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When I tell the story of learning to accept and appreciate my son’s autism, I always include 2012. That was the year I had my surprise quintuple bypass.

I thought I was healthy, until I found out I was walking around, ready to drop at any moment. A walk to urgent care, an ambulance ride, and a life-changing surgery completely altered my point of view. As the doctor told me, I was “one of those guys who walks around healthy and dies of a heart attack at 40.” That was going to be me. From that point on, I saw things differently.

When I tell this story, people often assume the near-death experience helped me understand the beauty of my non-verbal son. They’re right, the experience helped me understand Lucas better, but not in the way they think.

What that moment really did was teach me to live in the present. It showed me that all we have is right now.

The salvation you’re waiting for may never come. The appreciation you anticipate might never materialize. The hopes and dreams you have for the future mean nothing without doing the work today. Right now is all we have.

At the time, my now-14-year-old son wasn’t even two. His delays were becoming more pronounced by the day, and I feared who he would become.

But the day I left that hospital, those fears began to fade. Suddenly, it wasn’t about who he might be one day. It was about who he already was, right then and there.

I made the effort to understand him, rather than worry about him. I wanted to know why he did the things he did and what his world looked like. My goal wasn’t to “snap him out of it.” My goal was to embrace who he was, no matter what that meant.

This way of thinking has persisted. Today, that’s still how I live my life. I think about all the things I feared that never came true, and how the one thing that was never on my radar nearly took me out before I turned 40.

So what’s the point?

I know there are challenges my son will face down the line. Adult care decisions and lifelong assistance aren’t just possible, they’re probable. As those tough conversations come along, I have them. We take them as they come.

I don’t, however, live in those moments. I live in this one. I focus on him and the joy I feel when he’s around. I don’t cry for his future. I celebrate his present.

Do you know who taught me that? Lucas. Lucas taught me that.

My boy doesn’t really “do” time. He can’t read a clock and, to be honest, I don’t think he fully understands the concept. Telling Lucas that we’re doing something later or next week gets no response.

When people ask if he understands Christmas or his birthday, I have to admit, I’m not sure he understands them the way most people mean it. He knows when it’s time to open presents or sing the birthday song. But I don’t know if he realizes he’s woken up to a special day. I’m not even sure he knows that sleep separates one day from the next.

Before you give me a crying Facebook emoji and send prayers, understand something, this isn’t a sad thing I’m telling you. It’s actually beautiful.

Don’t get me wrong. Would Lucas fit into our busy world better if he had Zoom meetings and iPhone alarms to guide his day? Sure. He could climb the corporate ladder and earn himself a heart attack by 35. But that’s not him. That’s not Lucas.

Instead, my son lives in the moment more than anyone I’ve ever met. He goes with the flow. His reactions to joy, frustration, or excitement are always real-time. He doesn’t worry about running out of cookies. He just eats them all right now and smiles. It’s amazing.

It’s funny how the mindset I developed after my surgery, this focus on the now, mirrors my son’s natural way of being. Especially when you consider how it helped me to accept him. Once I stopped obsessing over who he might become, I finally saw who he already was.

Thinking like this is healthy, and few people truly have it. Trust me, there’s no shortage of folks who like to remind us of everything we should be worrying about. They approach with questions and concerns that, as Lucas’s father, are absolutely on my radar. I’m aware, and I deal with them as they come. But I don’t let them cloud the love we share in this moment. I don’t steal from today’s happiness with worries about a future that might never come.

When people ask me how I stay positive, that’s how. It’s all about today. That’s all we have. That’s all I had the day I wheeled into surgery. That’s all I have now. That’s all we ever have.

I used to think I was teaching Lucas how to live in this world. But somewhere along the way, he started teaching me how to live in it, too. Not tomorrow. Not next year. Right now. And I’ve come to realize that maybe that’s the most important lesson of all.

No One Is to Blame for My Son

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Is It Really Autism? 🎧💙 From audiobook “Hi World I’m Dad” – HiBlogImDad.com #autism #autismawareness #autismacceptance #autismappreciation #fyp
♬ original sound – James Guttman