The Story of Noah Greenfeld

So on the day when I'm thinking a whole lot about my growing boy growing up as it's his birthday, the very appropriately named Time magazine has an excerpt, How Autism Ages from Boy Alone. It's a memoir by journalist Karl Taro Greenfeld, whose father, Josh Greenfeld, wrote A Child Called Noah (1979).

Noah Greenfeld is a couple of years older than me. From reading the excerpt of his brother's book, there's a lot that's familiar, and much different, in Noah's life with what we've known in raising Charlie: Noah did ABA (but aversives were used and these have never been used in my son's education. As a teenager (14 years old), he was taller than his mother (Charlie reached that mark when he was 11). Also when he was 14, Noah went to live in a residential placement; he would live in six more. Every time his family visited, Noah had "'unobserved, self-inflicted injuries'"---USIs---and took a lot of medications which "always seemed to make [him] worse." For the past three years, thanks to Community Care---which called for individuals with disabilities to live in the community, rather than in institutional settings---Noah has been in an assisted-living program in which he lives in a rented house in Los Angeles, close to his parents.

Unlike Noah, my son Charlie does not have a brother who'll be there when his parents are gone, though Karl Greenfeld admits some ambivalence about this:

Will I always be there for Noah, as my parents have been?

I wish I could say, Yes, definitely, I will be there.

But I honestly don't know.

Honesty hurts but better to say it, if it helps you to face what lies ahead, and do the right thing. I think.