My golden retriever Sherman pees every time I approach him to trim his matted fur. It doesn’t matter if I’ve just brought him outside, or that it’s been three years and I’ve never cut him once. Though the trimming terrifies him, Sherman looks on as I wipe up his little puddle of pee, waiting to come in for a hug. Me on the floor with his head in my lap, Sherman squirming to get as close as he can, me stroking his ears with my fingers, whispering, “shhh, it’s alright now.”
******
I know my father flailed as he died. I could tell from the bruises my fingers traced over his head, face, chest and arms. I couldn’t stop touching him and imaging what it must have been like. My father’s kind blue eyes wild with terror, his head shaking side-to-side like a bull in a chute, blood and spittle flying.
My father lived in Arkansas, but he died in the Phoenix airport, so I had to wait for the coroner to send his body home. I paced his little house for a week, waiting, watching, signing for the packages I received from the Phoenix police: a ziplock evidence bag containing blood-soaked boarding passes. A large box that held his suitcase, the two new Bluetooth speakers I knew he was traveling with stolen, but his well-read copy of Gratitude, by Oliver Sacks still there.
I’ve told this story so many ways, so many times. I’ve written it; I’ve told it to my dogs while we sat on my father’s lake dock where we released his ashes. I’m not surprised by my need to tell and re-tell the story of my father’s death, but I have been surprised that every time I tell it there is one thing that stays the same: All my other stories make their way up to the surface too, begging for inclusion, connection, a piece of the action, like koi swimming to the pond’s surface for a nibble of bread crumbs. Maybe it’s because I’m autistic and my memories float around my head as bubbles of video and pictures, all intermingled like puppies in a pile wriggling and reaching for their mother’s teats.
******
The American Centers for Disease Control, or CDC, calls autism “a developmental disability that can cause significant social, communication and behavioral challenges.” The CDC also notes that while an autistic person doesn’t necessarily look any different from “most people,” people with autism may “communicate, interact, behave, and learn in ways that are different from most other people.”
******
I don’t think of myself as a writer so much as a translator. My inner language, my first language, the language of my autistic brain-body is nothing like what I call “people languages,” languages I’ve learned so I can translate what is inside me to something other humans can understand. My first language is unwieldy in the translating because my memories and experiences sing through my body, not in words, but in full-on corporeal experiencing and re-experiencing, every experience a constant presence within me. This is one of the reasons I’ve stopped clinging to the concept of linear time.
I’ve also stopped worrying whether other people think my writing is good in the conventional sense; instead, I ask myself: Have I faithfully and successfully translated a little of my inner world, my experiences known to me in my own first language, into words that sing and thrum in the brain-bodies of people outside myself?
******
My little Papillion dog Mica died suddenly last year. Weighing in at just nine pounds, Mica was a little dog with a big dog heart. Mica, short for the Latin Amica Bella, beautiful friend. She herded my two golden retrievers and cats around the house. And she was fast – a black and white blur flying over and under furniture, barking like crazy when the other animals broke her rules, which she fiercely enforced without fail. For thirteen years, Mica’s small weight on my legs helped me sleep. Nine pounds. Steady, vigilant, solid. But then, at three in the morning one night Mica started vomiting blood. So much blood. She vomited and lay down, vomited again. I woke my fifteen-year-old son because he would have to hold her as I drove through the night to the emergency vet.
******
I think often about loss, how loss is inextricably linked with my ability to feel joy. I imagine loss as a She, and I wrote a poem about her. Loss lacks for nothing, I wrote. She the keeper of all things lost through all time. God can be lost, Love lost. Loss remembers your lost love, her thighs trembling. Loss suckles your dead, collects your dreams, your bundles of nothing. Time can be lost. Memories lost. Loss remembers your scars, your little terrors. Her arms open, Loss will never leave you: she will never stop loving you. I find that line so comforting: Loss will never leave you.
My father died alone at the Phoenix airport. At least, I think he was alone. I don’t know for sure. I know there were paramedics, but what I mean is that I don’t know if anyone comforted him. I like to think some kind person held my father’s head in her lap, whispering, “shhh…it’s alright now.”
******
Popular culture portrays death as a man with a scythe wearing a black, hooded cape. Death comes, and one moment you’re alive, the next, gone. To me, that seems too easy, too inextricably linked to linear time. Yes, my father’s body is dead; his biological function has ceased. But his is-ness has not ceased. He is my father. I carry him with me. I feel him; I have seen him take the form of an eagle and fly over me. Not randomly, but at the very worst of times, when I’ve felt like giving up. This is not a religious thing; my father just is. When I lie in the grass and look up through a lush, twinkling green-leaf kaleidoscope filtering a brilliant blue sky, my father is there. In this way, he and I are not bound by linear time: we exist across dimensions. We simply are, and we will always be.
******
Before my father died, his doctor told him he was autistic. I was diagnosed autistic at age forty-eight. To paraphrase Hannah Gadsby’s explanation of her own late-in-life autism diagnosis, my autism diagnosis gave me the keys to understanding myself. Knowing I’m autistic helps me understand why my first forty-eight years unfolded so terribly. Why I couldn’t cope with things others could handle easily; why I fled from most people but identified with the misfits in my world; and why I didn’t have the skill to identify the difference between a friend and an abuser.
******
The CDC says “People with autism often have problems with social, emotional, and communication skills.” Autistic people might “have trouble relating to others or not have an interest in other people at all,” and “have trouble understanding other people’s feelings or talking about their own feelings.”
******
Other people labeled him eccentric and odd, but my father built up his own geologic exploration company and found success doing what he loved: working alone at a drafting table, studying maps and charts, along with his favorite pastime: working alone outdoors under the big Montana sky conducting fieldwork, pickaxe in hand. And then there is me, at forty-nine, choosing to keep my own company, the utter quiet of my home, my books, my dogs, dad’s pickaxe on the mantle, and my writing that helps me feel connected to the outside world.
******
There is something ineffable about how it feels to be known, truly known, and loved unconditionally in spite of everything you are. I count my dogs, but if you don’t count my dogs, there have been three people in my life who have known and loved me in this way. My father, my sister, and a childhood friend with whom I’ve remained close over the decades. The thing these three people have in common is that they knew me when I was young, before the social fallout of my autistic differences pushed me to craft alternate identities, to dissociate, self-harm and lash out when my back was against the wall. I think my sister got the worst of it, and of course, my sons.
******
When it came time for my son and me to put Mica in the car for the ride to the vet, I didn’t know how he would handle it: Mica, bloodied and wild-eyed, wrapped in a towel. But it turned out I didn’t have to worry. My son held our little Mica, our tiny warrior with her black butterfly ears and long, flowing whitetail. He held her as I drove fast through the cold night, his hands slick with blood and drool. He held her and asked me, very quietly, “Mom, what do I do?”
“Tell her: thank you,” I said. “Tell her thank you for all the love she gave to us; thank you for protecting us.”
And he did. Softly, sweetly, he told her. “Thank you, Mica,” he whispered. And, “shhh, it’s alright now.”
******
Sometimes, but not always, there is a gift that emerges, borne of a terrible loss, transforming the unthinkable into something new and precious. I’m reminded of the medieval practice of alchemy, a forerunner to chemistry. Practitioners of alchemy believed that matter could be transformed, or transmuted, from base elements, such as lead, into more precious metals, like gold or silver.
We said goodbye to Mica in a fluorescent little room. My son and I stroked her head, and said, “thank you,” and “rest now,” before handing her over to the vet tech. As I drove toward home exhausted and drained, my son watched me, worried. He turned on one of my favorite songs, Fuck You, by CeeLo Green. I felt him looking at me to see if he’d made a mistake, done something inappropriate. But as the first few chords played, “daah, da da daaaaah,” I smiled, and we yelled out the lyrics together: “I see you drivin’ round town with the girl I love, and I’m like, fuck you…I guess the change in my pocket wasn’t enough, and I’m like fuck you and fuck her too…”
******
Sometimes, but not always, there is a gift that emerges, borne of a terrible loss. Your beloved little dog dies and on the same night, you see that your stubborn, infuriating too-much-like-you-for-his-own-good son is growing into a good, kind man, and you get to sing along with him in the car to CeeLo Green as the sun rises behind you.
******
I am more comfortable with animals than I am with people. I’ve always been this way. My dad was too. Dogs and cats naturally gravitated toward him, even the shy ones. “Puss, puss, puss,” he’d call to the cats, and they would come. My big golden retriever Brinkley would lie at my dad’s feet while Mica perched above his head on the back of the couch. My dad would only have to put his hand down over the side of the chair, and like magic, a big blonde head would pop up to meet it. “You’re a good dog,” he would say. There was something in the way my dad said it. Often people interact with other people’s pets as a performative act. Like, “Look! your dog likes me!” But my father spoke directly to the animals like no one was watching.
******
While I’ve dissociated and walled off most childhood memories, but for some reason, one night in 1987 has always stayed with me. I was driving eighty miles an hour down a stretch of highway in the North Dakota countryside where I grew up. It was thirty degrees below zero, my windows were down, and the freezing wind screamed all around me. The Cure had just released “Just Like Heaven,” and I blasted it as I sped down the moonlit road with my headlights off, slugging beer and flicking cigarette butts out the window:
“Show me, show me how you do that trick,
the one that makes me scream, she said.
the one that makes me laugh, she said
and threw her arms around my neck.
Show me how you do it, and I’ll promise you,
I’ll promise that I’ll run away with you...”
I loved that song. I recognized myself in the girl, the “she,” “lost and lonely…strange as angels,” just needing to be carried away. I remember how good the pain felt in my freezing face and fingers, how that icy pain took away all the other pain. I didn’t want to die, but I didn’t know how to live either.
******
One morning not long ago, my sister told me about how, when I was using, she had to cover for me at my son’s school because I was completely fucked up on alcohol and the drugs doctors had prescribed for my arthritis, migraines and paralyzing anxiety. I had no recollection of the events my sister was describing, and even though I had now been seven years sober, pain and shame washed over me.
After my autism diagnosis, my therapist and I began unpacking how my autism threaded through every aspect of my life: my successes, my failures, my inability to handle too much stress or stimuli, my amazing ability to use my brain but only if I’m not under stress. Even after two years in therapy I’m only now starting to understand and to actually love how my brain works. Recently, I found out that none of the addiction recovery centers in Minnesota will admit autistic people, which doesn’t make any sense because so many people on the spectrum self-medicate to cope with the overwhelming demands of living in a world built for neurotypicals, a world in which I was certain the only real friends I could have were animals.
******
My dog Brinkley died in 2013, two years after I got sober. He collapsed on an October walk in the shade of a shimmering golden Minneapolis elm tree. Gentle, sweet, beautiful Brinkley. I held his head as the injections went in. As can happen with big dogs, Brinkley’s spinal column had turned to jelly and his back legs couldn’t hold him anymore. I held his head and I whispered “thank you, thank you, thank you” over and over long after Brinkley’s eyes closed and he was gone.
******
As I near my 50th birthday, I’ve noticed that I’ve taken up my father’s habit of wandering around the house and the yard, coffee in hand, stopping here and there to consider some detail I hadn’t noticed before. A volunteer petunia poking up through the mulch in my dog yard, the wood grain on a cabinet, a bit of rabbit fur stuck in a little hole in the fence. I imagine that, like me, my father’s brain was always churning, perseverating, working out a solution to fix the sprinkler system, wondering why a particular oak tree died, considering the political climate or climate change, and whether mayflies understand how fleeting their short lives are, or whether, to the mayflies, their lives felt full and lived.
******
I’ve never believed that I could write a proper essay, the kind I was taught to write while I was working on my MFA in the early 1990s. I can mimic a proper essay. As an autistic person, in order to survive in a neurotypical world, I had to become an expert mimic. And when I was in law school, I mastered legal writing and its formulaic structure. But more and more, my autistic brain resists coloring inside the lines when I write. I’ve let go of being a good student, the good girl, and I’m not interested in rules anymore. Since my autism diagnosis two years ago, I’ve been working to set my brain free while I write, to allow the structure of my poems and essays to reflect the workings of my brain. A brain I can now call good and beautiful.
******
I don’t think of myself as a writer so much as a translator. I ask myself: Have I faithfully translated my experiences to the page? Have I been generous in my translations so that my words will float just above the page so others may re-arrange them, just enough to recognize some part of themselves in what I have written? Contrary to the CDC and most media portrayals of autism, I do very much care whether I’m connecting to others. I’ve just always tried to connect in ways that are different from what is considered the norm in a neurotypical world. Now that I embrace my autism, I’m comfortable structuring my writing to align with how I experience my world, rather than trying to fit my words to a form prescribed by others.
If I’ve learned anything, it’s that writing is the practice of alchemy. Because whether we are autistic, neurodivergent, or neurotypical, we still share grief; we share loss, and a longing to connect and to understand the why of it all. I believe that if I am successful in my tellings, if I’m faithful in my translations from my language to yours, if I am fortunate and the words come flowing, I can transmute my stories, my bundles of lead, into what might be, if we’re lucky, bundles of gold for us to share.