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11:54pm June 10, 2014
stimmyabby asked: Who is Denise Degraf? Crabtail and The Dolphin? I googled and found a little, but not much. Are there any books on autistic history?

Denise was also known as Moggymania, she had an LJ and a public blog, and reviewed books sometimes too.  She had a lot of cats.

Crabtail and the Dolphin are a wonderful mother-daughter pair.  Also known as Juli and Nicolette.  Seeing them move around in the same room together is like watching two people dance to the same tune without even looking at each other, for a sensing person it’s an absolute delight of mother-daughter love and connectedness.  They both had Rett syndrome.  Crabtail was diagnosed with severe intellectual disability growing up and only began to type in her teens, and speak as an adult, and still had a lot of trouble functioning.  Her daughter was born after she was raped in an institution, and she had to fend off CPS all the time saying she didn’t have the mental age to raise a severely disabled baby (Crabtail had mild Rett, the Dolphin had severe Rett), but her child was always perfectly well cared for and they always went away frustrated.  

I posted an article recently about how Crabtail only got an education because she got Guillain Barre disease and was paralyzed and they sent in an instructor who didn’t know she was supposed to have an intellectual disability.  

Anyway, Crabtail did a lot of things to keep her daughter (who is very medically fragile) alive, and to help her communicate, and basically moved mountains for her child and for other autistic people in a similar situation.  A lot of people didn’t like her because she wanted a cure (for herself, not for her daughter) and took her daughter to a DAN! doctor, but she really did more for autistic people in her local area alone, than many of the people who were criticizing her.  

I miss her.  We communicated offline only by her circling around my table and me altering my rocking pattern enough to show that I understood her, but that was enough for both of us, the acknowledgement in the sensing world.  People often had trouble knowing what to make of her because she could speak in these really narrow areas, but she was actually propping up a very thin veneer of a facade of functioning in certain ways, and underneath she had extremely severe processing issues that most people couldn’t see.  I identified with that.

Notes:
  1. withasmoothroundstone posted this