Danny was the funniest person I have ever known.
I told Leo this first because I thought it was the most important thing, because humor is one of the currencies of Leo’s life and I wanted him to understand that Danny operated in the same currency.
Danny had a particular relationship with timing. He understood, instinctively, the architecture of a joke, the setup and the beat and the landing, and he could execute it in a way that made you suspect he had been studying comedy professionally. He was also, like Leo, a reader, though the reading had come slowly for him, hard-won, and the joy he took in it was more visible than Leo’s because it had cost him more.
He had worked in a movie theater for eleven years, taking tickets and selling concessions with the specific pleasure of someone who loves films and is surrounded by people who love films. He knew the catalog of the theater by heart, which movies were showing in which auditorium and what time and which ones were worth seeing. He had opinions about films that were serious and specific and that he was not shy about expressing.
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.
