978-1572305441

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Zachary 55
bally express their anxiety in ways that enable parents to recognize it as
such, or to identify the true source of the anxiety. Although Zachary had
good knowledge of grammar and vocabulary, there were still lots of examples
of his difficulties in the social use of language to navigate his
way through the world. I had a lot of trouble understanding what
Zachary was talking about during our interview. He would bring up all
kinds of people and topics without supplying a shared context for the
conversation, in a sense engaging us and not engaging us in this conversation.
Although I had never heard of most of the people he referred to,
he seemed to have little appreciation that I might need some contextual
information. The distinction between monologue and conversation was
a tenuous one for Zachary. He made no concessions to the listener. Perhaps
there is a connection between this difficulty in the use of language
to navigate the social world and its ability to modulate anxiety. It is possible
that his language skills could not be harnessed by his executive
function skills to help him be aware of a listener’s needs in conversation
or to think of other coping mechanisms, of imagining another way of
dealing with change. He cannot tell himself that it is of no use to worry
about death because it won’t happen to me, at least not yet. He cannot
tell himself these sorts of lies.
Instead, Zachary’s way of dealing with anxiety was to ask the same
questions over and over again. This was unsettling and very trying for
his mother. But for Zachary to be momentarily reassured, he had to ask
the same set of questions over and over again, and Angela had to answer
them in exactly the same way. The questioning became a verbal ritual, a
means of warding off change. It represented his refusal to accept disorder.
He must have felt that he was superimposing a whole different type
of order over this anxiety—that repeated questions and the ritual of
asking them were in and of themselves a type of predictability that supplied
what the inevitability of change and death took away.
I could see this most clearly during the interview. Zachary had his
set of lines to speak, and his mother had her set of lines. She had to deliver
them in precisely the same way. It was the repetition, the ritual of
asking the same question, that was momentarily comforting to Zachary,
not the answers. It felt like Zachary, his mother, and I were in a little
play. Zachary was both playwright and director. When I entered the theater,
I too had my lines to deliver and my questions to ask. I was both
actor and audience (certainly not the director). The play was a ritualistic
reenactment of the anxiety of death expressed through the problem
of change and replacement.