This one’s hard to write. But it’s important. Because this is about someone who understood Kya completely – without training, without reading a single book about autism, without ever needing to. He just knew. And she knew he knew.
Grampa. Sarah’s dad.
He and Nanny used to pop in all the time. Not arranged, not formal, not a big event. Just a knock on the door, a quick hello, and straight through to wherever Kya was. That was the thing – they didn’t really come to see us. I don’t mean that unkindly. They love us too. But we all knew who they were really there for. Grampa would walk in, find Kya, and that was him done. The rest of us could have left the room and he wouldn’t have noticed.
He’d sit down next to her. Not in front of her, not towering over her – next to her. Side by side. And Kya would lean in. She’d tuck herself against him, the way she does when someone feels completely safe, and the two of them would just sit there. No agenda. No activity. No trying to make her do anything or say anything. Just being together, quietly, for a few minutes.
He’d ask her things. “What have you been doing today then, Kya?” She wouldn’t answer. Not with words. But she’d look at him, and sometimes she’d reach up and stroke his face. Just gently, with her fingers, tracing his cheek like she was reading something the rest of us couldn’t see. And he’d sit perfectly still and let her. He never flinched. He never rushed it. He understood that this was her way of saying everything she couldn’t put into words.
“Grampa’s little girl,” he’d say. Every single time.
Most people, when they meet Kya, try too hard. They crouch down and ask questions. They wave toys. They try to get a reaction, a smile, a word – something they can take away as proof that a connection was made. Grampa never did any of that. He just showed up, sat down, and waited. And Kya came to him every time. Every single time. Because he gave her the one thing she values more than anything else in the world: no pressure. Just presence.
Then, out of nowhere, Grampa got ill. It was sudden. One of those phone calls that changes the shape of everything. He was in hospital before any of us had time to process what was happening.
We took Kya to visit. We weren’t sure how she’d handle it – hospitals are noisy, clinical, unfamiliar. Everything she usually finds difficult. But she walked in, saw Grampa in the bed, and climbed straight up next to him like she’d been visiting hospital beds her whole life.
And then she found the button.
If you’ve ever been in a hospital bed, you know the one – the little controller that raises and lowers the head and the feet. Kya discovered it within about thirty seconds, and that was it. Up went the bed. Down went the bed. Up. Down. Up. Down. The two of them sitting there, Grampa in his hospital gown and Kya with the controller, both of them laughing so loudly the nurses came to check everything was alright.
Everything was more than alright. Grampa was grinning. Kya was flapping with joy. The bed was going up and down like a fairground ride. Other patients were looking over, half confused, half amused. And I stood at the end of the bed watching my daughter make her grandfather laugh harder than I’d heard him laugh in months, and I thought: this is it. This is what love looks like when words aren’t part of the deal.
He never once asked her to be different. He never once wished she was easier to reach. He just reached her anyway, in the quiet way that mattered most.
Grampa died not long after that. I’m not going to write about that day in detail because some things belong to the family and not to the page. But I will say this: Kya was incredible. Quietly, gently, impossibly strong. She didn’t understand death the way we do. She didn’t cry at the funeral or ask where he’d gone. But she knew something had changed. Something in the shape of her world had shifted, and she felt it.
She doesn’t talk about him in the way you or I would. She doesn’t say “I miss Grampa” or ask when he’s coming back. But every now and then – out of nowhere, in the middle of something completely ordinary – she’ll say his name. Just once. Quietly. Not a question. Not a request. Just his name, dropped into the air like she’s checking it’s still there.
“Grampa.”
And every time she says it, I stop whatever I’m doing and say, “Yeah. Grampa.” Because I don’t know what she’s thinking when she says it. I don’t know if she’s remembering the cuddles, or the hospital bed, or the way he used to sit beside her and just be still. But I know she’s carrying him with her. In her own way, in her own language, she’s keeping him close.
People sometimes assume that because Kya is non-verbal, because she doesn’t express emotions the way most people do, that she doesn’t feel things as deeply. That’s wrong. She feels everything. She just carries it differently. The love she had for Grampa wasn’t loud or obvious or easy to photograph. It was a hand on his face. A lean into his side. A name spoken softly into the quiet of an ordinary afternoon.
He called her Grampa’s little girl. And she still is. She always will be.
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