few years. (She was apparently shy and didn’t always talk, so he would check on her and make sure she was OK. And Yes, your autistic child can most likely make friends.)
As my sons all like their routines, he noticed she had been missing for the last week or two, and had started to ask about her. He was used to seeing her, and she had been out sick, and he waned her back in class. This past week, she contracted pneumonia in addition to her other illness, and unfortunately succumbed to it. How do you explain that to a grown child who doesn’t understand permanence? That was our challenge last night.
Breaking the News to Our Son
I found myself spending most of the afternoon dodging the subject, and him as I didn’t want to have the conversation. I thought about how we could break the news to him. It’s hard as he’s used to people in certain locations, and she was a school person, not a home person, so he had a hard time remembering her out of place.
We’re told while he is better at talking to people in school than he used to be, he understands at about a 1st to 3rd grade level, and we tried to explain it to him like you would a child. We discussed it with him the best we could, like you would a child. We told him it was OK to cry if he wanted to, and feeling sad or missing someone is normal. We said it would be sad, but we’d not get a chance to see her anymore, as she doesn’t live on Earth with us. And we used the dreaded “D” word – death. We can’t always protect them, we can only be there for them.
Autistics Have Emotions Too
He seemed to handle the information OK, however, we also know that sometimes it takes a few days for things to sink in, and him to fully understand. So now we wait to see how the next few days will be. He may be sad without being able to explain why. He might get angry his friend isn’t there to talk to. We just have to be ready the best we can, and help him move through the emotions he will have.
Because it’s important to remember, that just because an autistic child isn’t like us, doesn’t mean that they don’t have emotions and feelings. Their feelings are just as strong, if not stronger than ours. They just sometimes have a hard time processing and expressing them, and we have to be there to find appropriate ways of expressing those emotions.
One Comment