"There's compassion available for the small child that everyone knows has a disability," Tyler Hudson says. "But what about when he ages out of that and turns into an adult, and now his behaviors can be perceived as threatening?"

His son is 18 now. "There's nothing between 18 and 80 for him." He will require significant support for the rest of his life, and Hudson describes that reality as the hardest stage of an actual grieving process, not something people talk about openly.

He pushes back on how society has reframed autism. "We say, 'Oh, autism is a superpower.' Well, it might be for that person. It's not for us. There's no evidence of savant-level telepathic communication going on with us."

Even the early hope, he says, produces its own kind of bargaining: "God made my child this way for a reason," a mental gymnastics society at large has adopted too, sanitizing something it doesn't actually understand.

@delbigtree