978-1572305441

Zachary 53
was in fact a literal, entirely egocentric, interpretation of death. The important
part of Zachary’s interrogation of his mother was not the “What
will happen to Grandma or Uncle Jim or Ferdinand Porsche?” question
but the “Who will replace them?” question. More than anything else, I
realized, Zachary was in fact terrified of change, of disruption in the order
and coherence of his world. This was, in fact, the classic symptom
of resistance to change, but because Zachary was so high functioning in
terms of his language abilities, it appeared as a much more sophisticated
anxiety about death and loss. My mistake was that I had paid too much
attention to the first part of the repetitive questioning and too little to
the second part about change and replacement.
Zachary had taken an abstract concept like death and reduced it to
its most concrete dimensions. Zachary’s language abilities allowed him
to talk in a metaphysical way, but his ASD focused that concern on the
immediate, literal consequences of death and the changes that it brings
about. I had initially assumed that what concerned Zachary about death
would be the same as it might be for a typical child. But I was wrong.
The anxiety about death had to be interpreted through the prism of
ASD, the distortion that the disorder imposes on a child’s experience of
the world and the vicissitudes of change.
In spite of myself, I found the whole conversation with Zachary
amusing. So did his mother. We both found it funny that a nine-year-old
child would have such an adult preoccupation and would express it in
such a literal way. It made me remember a humorous scene from the
novel Molloy by Samuel Beckett. Molloy is crippled and lives alone with
his mother (whom we never meet). He likes to go to the beach and suck
stones. He gathers sixteen stones and decides to place four in each of
his pants pockets and the pockets of his overcoat. All his pockets are
now full. His main problem is what to do with each stone as he finishes
sucking it. He doesn’t want to suck the same stone twice before he has
sucked all sixteen. He decides to put a stone in his left coat pocket after
sucking it but soon realizes that all sixteen stones will end up in the
same pocket, an unsatisfactory solution. His answer is to rotate the
stones from pocket to pocket, replacing each stone from his coat pocket
with one from his pants pocket. He goes on and on like this, trying to
find a perfect solution to the problem of replacement. He cannot deviate
from the ritual of sucking the sixteen stones in turn. But of course there
is no perfect solution to this dilemma; that is the point. It’s a very funny
episode but profound at the same time. The problem of replacing
stones, which is silly at first, takes on a more conceptual, slightly sinis-