On School Shootings, As an Autism Sibling

My crazy family. From the left: Cade, me, Dad, Mom,
Kelsey, and Brinn.

I am one of four children. I have two older sisters: Brinn, age twenty-four, and Kelsey, age twenty-two. I'm the third girl in our lineup; Haley, age twenty. My little brother is seventeen and the only one of us still in high school. His legal first name is Kenneth, after my father and his father and his father, but we have always called him by his middle name, Cade. He loves Star Wars, our pets, video games, and Blake Lively. He will graduate with his class in July of 2019.

That is, if he lives long enough.

I love my brother vey much, so much that every time a mass shooting occurs in a United States school, despite how normal and nightmarishly commonplace they are beginning to feel, my heart aches and fractures for the lives that are suddenly cut brutally short. Every time, every place, in another world, they are him. If we do not stop this, it may be him. Cade is not only a high school student, which alone puts him at risk in our current reality, but he also has autism. He is very "high-functioning", as it's often put, fully verbal and fiercely independent, but he is still uniquely vulnerable, and it leaves me paralyzed to imagine what a shooting at his school would entail for him, for me, for our family. He is not lesser in any way than any neurotypical kid his age, but he is at risk in ways this counterpart would not be.

Students are evacuated from their school at Major Stoneman Douglas High
School on February 14th, 2018.

As an autistic person, he is extremely noise-sensitive. Loudness can make his brain go into panic mode, short-circuiting in the face of this perceived violation, and he freezes, shrinks into himself, and is virtually incapacitated until the intrusion stops. Guns are loud. Shootings are loud. People running for their lives and screaming and police shouting at you to put your hands up are ear-splittingly, staggeringly loud. Even if Cade was lucky enough to survive this hypothetical shooting I can only pray never, ever happens, he is so incredibly sensitive to the emotions in his environment. So many people misinterpret autistic people's difficulty expressing themselves as robotic unfeeling, which is entirely inaccurate, especially in my brother's case. He hates arguing, hates tension and bad feelings of any kind, and internalizes these things so much. No person, let alone a child, should ever have to experience such sheer terror, such real peril, and my brother would feel this in raw, hideously hi-definition. The scars would be unimaginable.

As I'm sure happens in every home a school-age child occupies, I watch my baby brother leave in the morning, loping out the door like a gangly baby deer carrying a messy navy blue backpack, and pray he comes home. That I'll hear him singing to himself when he thinks no one can hear him. That he'll use all of my bubble bath all at once and make me royally pissed of at him. I need him to make me laugh and tell me new things about AT-ATs and drive me absolutely crazy. I am so afraid that my family will be forced to live the rest of our lives with a Cade-shaped wound in us.

Cade and me at Disneyland, summer 2015. As you can see,
he really enjoys hugs. 

I pray that he will not become another candlelight vigil, another school portrait on the news instead of in a yearbook, another life filled with unknown potential stolen by gun violence.

This has got to stop. This isn't about the left or the right or any ridiculous party lines, it is about precious human lives. Please do not let the discourse and policy changes and call for action brought up by the most recent act of senseless violence die, just to repeat the tired cycle the next time it happens.

The next time, it could be your brother, or mine. It could be your cousin or son or neighbor or another stranger who does not matter any less than any of these people. It could even be you. Please. Please. Let us work until we can do all we can to prevent there ever being a next time. Let's trade "next time" for "Never Again", thoughts and prayers for real action and real change. We will not survive without it. We have to do this.

For Columbine. For Sandy Hook. For Major Stoneman Douglas.

For Cade.