Radiolab - Juicervose

Episode Date: September 18, 2014

Ron and Cornelia Suskind had two healthy young sons, promising careers, and a brand new home when their youngest son Owen started to disappear.  3 months later a specialist sat Ron and Cornelia down and said the word that changed everything for them: Autism.  In this episode, the Suskind family finds an unlikely way to access their silent son's world. We set off to figure out what their story can tell us about Autism, a disorder with a wide spectrum of symptoms and severity. Along the way, we speak to specialists, therapists, and advocates including Simon Baron-Cohen, Barry and Raun Kaufmann, Dave Royko, Geraldine Dawson, Temple Grandin, and Gil Tippy. Produced by Kelsey Padgett.

Listener supported WNYC Studios Wait, you're listening Okay All right Okay All right You're listening to Radio Lab

Radio Lab From WNYC C C? Yeah And NPR The word hit us

Like you're hit with a With a bullet And we're like, that cannot be our, that cannot be our son. I'm Chad Abramrod. I'm Robert Krollwich. This is Radio Lab, and our story today begins with a boy. And that boy is going to vanish, not in the thin air, but to a place that we know very, very little about. And if you're the parent of that boy, what do you do if your child is falling away from everything you know?

How do you find him? How do you get him back? So part of this tale we got from Ron Susskind's new, wonderful book, Life Animating. and some of you may have heard it, some not. Let's start where Ron started. For him, it began around 1993. And it was an exciting time. Well, we're going into Owen's room

for what is his last night in the crib. I still can't watch. You still can't watch it. Can you tell us about your crib, Owen? Do you like your crib? Yeah. Yeah. Do you know where you're sleeping tomorrow?

What kind of bed are you and Walter going to sleep in? In 1993, the Suskind family decided to make a big move. Ron and his wife, Cornelia. Cornelia Suskind. And their two sons, Walt and Owen. Walter is about five, and Owen is about two and a half. They decide to relocate from Boston to Washington, D.C. You know, I had this senior national affairs job at the journal.

Good night. Say night and night. Nine. Kind of a dream job. I love you. Lots of excitement. Have a nice last night near cribby. So they make the move, and as soon as they arrive in Washington,

we start sort of noticing something's amiss. Their youngest son Owen, who to that point had been a totally normal, chatty, almost three-year-old, hitting all of his markers, suddenly goes sideways. Maybe the very first thing that happened was he stopped sleeping. He stopped sleeping, he stopped eating. He was very fussy. Initially, they figured, well, it's got to be the... move. And then we start losing eye contact. Then he starts losing motor skills. He can't hold his

cup, slipping out of his hand. His gate became very odd. And he was sort of looked like a drunken sailor walking around the house. And then he stopped speaking bit by bit by bit. This was all compressed into a few months. A few months, really. Yeah. What could have occurred? Could he have banged his head? ingested something toxic. You know, first you hit the regular pediatrician, and he's gone, he sent us to a center. There was a woman there.

Who sits them down? And she says the word autism. What did the word mean to you at that moment? It meant Rain Man. Dustin Hoffman. I'm a very good driver until we saw. And we're like, that cannot be our, that cannot be our son. You know, it was just terrifying.

Now, in reporting the story, We ended up going off in a variety of different directions, but we did visit one place where we got a glimpse, just a hint, of what parents like Ron and Cornelia must have felt back then. We visited a school here in Manhattan called the Rebecca School. It's a really unique school for children with autism, other developmental delay. There's little kids in there, age four, all the way up to, I think even 21.

Every kid that you meet in the school is different. Autism is a many-man. many flavored thing. But the overwhelming sense you get walking the halls there is that each of these kids is kind of locked away a little bit. They don't know how to be

with. Like Kelsey Padgett and I, we got there during lunch, and in one of the rooms, I don't know, maybe you should describe this. Yeah, there was this, we went to this one classroom where there was this one boy who really stood out. He was about six years old, and he had this big mop of black hair. and he was just standing there at the table holding an apple and just sobbing. Do you want to eat your apple?

You don't want to eat the apple. And the director of the school, Tina McCourt, she was there, and she just stayed with the boy and really tried to be there with him, but there was nothing she could do. There goes apple. It was hard to watch. Because you don't know how to help him. That's a challenge, right?

There's a kid who actually can't tell you what's upsetting to him, right? That's Gil Tippi, the school's clinical director. It could be that he physically, he actually doesn't know where he is in space, maybe. It's as if we were being. thrown out of an airplane? Right? You're just tumbling. You don't know where your body is. It's a thunderstorm. So you only see things in flashes,

right? So now the world is totally frightening. It's totally overwhelming. I mean, I do remember the drive home from that terrible day. I've blocked that out. Well, just, I mean, I just remember you and I driving home in silence

with Owen in the back. And I just felt like, you know, there There's no hope. Like they had no idea if the Owen they knew was in there. Or if he was just kind of lost to them, like gone. Now, keep in mind, this was 1994. We knew even less about autism than we know now.

We still have no idea what causes autism. But then the prevailing wisdom seemed to be that kids with autism, they couldn't feel emotion, they had no capacity to empathize with other people. This was way before the neurodiversity movement. Like actually right around the moment when autism was becoming a spectrum for the first time. That's just happening in 1994, just starting. Barely starting. Yeah.

At that point. Owen was about four. Was he active or was he? Yeah, he was very, he was hyperactive. A lot of self-stimulatory behavior, you know, hand flapping, running around. And Cornelian Ron say that when they would call him, it was as if he didn't even hear them. We're hoping he's hearing, you know, but he's not really responding. When you needed him to come to the table, or would he come?

have to go and lead him by the hand or pick him up and bring him over. And he was down to one word, which was juice. So the only thing he was doing was drinking juice for about a year. And also, you know, there was the Disney movies. So he would sit for, he would sit for television entertainments or something. He wouldn't sit for the whole movie for sure. But he would, that would be the one thing that he would sit for quietly for periods. You don't know what I've been through.

Because he didn't sleep, so at night, I was usually up with him all night thrashing around. And as Owen watched one Disney movie after another, after another, not sleeping at all, that word juice, it seemed to expand just a little bit. He began to repeat the word. Juicervos, juiceervos. What is he saying? Juicervose? Jucervose. But you don't know at first what that is. No.

No, we think it's juice. Cornelia's like, I said, does he seem to want more juice? And she's like, no, I gave him more juice. He didn't seem to want it. And Ron says he would say that word over and over for weeks, and they had no idea what it meant until. It's about a year and a month after the symptoms have started. One night, all four of them are together in the living room.

And we're watching The Little Mermaid. And at a certain point, Owen, who's got the remote, he starts rewinding the movie back a little bit to rewatch the scene. It's typical. So Owen knows that it worked the remote. Walt kind of showed him how to do it, and he took to that. And he's rewinding the part where Ariel... If I become human...

Or a protagonist... I'll never be with my father or sisters again. ...wants to become human to get her man, Eric. That's right. And the sea witch, Ursula, says it will cost you. Tough choices. And the price is... Your voice.

Your voice. My voice? You've got it, sweet cakes. And all of a sudden, Ariel and Ursula... are having it out. Come on, you poor, unfortunate soul. And this park has rewound, again. Again.

All day, it won't cause much, just your voice. And Walt's like, oh, and stop rewinding. Just play the movie. A boy, it won't cause much. Just your voice. But after the third rewind, Just your moist. Cornelius says,

It's not juice. It's not juice, it's just. I said, what? Just your voice. Just your voice. At which point, I'm like, I grab a leg of the shoulders and I'm like, just your voice, just your voice. And he starts going, juicer vows, juice your voice, juice her voice. And Walter starts jumping in the bed, crying and laughing and jumping on the bed. Did you feel like he chose that phrase for a reason?

That's what we, that's of course immediately what we thought. He's trying to tell us something. Like he has things to say, but he just can't say it. It's his voice. In other words, he's in there. He's in there because he's trying to talk to us. So we run to the doctor, a very trusted guy, and he's like, you know, sit down, let's talk. And he says it's something called echolalia.

It's echoing sounds. That they're auditory processing, their ability to process sound, speech. Language. Goes haywire. And so they just repeat the sound. And we're saying, so he doesn't know what it means. And he's like, probably not. echolalia. It's what it sounds like, echo. What it sounds like, echo. I said like a parrot.

They're like, yeah, yeah, parrot. So we go from Helen Keller to the pet store parrot. Life goes on. And years go by. Where he's murmuring a lot of gibberish, we might be able to decipher from some movie, maybe. By six, he's got, you know, three-word sentences. I want juice. just, you know, one and a half year old speech. Corn's there full-time, 24-7. Ron's working around the clock in a kind of frenzy. They pay for all the therapists. And we're fighting it out, basically.

They see tiny, tiny bits of progress, but no more breakthroughs. Until... It owns about six and a half and Walt is nine. And Walter gets a little emotional on his ninth birthday. I'm not sure maybe the anxiety of the moment of the attention of it. This is Walt Susskind. And how old are you now?

I'm 25. Your voice is so much deeper than I imagined it would be. People usually after like 10 minutes if it's their first time meeting me asses of them faking my voice and I have to assure them

this is not an effect. This is how I sound. In any case, Walt has his ninth birthday and his friends come over. And then after the party, he's out in the hammock in the yard and he's kind of crying a little bit. Birthday is, it was,

Oh, they were just kind of strange days for me, like sensory overload in a way. Well, Owen walks in after Walter is emotional, and we're in the kitchen, and he seems to kind of look back and forth between the two of us, and like there's something he wants to say. To this point, Owen had only said three-word sentences, but in this moment, according to Rod, he looks at us and says, Walter doesn't want to grow up like Mowgli or Peter Pan. He said full sentences.

Full thing, whole thing. Wow. I mean, literally, it was like a thunderbolt, a lightning bolt went through the kitchen. And Owen runs off in some, you know, reverie, whatever. And we look at each other. And like, what was that? You know, this is his first complex sentence or thought that's been expressed. And it's a subtle one, actually.

because he's taking three different characters, two from a movie, one from real life, and he's putting them together. Serana's like, I got to follow this, so he goes up to Owen's room. And I see Owen on the bed looking at a Disney book, and I see on the carpet are some of his puppets. And one of them is Yago from Aladdin, the plush toy, you know, which is the $98 one that goes up to your elbow. And I grab it, and I put it on my arm right up to the... elbow and I crawl along in the rug and I throw the bed spread kind of over my head and just edge up to the edge of the bed and I push the puppet up through the crease and the bed spread

and so now they're face to face Owen and Yago and I'm looking up through the crease sort of up my arm and I talk to him as Yago now this is an easy voice it's Gilbert Godfried's voice I mean anyone can do this I say so Owen Owen, Owen, how does it feel to be you? And he turns to the puppet like he's bumping into an old friend. And he says, not good, I'm lonely. And it was his voice. Wow.

And so I say, so when did you and I become such good friends? And he says, when I watched Aladdin and you made me laugh? And we go back and forth like this for four or five more exchanges. And then I hear Owen clear his throat. Like, like that. And then all of a sudden I hear him say back, I love the way your foul little mind works. You say what?

I love the way your foul little mind works. That's Jafar, the villain. Yago's the villainous sidekick to Jafar, the villain of Aladdin. That's the next line from Jafar. But you'd slip into a script. You're in the movie. He's asking for me to respond as Yago. Did you know the next line? I didn't know the next line.

At that point, I just jumped out from under the best friend. And what's going on? So now they felt like, okay, he is in there. I mean, despite everything that they had been told about autism, Owen, was in there. And somehow these Disney characters were in there with him. It doesn't take us long that, you know, we start what we called the basement session. where we say, let's see how far this can go. A couple times a week.

We go down in the basement and start playing out scenes. And we do it the first time we do it with the Jungle Book, which is a movie he was into at that point. And then? 101 Dalmatian. Kill the Beast. Beauty and the Beast. Peter Pan, Sword and the Stone.

We kind of ran the gamut. I mean, pretty much we'd watch any and every Disney movie there was. What described to these guys? What was it like when mom and I started doing voices on Walter? Felt amazed. Felt amazed. Who was amazed? You were amazed or they were?

I was amazed. This is Owen, Suskind. He's 23 now. Why were you amazed? I was so surprised by my family. I could hear them respond better. You're saying that when everybody was acting out at Disney movies, suddenly you could hear them better?

Right. Huh. So when people would talk to you not in the Disney movies, what do you remember about how they sounded? A little weird. Yeah? Gibberish and rubbish. Huh.

Do you remember how you felt? A little worried. You told Mom once that you were scared. I was scared. Why did it feel? feel good to watch them over and over again that you kept wanting to, watch them over and over again. How did that feel to you? It felt comforting.

Comforting. Felt comforting. Why? Because it would help me with reducing my autism. How does a movie help a boy in Owen's condition? Stay tuned and we'll attempt some explanations. This is Candace, currently called. Calling from her bicycle, Radio Lab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and by Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world.

More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. Thank you. Hey, I'm Chad I boomrod. I'm Robert Crulwich. This is Radio Lab, and today a story about a kid named Owen and a condition that no one can quite pin down. Now, we just heard that Owen, when he watches Disney movies, he feels comforted and that somehow the movie seems to dial down his autism. We were like, why would that be? How could a Disney movie, or any movie, really, make that much difference? Can you hear me okay? I can hear you pretty well.

We ended up taking the question to this guy. Simon Baron Cohen. He's a leading researcher in autism. And yes, he is the cousin of this guy. And I'm the director of the Autism Research Center at Cambridge University. And Simon told us a couple of different things. First of all, he says that in the last few decades, our whole notion of what is happening in the mind of a child with autism has totally changed.

We've sort of tossed out the Rain Man idea. The idea that people with autism lack some inner life, I think that's completely false. It's not necessarily that they can't feel, emotion or empathy, he says, not at all. It's often a decoding problem. Like they have trouble decoding all of the information that's coming in. I mean, some studies have found that a lot of kids with autism literally have too many synapses in their brain. So it might be that the world is just coming in too loud. I think often people with autism feel very lost

and confused. There's so little predictability in the social world. You know, people come and go. No two days are the same. People say things unexpectedly. They do things unexpectedly. And people with autism seem to need a lot of predictability. We spoke to Temple Grandin, the well-known author and autism advocate, and here's how she put it. When I was a little kid, I wanted to feel the nice feeling of being held, but there was just too much overwhelming stimulation. You know, loud sounds hurt my ears.

Like the volume control on touch and hearing was warm. way, way, way turned on. And one of the reasons why I withdrew in things like dribbling sand through my hands is I could shut out the hurtful sound. As Temple Granite explained it to us, a kid with autism gravitating to something like bus schedules or knowing every single fact about every dinosaur that ever lived, that is just a way to slow things down and make the world predictable

so that it happens the same way every time. And as Simon Baron Cohen puts it, in Owen's case, He had these Disney movies that you could play over and over and over and over. And then the fact that it's, you know, it's not just repetition, but it's repetition about human action. Jasmine? Where are you? Out in the menagerie, hurry.

You know, that creates a kind of structure to be able to look at human behavior. You know, in the real world, there's no opportunity to rewind the movie. Whereas in the world of movies, you can watch the same disdemeanor. cartoon a hundred times or a thousand times and you could almost go frame by frame. Like a literary critic or a film critic, you could really analyze the action to understand, okay, that's what happened and that's what caused him to do what he did. Add to that, the element of music. We spoke with Professor Geraldine Dawson, a neuroscience professor at Duke,

who guessed that maybe it's not just the repetition that made the difference, but the repetition with music. One of the things that we've learned from neuroscience is that music activates emotional centers in our brain. And in fact, it's pretty reliable that certain kinds of music make us feel, you know, frightened, make us feel happy, make us feel worried and so forth.

Now, she says when scientists have done brain scans of kids with autism, they've found. That during kind of normal interactions, people with autism don't necessarily activate those emotional centers of the brain, areas like the amygdala. But during the experience of music, those areas of the brain did become activated in a way that was very much like a typical person. So it might be that while Owen was sort of forensically examining these moments of Disney movies, it was the Disney music that was binding those moments to feelings.

So he could know, like, oh, when a person looks like that, that's when they're happy. When a person looks like that, that's when they're sad. However it works, Simon Baron Cohen thinks it's at least plausible. That is using the movie as a scaffold to make sense of the much greater complexity of natural life. And that's what got to run, Suskeye. Like, wow, this is a whole new planet. here. That maybe this Disney-ish therapy that they use with Owen might be a whole new approach to treating

kids with autism. Instead of the one-size-fits-all model of sit in the class and hear the things you're supposed to know to be a working member of society, instead it's like go with their passion, follow them in there. It's a pathway, the brain finding a way to get to what people need, which is interaction and emotional wholeness. Yiro, I want you to sing the song for them You see, we just

own whiskey, nah, it's a party or sis lake You dream about Go week up there But that is a big mistake Just don't got to wear that Over the years, sometimes down in the basement With the family

Or sometimes even in doctor's offices Owen started to improvise He'd go off script And use the characters he knew so well To explain how he was feeling Out of the sea Down in its bed the downward is way to take it from me.

And as we were thinking about all this and asking ourselves, you know, well, if this works with Disney movies, which are very emotional and clear, how do you do this with paper clips or bus schedules? And as the question has kept coming, we ran into inevitably a counterreaction to Ron's story. And this we didn't expect. The story is great.

It's a wonderful story. But the fact is most, I mean, the, The danger with a book, with any book, including life animated, is that it's going to give the impression to a lot of people that this is the answer. That's psychologist and journalist David Roiko, and he warned us that like, with autism, we still don't really know much and we don't have yet a body of established science. And all the anecdotes you're hearing, they're just anecdotes. If you've known one person with autism, you've known one person with autism. That, he says, is really all you can say. And to take one person's experience and generalize on it, it's a mistake.

A case in point, his son, Ben. Ben is turning 21 years old today. Oh, my God. Happy birthday to him. Thanks. And, you know, Ben is never going to be able to live independently. He's never going to have what anyone would consider a full and normal life. Ben has severe autism and is now living in an assisted living facility.

He was diagnosed around the same age as Owen, same basic symptoms. On lack of eye contact. Sudden loss of speech. Fascination with spinning wheels, with ceiling fans, the whole package. Dave says he and his wife tried every therapy they could afford, and a whole lot they couldn't. But Ben never had any of those big breakthroughs. Instead, even as a teenager. He would hit and he would scratch and he would bite and he would punch and he would kick.

Honestly, I was always afraid when Karen and I would end up having to go to an emergency room for some reason that if they saw her arms, that they would arrest me because they would think I was some horribly abusive person because their arms were nothing, they were covered with scabs and scars and scars on scars. And on top of that, you know, there would be the crap. Like, like, like in his pants. Yeah, I mean, he's, he was not, well, you know, I hate to say it, but here we are on his 21st birthday. And he's still not 100% reliable when it comes to toilet. And honestly, the reason we ended up calling,

Dave is because he wrote a review of Ron's book where he said basically, it's a great book, but it's just one more story of a triumphant happy ending. And that is not the norm. For many, many people who experience autism, you don't have happy endings. I mean, that's a sad fact for many of these families. And we're not expecting in our life a happy ending for Ben. People seem to believe that it's dangerous for parents to have too much hope. Because what if they really think it's possible for their child to progress a huge amount or recover, and then their child doesn't? We have the other concern. That's Ron Kaufman of the Autism Treatment Center of America.

We find that we're not afraid of so-called false hope. We're more concerned about false pessimism. And here's why he says that. In 1981, Ron's dad, Barry Carthman. And I'm Oprah Winford. He sits down on a local TV show with a very young Oprah. Winfrey, and he describes his experience. Okay, we had a child

who was diagnosed as incurably ill or hopelessly ill, something called autism. He tells how at a really young age, a year and a half old, his son began to regress and began to flap hands, lose eye contact, rock back and forth, and then one day, he and his wife decided, you know what,

we're going to just sit down on the bathroom floor right next to him, and we're going to rock back and forth just like him. And he explains that they did this over and over and over, hour after hour until one day his son turned his head. And he actually looked at us. It took 900 hours before he ever gave us eye contact on his own. When he looked at us, we cheered, we cried, because that was really big for us. And so somebody else might look at us and say, you're crazy, but we're not.

We just got this little boy. It took us 900 friggin' hours, but he just looked at us for three seconds. My God. And he went from that to a little boy now who functions on a near genius level, who talks as communicative, is loving, and is embracing. That little boy is Ron. For me, it just felt like my mother was loving me and enjoying me and playing with me. Nowadays, in interviews, Ron seems to say that maybe his parents cured him of autism.

I actually have never used the word cure. I don't use that in my lectures, YouTube videos. No one's ever actually heard me say that. What I do say is full recovery, which is essentially the same thing. Whatever you call it, armed with his heroic story, Ron and his dad Barry, now run an autism treatment program that they call Sunrise, S-O-N-Rise. People come here from all around the world. I'll say my child is severely autistic.

And I will smile and I'll put out my hand and I'll shake their hand and I'll say, I am so excited for you. Wow! You are so blessed. And you know what they'll start to do? They'll cry. And I'll say, why are you crying? No one ever said that to me.

You really say that to parents with severely, like severely autistic kids? Severely. I say it all over the world. You know, last year, there was a woman named Kelly Stapleton, who was a fairly prominent, autism blogger. And I got to know Kelly a bit. She has a daughter with autism and one day when her daughter was

14... She locked herself in a van with a couple charcoal burners and tried to commit suicide with her autistic daughter. You see that in the world of autism more than... I can't think of any other place you see it. Dave believes that one of the reasons you see

so many suicides in this community and by the way there's a huge debate about this on the web. But he believes that one of the reasons you see it, so much is that all these success stories seem to say to parents like him that as hard as it can be and it can be really, really hard. You're not trying hard enough. It's depressing. You know, a new bumper sticker, you know, that's shown up that autism is awesome. An awesome spelled like A-U-S-L-I-I-I- like similar to autism. No, autism, it destroys lives, is what it does in our definition

of it. And that's one of the things that makes it very, very confusing for people outside the community to describe what's going on. Because you now have this situation where obviously autism is a spectrum. And so you have all of these different kids described by the same word, making things even more confusing. If you take a child when they're two or three. That's Temple Grandin again. You can have two kids that look real severe. And I looked real severe when I was three.

real, real severe. And then you work on these kids, lots of one-on-one therapy, and one kid you kind of pull them out of it, and the other one you're not able to pull them out of it, and they both look the same at age three. So if a lot of these kids start out with the same set of symptoms, but they end up in vastly different places,

no one knows why, then as a parent, you really have no idea what is going to happen, or how much you can dare to hope. Notions of what could be up the road or what should be now. If they pop into my head, which is rare,

I dismiss them. I have absolutely no idea because we have been down so many roads that we're disappointing. And that's next. Hey guys, this is Nathan Sanchez calling from Santa Clara, California. Radio Lab is supported in

part by the National Science Foundation and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. Thanks, guys. I'm Chad Abumran. I'm Robert Krollwich. This is Radio Lab. And to continue with the story, after Owen's Disney basement sessions had really taken off and the Disney therapy, as it were, seemed to be working. And Owen was getting better. and better and better. Things took a turn, and not for the good. Remind me how old he is at this point?

14? 14. 15? 14, yeah. 9th grade. It was 10th grade. Oh, right. 10th grade. Oh, was it?

Yeah. That's right. That's right. And what happened? We didn't know what was happening. You know, we just saw over the months that Owen was really out of sorts. He got quiet, kind of withdrawn, basically stopped doing Disney. Over this period he's losing a lot of weight.

He's not sleeping. The three of us were scratching our heads saying, what is going on with Owen? He is really moving into a bad place. I mean, I was actually worried that he was becoming schizophrenic. Yeah, I still think about that whole scenario all the time because we knew something was wrong with Owen and we couldn't get it out of him. This is Owen's older brother Walt again and he says when he pick up Owen from school.

He was just a shell of himself. I'd pick him up and you'd talk to himself in the car and it'd be no, no. or, you know, it's not true or something under his breath. And then... At one point, I overhear him in a kind of conversation with Phil, the sidekick of Hercules in that movie, Hercules. Danny DeVito does the voice. And Phil is, you know, listen, kid, you can take him.

You know, you're going to stand up for yourself. That kind of thing that Owen was saying. And I didn't know where to fit it in. Ron says it seemed like Owen was trying to psych himself up for something. thing. So he sat down with Owen on the couch and he grilled him for an hour until eventually Owen told him about his music class at school. There are two kids in this class who are ED kids, emotionally disturbed kids. So they're not on the autistic spectrum and socially they're very on target. And they basically torment and terrorize him for six months of that school

year, unbeknownst to us and unbeknownst to the school. What did they do? They sat on either side of him and basically said, you know, we're going to kill you, we're going to kill your parents. Those two bullies lied and bullying me badly. I mean, right then you were in a very bad spot and you couldn't tell me or mom or anyone. Right. Because what happened?

The bullies said what? Burn your house down. If what? if you tell. Right. And Owen was so literal, as are so many autistic kids, he believed that they literally meant they were going to come and burn his house down. And there's an extraordinary moment in the middle of this where Walter picks him up,

and Owen starts to think, go through a calculus. The bully said, if you tell your parents about what we said, we'll burn your house down, but they said nothing about your brother. Oh. And so he sees like an opening. Yeah. And so did you tell him? No, I didn't.

No, I didn't. Why not? Because I'm afraid he would beat them up. I didn't want that. Walt at this point, you know, is a football player. And, you know, he looks like Hercules to Owen. And Owen later describes to us this thinking that if he tells Walter that Walter will hurt. the kid and maybe kill the kid.

And in Disney, none of the heroes actually kill any of the villains. No. Walter was the hero. You were afraid he was going to do what? Kill. But it's wrong. Did you ever talk to Walt about it? A little bit later after it happened.

I just remember finding out and it was like a combination of like rage and helplessness that I literally just thought of what I would have done to that kid if I had told me I really wanted to kill that kid I mean

I'm you know I'm his protector in a way you're you were kind of Walter was worried about protecting you in that time. Yeah. In a way, it was...

Me. That was doing what? Protecting myself. And who else? And my brother. Right, and Walt. And Walt. You're protecting Walter.

Yeah. So here you had this moment where it looked like Owen was sliding backwards, but according to Ron, it might have actually been his greatest leap forward. His most profound moment of empathy. These days, Owen is 23. just turned 23 a few months ago. And are you in love right now? Yes, I am with the Girl My Dreams, Emily.

She and I graduated from Revue last month. This has been a three-year program called Getting Ready for the Outside World. Grow. Yeah. And so he'll be graduating from the entire program? Yep. Yep. And off on his own.

And now, me, her, and our other two friends, John and Julie, also go to school, are all going to move and live at life in hyanus. What is life? Living independently forever. What is it? What kind of describe it? An adult independent living program. As we were talking, it was hard not to wonder how independent will Owen be

because that's the question that's in front of the Cuskines now, especially Walt. I think what scares me sometimes is kind of just having to go it alone in a lot of ways and at the same time just being there for, sorry, there's some daunting things ahead and I'm, you know, I'll just have to be ready to take these things on, kind of. No wonder you don't like birthdays. Makes sense. Makes clear. Makes sense. Well, it's a tough one.

I mean, Walter's like, you know, he said to me at one point, he's like, it says, to me at one point he's like, it says, always going to be Disney? I mean, forever. And my God, I know, Walt. But we talked to him about, you know, about everything, about, you know, our will and who will be Owens, you know, how he figures into everything. All the efforts of what we're trying to do and have been doing for all this time is to, one of our favorite movies is the jungle book. Because Mowgli's, it's his quest with his animal side. to get him to the manned village.

What we have been doing all this time and what we're still doing and we do every day is to bring Owen closer and closer to that man village that we all inhabit. There's so much hope in that and as he progresses you feel so good about it. But at the same time, that's not to say he'll ever totally get there. As hard as we might try, we may not get him there. but that doesn't mean you you leave him on the path you stay with him on the path

even if it's a never-ending path thanks to Ron Susskind Cornelia Susskind Walth Susskind Owen Susskind the whole Susskind family and Mr. Susskeide's book Ron's book is called Life Animated Thanks also to Jonathan Freeman Elaine Hall

Steve Silberman Pamela Dita Lvoire and Kelsey Paget And sincere thanks also to Gil Tippy and to Tina McCourt at the Rebecca School and to the whole staff at that school. They're all heroes in my mind here. So here you go. There you go. I'm Chad I boom-rod. I'm Robert Krollwich. Thanks for listening.