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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