I was asked this week if I ever wrote anything about disability diagnosis and grief, from a parent’s perspective. I’ve never really attempted to say it all, I might one day, it is a complicated state of mind, the best and most painful things that have happened to me overlapping. I did write this piece about three years in. I’d write a different piece now, what was hope then has been replaced with more diagnostic certainty, but we also know our son better and at 14 he truly is a marvel on so many fronts, especially in his conversational skills and how much he loves other people. I haven’t tried to write that definitive essay either, but I have written this newsletter, and long term readers would have read dozens of vignettes that make up something approximating the whole, in all its beautiful and heart-wrenching glory.