My autistic grandfather dutifully cared for his wife (the grandmother I never got to meet) at the end of her fight with breast cancer.
Grandma Mary really wanted marijuana joints to cope with her pain, but the doctors only permitted her to use morphine (this was in the late 1970's). She couldn't administer it to herself so my grandfather injected it into her veins for her.
He told me this story one summer day when I was over at his apartment with my father. I was 10 years old at that time .
What prompted the story was grandpa Bill giving us a tour of his tackle box. I saw a syringe next to the rubber worms, and I asked what it was for. He explained that the fake worms injected with air made them seem life like to the fish, they'd wriggle about in the water, and were more likely to get a bite.
Then, he paused and told the story of that needle, and what it was originally for. After grandma Mary died, he kept all those remnant from that time, and everything seemed to have a repurpose . I watched him grimace as he took the morphine syringe in his hand and he angrily snapped it in two, and threw it away.
That was the first time I ever seen the gentle man look angry, actually, full of rage.
Only now, as I lay here in the hospital bed, after having a dose of Dilaudid, as the burning hot pain relief sears through my veins and breaks open my weary heart. I feel my grandmother, and I didn't have to meet her, to begin to feel her pain.
I feel grandpa's pain too. Repurposing the hurtful memories, the tools we are are actually given , when what we needed was something totally different. The autistic tendency to survive and "make due" with rampant unfairness.
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