Goodbye and God Bless, Gail Kastorf

I learned today that autism support guru Gail Kastorf, has died. My heart hurts hearing this because Gail was my very first support group leader. Gail was the one who showed me I was not alone. Her pamphlet, from the Autism Support Center in Danvers (1993? 1994?) was the first hands-on information I had every been given about autism. I wrote about Gail in my first book, Making Peace With Autism, Shambhala, 2006): Reaching Out My next step was to locate other people like me. I called the local branch of the Department of Mental Retardation, [as Department of Developmental Services was called back then], which ran an autism support group at a nearby office. My first night at the autism support group felt to me like coming home. In this room full of strangers, I listened to story after story like mine. The mother whose child would not eat and for whom even the great Children’s Hospital of Boston had no clear diagnosis, who had finally returned home to Venezuela only to hear from her old family doctor the word she had been fearing all along: autism. Or the father of twins, one normal, one disabled, who had been given multiple diagnoses but who kept hoping and emphasizing the positive, only to realize that all the diagnoses were euphemisms for autism. Or Sheila, whose son had just been examined because the doctors suspected a hearing loss. He had not spoken a word until he was three. Yet testing revealed that his hearing was perfect. The more horrible the story, t...
Source: Susan's Blog - Category: Child Development Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: blogs