My father was most patient with Mike. Mom took Mike’s withdrawal from everything personal. I rode the middle ground: patient to a point, then withdrawing, thinking that something in me failed to reach Mike. I had an element of If-I-Keep-On-Trying-ness about me. I still wish I could have reached my big brother.
This is the 4th page of my short comic sketch: I’m My Own Worst Enemy. I did this a couple of years before I started my blog, which concentrated on my older brother, Mike, who is autistic, nonverbal and low functioning.
Below is the third page of my comic book that synopsizes my childhood as the brother of an autistic, low functioning, nonverbal person. I always wanted to help out. My parents had a rough time of it.
This is the second page of my short comic “I’m My Own Worst Enemy“, about a bit of life as a sibling of a nonverbal, low functioning, autistic brother.
I made a small comic book a couple of years before I started my blog. The original mission of my blog was to document my experience as the sibling of my older autistic, low functioning, nonverbal brother. I had a lot of writings, photographs, sketches and thoughts to share, which you can see in my […]
I’m continuing to process my brother Mike’s* predicament. I visually paraphrased a picture from Mike’s youth to the latest image I captured during a video conference with Mike’s healthcare team. The snake/lifeline/breathing-tube imagery imperfectly divides the two portraits.(See other recent posts for other efforts at visual processing Mike’s condition.) [Note: Apologies – have not yet […]
My older brother Mike doesn’t know he’s in trouble. Mike is low functioning, autistic and has never spoken. He is inwardly directed, if that concept even makes sense for him. I spent many years trying to understand my brother and, I don’t know him any better than I did 60 years ago. Mike breathes in […]
Mike is still with us or, (more accurately) with himself. Mike is my older autistic brother, who is autistic and low functioning. During most of his life he was inwardly directed, although he would take your hand sometimes, to get you to open a door to go where he wanted, or to direct you to […]
This is one of the layered, complex (overdone?) sketches of Mike’s* situation. * Mike is my older brother (autistic, nonverbal and low functioning). He has been on a ventilator for more than a year. Now, it seems, he cannot be safely removed.
My drawings (as yet unposted here) have been getting more and more complicated. Layer upon layer of thoughts, when made visible, crowd the paper and dilute the focus. However, the point of layering is to get the thoughts on paper. I kept today’s sketch simple. I emphasized Mike’s face. The ventilator connection is subtle and […]
Brotherly Love 