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8 | JUNE 18 • 2020 

1942 - 2020

Covering and Connecting 
Jewish Detroit Every Week
jn

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How to reach us see page 12

Essay

“Open, When?”: Helping My 

Autistic Brother Through Uncertain Times 
I 

called Alex as soon as I 
heard the good news. “The 
restaurants will open again,” 
I said. “We will still have to be 
careful, but we will be able to 
eat out.”
“Can I choose 
the restaurant?” 
he asks. 
“
Any place you 
want.” 
Finally, Alex 
has something to 
celebrate.
Living in isola-
tion has been tough on all of us, 
but to people like my “different” 
older brother, it can be espe-
cially lonely. A big, intense guy 
who’
s never held a job or lived 
on his own, he needs things to 
be definite, predictable. Like the 
average 8-year-old, Alex strug-
gles with the ambiguous and 
the abstract.
He takes refuge in routine, 
like riding the special bus that 
stopped at his group home in 
Pontiac at 8 a.m. every weekday 
and delivered him to Visions, 

a friendly “psychosocial club-
house.” 
 Unlike many autistic people, 
he enjoys talking with others, 
though his conversation usually 
concerns dates. He possesses 
an amazing inner calendar. Tell 
him you were born on Oct. 3, 
1952, and within seconds he’
ll 
tell you it was a Friday. Then 
he’
ll recite the birth dates and 
days of the week of a dozen or 
more other people born that 
month, along with their current 
ages. Our mother died years 
ago at age 46 and our father 
at 50, yet last year as each of 
their birthdays approached, 
Alex carefully reported that our 
father would have been 99 and 
our mother 97.
While this gift awes people, 
it’
s of little practical use. Aware 
that others have more control 
over their lives than he does 
over his, he’
s always had a lurk-
ing sense that life has treated 
him unfairly. When the pan-
demic blew up his routines, his 
stress level mounted.

That’
s where I come in. 
Concerned that Alex might slip 
into a bad depression or lose 
his temper and start feuding 
with others in his group home, 
I’
ve stepped up my involvement 
in his life. While I can’
t visit, I 
now call him every day, morn-
ing and evening, instead of two 
or three times a week.
“Tell me what you ate for 
breakfast,” I’
ll say. “Did you like 
it?” “Have you gone outside 
for a walk, Alex?” “What did 
you watch on TV
, besides the 
news?” Because our parents 
watched the nightly news, he 
does, too — to my chagrin, on 
the ambiguity-free Fox net-
work.
To help him stave off bore-
dom, I go online every week to 
order books to be shipped to 
Alex. It’
s not easy. He reads at 
an 8-to-12-year-old level, and 
he likes biographies of people 
he studied in school, particular-
ly presidents. I think I’
ve sent 
him five different young-adult 
books on Thomas Jefferson. 

Alex also writes letters — 
to relatives, family friends, a 
couple of guys at group homes 
where he’
s lived previous-
ly —and lately that, too, has 
increased. I keep him supplied 
with stamps and writing mate-
rials. He doesn’
t receive many 
responses —in fairness, his 
handwriting is hard to read — 
but he loves to read the occa-
sional response aloud to me.
Alex’
s pre-pandemic life 
wasn’
t exactly blissful, but it 
offered him a few steady plea-
sures. When the clubhouse 
assigned him to act as recep-
tionist, he enjoyed greeting vis-
itors, paging staff and making 
announcements over the public 
address system.
He could decide between 
a couple of simple choices at 
lunch, take his turn to talk 
at the daily group meetings 
and sing “Happy Birthday” at 
the monthly celebrations. He 
looked forward to his birthday 
and Chanukah, getting ice 
cream and visiting longtime 

Eve 
Silberman

continued on page 10

