And Update on Noah, kindly written by his Grandfather: Last Monday, Noah (my 6 ½-year-old grandson) came home from his very first day of school. He was greeted happily at the door by his little brother Andrew (my 4 ½-year-old grandson) with Noah’s new little gray stuffed Elephant. “Here is your Elephant, Noah,” said Andrew cheerfully.
On the surface this is pretty simple stuff, but that tiny exchange was probably the most breathtakingly dramatic moment of my life. No element of it could have possibly been anticipated just six weeks before. It was radical behavior beyond all experience. (Don’t expect the verb tense in this narrative to be systematic or coherent. Don’t count much on proper sentences or cohesive paragraphs either. It is all about a future being miraculously revealed.)
Noah is autistic. Ever since much of his neurological and digestive systems were destroyed by the mercury poisoning from his childhood inoculations, he has lived in his own isolated world. Like other children’s whose lives that have been broken by regressive autism at about twenty months of age, Noah was developing perfectly normally before the shots. And then he was gone. Then he had no speech other than loud and lengthy vocalizations. Aaaahhhh! By age six, he had made some progress in toilet training, but was still largely dependent upon diapers. He ate only a very few self-selected specific foods and would regard any other food as if it did not exist. He had no understanding of toys or anything else that was representational. He couldn’t really go for a walk, but had to ride in everywhere strapped into his aging stroller; on his own he would just take off in a straight line and not look back. He had to be intensively cared for 24/7.
Noah has taught me a great deal about human nature. Lying and deceit have no meaning for him whatsoever. He is a strong, healthy, and perfectly beautiful little boy who in many ways is the distilled essence of humanity uncluttered by social connections and confusions. He is Homo sapiens, the thinking man; all he can do is to observe and to think about the world in which the rest of us are living. Reading books and stories written by and about people who have outgrown or been cured of autism really has told me nothing about what is going on behind his deep dark eyes. His world is very far away.
When I would describe Noah to anyone interested, they would invariable ask about his schooling. My response was always that school had nothing whatever to offer Noah. He had no language or mathematical skills whatever, so there was no basis for teaching him anything. School (D.T. Watson Home) here in Pennsylvania would basically mean his being restrained physically and forced to accomplish some arbitrary task. We found this dehumanizing approach to be anathema. For most of five years, Noah’s family was working on half a dozen parallel intervention strategies to help him make the most of his life. (The Internet is, of course, a lifeline for families trying to take care of any special needs members. Doctors untouched in their own families by autism are willfully ignorant and worse than useless.) All food coming into the house was carefully screened to be sure that it contained no gluten or casein. Special foods were very expensive and required extensive preparation. All Noah needed was one tiny morsel of some foods (which act like morphine in his system) to go on a “search and destroy” mission for hours or even days screaming and trashing. Play therapy from the Options Institute’s Sonrise Program was another approach. Love, support, appreciation, nurture, fun times, discipline and direction, hugs and kisses, prayer.
At the core has always been prayer. David and Emily were assured by God years ago that Noah had been healed, but that the time of his being cured was not yet theirs to know. Scattered around the world are hundreds of refrigerator magnets with Noah’s photograph and an invitation to join us in prayer for his being cured. There have been many gatherings large and small to petition God for Noah’s cure. His home was systematically exorcised by a bishop friend. A truly amazing network of diverse people has had a burden laid upon their hearts to pray for Noah’s cure.
On the seventeenth day of the seventh month the ark grounded on a mountain in Ararat. Genesis 8:3. Everyone knows that it rained for forty days and forty nights, but that is just one tiny fragment of the story. The account of the Great Flood is loaded with very specific dates. This is no hyper complex DiVinci Code; it’s just the carefully enumerated dates of many key events surrounding the rescue of Noah and his family in the ark of grace. Why put them in the story? I don’t know. But there they are. On July seventeenth (Yes, of course; the Bible uses the Hebrew calendar, and we use a variation of the Roman one!) Emily asked a small group of people to come together to pray for Noah. They gathered in their home after the other children had gone to bed. Noah stayed up and hung out fairly quietly with the group as they faithfully prayed in turn for his cure.
A few days later, someone mentioned to Emily that in South Carolina children had to be in school at age five or be considered truant. In Pennsylvania, it is age eight. None of us had ever considered that South Carolina might be more progressive in its educational requirements than Pennsylvania. (Yankee prejudice!) So in the midst of endless phone calls and car pool discussions getting Elaina prepared to begin her third grade year in her new school, Emily asked Noah if he wanted to go to school. Noah climbed up into her lap (unusual but not unprecedented behavior), picked up a pen, and insistently made Emily show him how to hold it properly. He then scribbled on paper for forty-five minutes. Noah loves pens almost as much as he loves toothbrushes. He will tenaciously grab any pen that he finds and hold it clenched in his left fist and look at/through it as he waves it in front of his eyes while holding his right hand near his right ear and vocalizing. He does this by the hour; it is called isming. Noah doesn’t draw or do anything else with a pen. He just waves it in front of his face. He had never done anything like this with a pen before. Clearly, he understood that he wanted to go to school and to learn to write. Again, there had been no precedent whatever in his life for anything like this.
David and Emily investigated a number of school possibilities and settled on a special needs classroom in the public school that is only about ten minutes from their house. The director of the program and the teacher worked very closely with them to develop a plan for Noah. (This is a very long story made very short!)
Emily took Noah shopping for school clothes. Noah spotted a pair of bright green Converse high-tops on the shelf and put them into the buggy. He had never shown any interest in clothes whatever. He would just as soon be naked as dressed in whatever you want to put on him. This was another move totally without precedent by him. Emily took him through the toy department and thought that if Noah chose anything, she would buy it for him. As I mentioned an hour ago, Noah doesn’t understand toys. He only grabs things to wave in his face. But on this trip he selected a number of different items and put them into the buggy. Emily talked to him about choosing just one, and they agreed on what to put back. Finally, Noah selected the Elephant with which I began this story. Small, soft, gray, with a very silky tail. Just two months earlier they had all come up here for the funeral of Emily’s brother. On the last day, the whole family went to the zoo which included the gift shop filled with beautiful stuffed animals. While everyone else cuddled everything in sight, Noah just sat in his stroller totally indifferent (outwardly) to what a magical place this was for the rest of us. David chose for him a small white whale and explained to the other children that he had done so because Noah could not ask for what he wanted. Such a simple expression of a father’s wish for a hint of typical behavior from his son broke my heart as nothing else has with Noah. David doesn’t do things like that. He doesn’t make sentimental gestures about Noah’s limitations. He doesn’t try to explain things that can’t be explained or understood. He just loves and waits.
And that for me was the clearest symbol of what has happened to Noah since the seventeenth of July. He had never had a toy before. He had never had anything but odd bits of hardware to wave around.
When Noah got home, Andrew characteristically decided that Noah’s Elephant was the greatest thing since sliced bread. He characteristically snatched it away for himself. (When we were down in March, I bought Elaina a dolphin which Andrew immediately adopted and carried around for months. Elaina is a good sport about such things, and Noah never had anything worth stealing before.) (I don’t know where to put Andrew into this, so I guess I shall just do it now. Andrew is much more mildly autistic than Noah is, but still has considerable limitations and requires similar intense care. He only had his first MMR inoculations with much less damage than Noah experienced. Since the seventeenth of July, Andrew’s verbal skills have increased dramatically. He has gone from using words in fragments of rudimentary sentences [and lots of No! No! No! No! No!] to constructing complex complete sentences with proper auxiliary verbs, prepositions, and modifiers. He has also learned to use the toilet. After eight years only Molly is still in diapers now! Surely, Andrew is now really the middle child as Elaina, Noah, and Baby Molly push him to the back row for the present. He’ll cope. Prayers for Noah’s cure have spilled over to flood Andrew as well.) Anyway, David and Emily defended Noah’s Elephant and made it plain that Andrew was not to take it. That night, Andrew could be heard through the door conspiratorially calling down from his top bunk bed, “Noah, come up. Bring Elephant. Noah, come up. Bring Elephant.” But Andrew didn’t take it from him. Remarkable. Beautiful.
On the way to school for the first day, poor Mother Emily asked God for one final confirmation that Noah was supposed to go to school, that she was doing the right thing. She began to sing to him about the three little ducks and on the final line Noah made the motions for the Quack! Quack! Quack! He couldn’t sing the words, but he remembered their motions that went with this favorite song from long ago before he was taken away.
On Noah’s second day of school, he got up when awakened. He ate his fruit smoothie for breakfast. He selected a snack of carrots and cashews and put it into his backpack. He put on his backpack and waited by the front door for his father. When they got to school, Noah took his father to his classroom and found his own cubby and his own desk. While he is sometimes reluctant to stop one task and move on to the next (Who isn’t?) Noah completely grasps the whole complex business of school. He sits at his desk. He works on his lesson. (While the other children in the class were having a handwriting lesson tracing X’s that had been drawn on their papers, Noah was given a plain paper to scribble on. When one of the children asked why Noah didn’t have to trace X’s, he drew a diagonal line straight across his paper. Only half an X. Not Moby Dick. But what an absolutely wonderful composition. An accomplishment beyond comprehension for me.
Noah is happy and excited to be going to school. His teacher said that she had been really discouraged this year about her work, but that Noah had shown her afresh why she was a teacher for special needs children. Noah teaches many people important lessons like that. God teaches many people important lessons like that.
I am very careful about the use of the word miracle. It is used very carelessly in our culture today. But what has happened to Noah’s life since the seventeenth of July completely transcends the laws of the physical world of matter and energy. It transcends biology, psychology, neurology, and education. It is a pure unmerited gift of grace given by a God who delights in granting the desires of those who love Him. Truly all things work together for good for those who love Him.
