This week I have come to the realization that everything happens for a reason.

Seven years ago, my son was born and within the first year we realized things were a bit different for him. When he was 14 months old, early intervention came to our house and screened him for delays in development and quickly started speech therapy, occupational therapy, and developmental therapy among other things.

My life changed in a brief instant.

In one moment, we were much like any other family, albeit a struggling family, but we came and went as we pleased and had the control to say what was going to happen today, tomorrow, and the next day. We had freedom. In the next moment, we had therapists coming to the home almost every day. We had doctor appointments just about every week. That freedom and ‘go with the flow life’ went right on out the window. While we didn’t sign up for that kind of life, we quickly realized that sometimes the hardest thing and the right thing are the same. We saw first hand how important this new lifestyle was for our son. We saw how much improvement he could make with help. We saw how we could build his skills by using pictures, sign language, and how changes in the home environment, or playing a little differently, and living a little differently could impact his life. We did all these things to improve his skills and his quality of life.

My husband and I began to understand how our son’s brain worked and how he saw the world and understood it. We learned as much as we could about how his brain learned to problem solve, how his brain learned to make connections, how his brain learned to communicate and reach out to others. The frontal lobe became the focal point for understanding how our son made sense of the world. All the sequencing difficulties, all the problem solving skills, all the language processing issues, all the planning skills, all the language comprehension skills, all the decision making skills—ALL of these things are wrapped up in that frontal lobe.

As I went along in my quest to understand autism, the world branched out from the frontal lobe to parts of the brain like the amygdala, the fear and emotional center of the brain. Learning to recognize and maintain stability between an even keel and fight or flight became crucial. Understanding how my son perceived the world helped me realize that his fear center was a bit on overdrive. Understanding how my son perceived emotions in himself and others guided his therapists and me to focus on emotions and facial expressions and to think long term in regards to social skills programs for him.

The tour of the brain continued along to places like the middle and inferior temporal gyri where more language processing occurs along with visual perception and the integration of information of all the senses comes into play. This became crucial as I understood how my son preferred objects to human faces and processed those faces, how this affected his word retrieval abilities as he began to learn to speak on his own, how my son categorized items and objects, or how my son handled sensory integration.

The brain became the center of my solar system.

Through learning about how my son’s brain worked and how it perceived the world helped me help him have a life of limitless possibilities. I learned to provide him with tools and strategies that promoted independent sequencing skills, problem solving abilities, and his decision making capacity. All the visual strategies we used to increase expressive and receptive language abilities, the sequencing strips, and the social stories seemed to be a constant in my life. We worked on recognizing faces and interpreting facial expressions. We worked on categorizing items over and over and over. We built up his tolerance and ability to handle sensory information in the environment. We worked on handling stress and dealing with extremes in emotions—learning to take a deep breath was a constant for us all. My living room and my life looked like a therapy center.

Over the years we have become pros at all this. The shock wore off and this new life became our regular life. Abnormal became normal. We grew and thrived together as a family, as a whole until all of this just became instinctual. I can whip out Boardmaker symbols faster than most speech pathologists. I can program a high tech communication device faster than most of the programmers at Dynavox. I can produce a social story faster than Carol Gray herself. I’ve got as many sensory ideas as Jean Ayres at this point. I’ve learned to handle all the hiccups in life the brain with autism could produce.

My life with a brain has come full circle though.

Just yesterday, my grandfather was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. I am learning how to handle a life the brain with Alzheimer’s can wreak havoc on. I am back to thinking about what visuals need to be used. Back to thinking what kind of schedules need to be placed around the house. Back to thinking about sequencing strips and how to problem solve through all of life’s daily tasks. And of course, now beginning to wonder what kind of help will he need remembering where he is in time and space.

Believe it or not, my life with autism has been a God-send in helping me understand the life with Alzheimer’s. This morning, I thank the Lord for giving me the opportunity to live with and work with individuals with autism—it has saved my sanity for taking the first steps to a life with Alzheimer’s. The last few years of repetitive statements and questions from my ‘auties’ helped me make it through the last few days with grace, patience, and respect for my grandfather’s need to tell me the same story over and over and over.

To be honest, I’m shocked at how similar the two can be at times. The same monitoring programs I have recommended for our wandering children with autism are the exact same ones being used for those with Alzheimer’s. The same visual and cognitive supports to promote independence and problem solving abilities are used in both autism and Alzheimer’s. While the brain with Alzheimer’s and the brain with autism are very different, the strategies to promote independence and improve quality of life can be eerily similar. Managing tasks, changing and arranging the environment, dealing with emotions, providing that crucial routine, and understanding and interpreting behaviors have all become crucial points in not only my son’s life; but now also in my grandfather’s life.

Yesterday, I had to take my grandfather’s car keys away. In a moment, his life changed from a life of freedom and independence to one which will require more and more support through the next few months and years. In a moment, his life has been irrevocably changed with the A word. The grieving process has begun for us all. I grieve for his past, his present, and his future. He grieves for an entire life that has changed and been lost. I’ve had more difficult conversations in the last few days than I can ever remember having. But sometimes the hardest thing and the right thing are the same.