Ten-Finger Exercises

Denial: our sometimes-enemy, sometimes-friend

Jeff Doaks, not his real name, has cancer. His doctor expected last year that he would not live out the summer. Here he is, nearing this summer’s end, looking better than before. He remains a hospice patient, because his doctor insists he is still dying. Jeff refuses to see it that way. Has his denial helped him stay alive, and even have a better quality of life than before? Who is to say? It appears that way, and he doesn’t plan to change his attitude.

The crisis in Jeff’s life now involves his granddaughter Gracelyn. Gracelyn is eight, and getting ready for school to start again. Last spring, a social worker from Gracelyn’s school told her parents, Nita and Bob, that she suspected that Gracelyn suffers from Asperger’s syndrome, a
mild form of something in the spectrum of autism. Nita and Bob refuse to accept that possibility. Maybe it sounds like a behavioral problem or a mental disorder to them; but whatever the reason, in their minds, it has a stigma attached to it that they are afraid of.

Jeff, a retired educator, is grieving. He doesn’t know how to get his son to see that Gracelyn needs help, and could get it if only her parents would seek help for her. An official diagnosis would be needed to begin the process.

Asperger’s wasn’t around in Jeff’s day, but he’s read up on it. Gracelyn doesn’t have all the symptoms he’s discovered in the literature, but she has a number of them. He’d always thought that Gracelyn was lacking in social skills, and shyness didn’t seem to explain it adequately. She has had noticeable sleep difficulties from the time she was a baby. She was a little slow at learning to talk, but most of the experts discount that as a predictable symptom. Her vocabulary is good now, and that’s not a surprise with Asperger’s children. They are often brighter than average. She does have an unusual voice, a lack of inflection, which falls in the list of things to look for.

But most of all, she doesn’t relate well to others. And, smart as she is, she doesn’t seem to have good common sense. “Sometimes it’s as if she hasn’t heard anything I’ve said,” Jeff told me “although she does pay more attention to me than to her classmates and the neighborhood kids. But then one of them will tell her to come here, and she’ll walk right into the street to go there, without ever looking.”

That was at the beginning of the summer when he related this to me, and it’s exactly what happened. The paperboy was coming, and he saw Gracelyn on the porch. He called to her, “Here’s your paper,” and she walked straight into an oncoming car.

She was not hurt badly, but she was terrified. She ran to her grampa, who held her, trying to comfort her. She put her fingers in her ears, as if to block out the sounds, and rocked her body back and forth in his arms. Jeff tried so hard to get her to understand what happened without placing blame, but he wasn’t sure if she ‘got it.’ “It’s as if she’s in her own world sometimes,” he said.

I talked to a speech therapist friend on Sunday, and she told me about children she worked with who have Asperger’s. She said they have a hard time relating to the world around them, and especially to other people. She said she works with them to help them develop “scripts” to understand how things happen. She said those children are often more visual learners, and so can work better with pictures to go along with explanations. If they have a lot of help, especially when they are younger, when their social skills are just developing, they’ll make much better progress as adults. “By the time their hormones are raging, it’s harder to get them to listen,” she said.

A social worker who is a co-worker of mine said she suspected her oldest daughter to have Aspergers. Her husband, a high school teacher, disagreed, but went along with some testing before the girl began school. She was found not to have Aspergers, but to have some form of social development disability. Cathy said that her daughter was in a special program for three years and that it really taught her the skills she needed. She still needs to know exactly what to expect, to have a schedule all planned for each day, and finds disruptions more difficult to deal with than some children. But she has friends, learns well, and enjoys life.