He had a best friend named Marcus, who did not have Down syndrome and who had met Danny at a community center when they were both teenagers and had been his friend for the rest of Danny’s life. They had watched every major sporting event together for twenty years, in the same seats on Marcus’s couch with the same snacks, and when Danny died Marcus was the person I called after my parents.
He had been loved completely.
This is the thing I wanted Leo to understand and this is the thing that is hardest to convey to a fourteen-year-old, the completeness of Danny’s life. Not despite his disability but as a life that included his disability as one of its conditions, the way all lives include their conditions, the specific circumstances that shape but do not define.
Danny had been made fun of.
I told Leo this too, and I told it clearly, without softening.
