Grief is a Spectrum Too

And we all do it differently

The cat was dead.

I’d found him in the  morning, stretched out  in his basket in the living room, as peaceful as any seventeen year old cat could be. I covered him with his favorite blanket, then called up the steps to my son, Allen, an adult with autism. When Allen came down, I gently told him Butterscotch had died and asked  if he wanted to pick out some toys to cremate with the cat. 

“Not now,” Allen muttered and ran up to his room. I heard his bedroom door slam, and knew he needed time to wrestle with his emotions at this latest loss.

Grieving  is an individual task. Allen’s sensory processing disorders make it challenging for him to accept something he cannot see or control.  Just as autism itself is a spectrum, so are the many reactions to grief. Allen’s first brush with death was a few years ago when  his cat, Sugar, was missing for three days before we found her. Allen protested it was not his cat curled up near the heater in our basement.

“It’s some other cat,” he said. “It’s not Sugar. Sugar just got out. She’ll be back.” 

He still claims he sees Sugar around the neighborhood.

Three years later, Allen’s father passed away at home quite suddenly when only Allen was there.   The trauma of it led him to deny his dad was dead. A few days after the funeral, he began a process known as “magical thinking,” bargaining and trying to find ways to bring Ron back. His grief overwhelmed him as he tried to find a place to put it, an experience to compare it to.

But Dad had never died before. Allen had no frame of reference

Allen’s grief journey took eight months as we looked for clues and visited places he thought Dad might be. Eventually, he found not only a father who still loved him from heaven, but a Father who had been merciful to his dad.

Today, just two hours after his door slammed, I heard Allen walk down the steps. Without saying a word, he picked  up Butterscotch’s jingle ball, his squeaky fish, and his stuffed banana, adding them to the basket where our cat lay covered by a blanket.

“Maybe when Butterscotch gets to Heaven,” Allen said, “ he and Dad can play with these toys.” He gave the body of the cat one more pat, then asked if he could play a video game.

Later that evening, Allen leaned against me as we watched a movie. “I’m going to miss Butterscotch,” said Allen. “He was a good cat.” He sighed. “But maybe Dad was lonely in Heaven. I’m glad he has company now.”

As Karla Fischer noted in her blog, The Thinking Person’s Guide to Autism, “Autistic grief is not neuro-typical grief.” It’s taken time, but my son has learned that death is a part of life. The stages of his grief journey were unique to him.

As they are to everyone.