This is a guest post by Jonathan Rose, author of Love in the Age of Autism: Navigating a Joyful and Romantic Marriage in the Face of Adversity
Over the last two years of her life, Gayle DeLong composed a diary, which she titled Love in the Age of Autism. With unflinching honesty, she described the heartbreak and the joys of raising two autistic girls, producing an account far more realistic than anything you are likely to read in the mass media. She described her long battle with breast cancer, which she ultimately lost in January 2022. And she celebrated the happiest of all possible marriages, which sustained her – and me, her husband – through those two ordeals. As a professional historian, I immediately recognised that she had produced a gripping and important document of our times. It recorded the devastating impact of the autism epidemic, which has decimated a generation. And it revealed the terrible damage that the Covid lockdowns wreaked on all families, and special needs families in particular.
Gayle was a ‘MAHA Mom’ well before the term was invented. She recognised that both autism and cancer were caused largely by environmental toxins. She put herself and her family on an organic diet, she banished sugar from our kitchen, and she was always careful to wash the red dye off Advil. She and I and our family doctor all concluded that our girls’ autism had been the result of adverse reactions to vaccines, and she had the guts to make her views public in the face of fairly brutal online attacks. She wasn’t an MD, but she was an expert statistician, and that meant that (unlike many doctors) she could count. Responding to reports that the HPV vaccine could cause ovarian failure, she produced a study that showed that women who had had the vaccine had far fewer pregnancies than women who had not. She won a prize for another article, ‘Conflicts of Interest in Vaccine Safety Research’ (and she found plenty of conflicts). She worked with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on vaccine injury issues and supported his crusade to heal ‘the sickest generation’. She didn’t live to see him become Secretary of Health and Human Services – but I’m sure that, wherever she is, she feels happy and vindicated.
Raising autistic children and dealing with cancer can be terribly stressful, but our lives were certainly not unrelieved misery. We managed to indulge in all the joys of normal family life – and then some. We celebrated our girls’ achievements, including bat mitzvahs for both of them. We believed absolutely in family values, and for Gayle, one of the most important family values was warm, loving, monogamous sex. Autism moms often feel guilty about sex (even Jenny McCarthy!), but Gayle was determined to enjoy her husband to the hilt. It was the most effective therapy for the many stresses she was dealing with, fully organic and sugar-free (though she admitted it could be habit-forming). She was living proof that you can save the world and have an absolute blast while you’re doing it.