By Elizabeth Butler
VALDOSTA — Shortly after I learned the child in a family I know had been diagnosed with autism, I went to the library in search of a mystery for pleasure reading.
But as God would have it, as I walked into the library and glanced through the featured books at the entrance, there it was — “A Friend Like Henry: The remarkable true story of an autistic boy and the dog that unlocked his world” by Nuala Gardner.
Nuala’s son, Dale, was born prematurely in 1988 in Scotland and didn’t say his first word until he was 26 months old. It took appointments with 13 different professionals over a 16-month period, before Dale, at almost 4 years, was diagnosed with classical autism. Never did Nuala, a part-time nurse for the elderly, give up as she battled Dale’s bizarre and sometimes dangerous autistic behavior, never did she settle for the opinion that her son was retarded, and never did she quit fighting to get her son moved to a regular school from the special school where he was picking up more autistic traits from the students there. But, ironically, it was a Golden Retriever named Henry who brought Dale out of his autistic world.
“Attending to Dale’s needs became even more of a battle as his rituals and obsessions grew increasingly rigid and unpredictable,” Nuala wrote of her 3 1/2 year-old son. “Just as I thought I had a handle on one, he would change it. Sausages were no longer allowed to touch baked beans on his plate — and I was supposed to know this. If I go the slightest thing ‘wrong’ in his eyes, a tantrum would result.
“I started to suffer from panic attacks and would be awake at night. When not dealing with Dale, I would become desperately anxious about what the next day would bring. Jamie witnessed this but was powerless to help because he had to be in a fit state for work himself — and by now had seen me overwhelmed so often.
“I had thoughts of wishing I was dead so I could escape this living hell of being imprisoned with Dale and his autism, which consumed me more and more. ...”
Certain words, such as “OK” and “proud” would cause Dale to fly into a rage, and he would bang his head furiously against the wall. His mother would have to sit on him, cradling his head trying to reassure him. One day, she had done this for 40 minutes when her husband, Jamie, came home from work. Jamie tried to entice him to go for a run in the garden, but he would have no part of it. Then Jamie came up with the idea of adopting a deep, refined voice and told Dale, “Dale, this is Henry speaking. I hate it when you cry. I’m so worried. Could you please stop this?”
Dale calmed down and told his dog, “All right, Henry. I’m sorry.”
And thus began the parents speaking to their son through Henry.
When the parents attended a seminar on autism, they cornered one of the speakers and told him about communicating with their son through their “dog’s” voice. Jim Taylor said, “I’m not surprised. A third party can reduce the anxieties associate with one-to-one conversation.”
Nuala wrote, “... with his unthreatening face and eyes, (Henry the dog) was not making the type of social demands on Dale that a person would. He had also become Dale’s first real friend, teaching him how to be successful in a relationship without all the pressure that would come with a human friend.
“When we got home, we saw how Jim was right. If we used Henry’s voice, Dale would look at the dog’s face, with correct eye contact and proximity to Henry, whereas when we spoke as ourselves, he either avoided looking at us or got right in our faces as before.”
Using Henry’s voice, “tantrums with Dale still happened, but not as often or for as long, because Henry could talk him through his frustration and reassure him more quickly than ever Jamie or I had been able to do. When Dale was almost 7 years old, he himself poignantly confirmed his appreciation of Henry to me: ‘I love my soft, cuddly dog. He’s beautiful. If I didn’t have him, I would be crying and sad for a long time.’”
The day came when Dale demanded to know if his problems had a name. His mother explained that “when he was born it was possible that his brain had been damaged a little, which caused problems in understanding people and knowing how to talk to them and socialize with them in the right way. Or it might have been that he had similar difficulties as Uncle Tommy, due to a link in the family.”
In the back of the book, Dale, who is an adult now and has successfully harnessed his autism, which is incurable, looks back and gives his reasoning for his behavior, such as walking on his tiptoes, stripping off his clothes, not looking people in the eye, vomiting at will, and not wanting to leave the park after more than four hours.
When his mother picked him up to leave, “His disapproval would be registered with a tantrum of mammoth proportions,” she wrote. “I had to carry him while he screamed, punched, continually kicked my shins, scraped his fingernails down my face, or tried to bit me to demonstrate the full force of his rage. Exhausted, I finally got him to our tenement building, where I then had to negotiate six flights of stairs to our apartment.”
People were cruel when they saw his autistic behavior and said he was spoiled and suggested spanking him.
And yet, as the Reading Group Guide at the back of the book says, “... some researchers’ (believe) that many of humanity’s greatest thinkers were autistic, from Isaac Newton to Albert Einstein ...”
