Not everyone's experience is the same, but the letters we received from brothers and sisters of people with disabilities pleasantly surprised us.
Times have clearly shifted for the better. Twenty years ago, siblings lived with their pain locked away: they feared and felt shame talking about what happened at home. They didn't even dare ask their parents why they witnessed so many things they couldn't control. Now, thanks to the support available to parents, thanks to school integration, novels, films, and television programs, these realities have become visible. People speak about them. They name the conditions, the illnesses, the disorders. Better care and stronger social services have made the world of disability feel less isolating.
It isn't easy—and it never will be—to be the sibling of a person with a disability, whether you are older or younger. But now, more than before, you don't have to feel shame about being healthy and whole alongside them, about living your own life, going out, falling in love, starting a family.
This makes it easier to love them well, to help them, to live beside them with humor. It becomes natural—when needed—to become their advocate, to push for their progress.
It's beautiful to read the testimonies that follow, knowing that beneath all this hope lies real suffering still—and that's normal. What strikes you is the maturity that springs from it: forced as it may be, it carries a serenity and composure that take your breath away.
And it's remarkable—though sadly not true for everyone—to see the genuine, spontaneous gratitude that flows from almost all of them toward that brother or sister who, wrongly, is still seen by some as nothing but a burden to a family.
How much ground has been covered. And how we ourselves must stand in wonder at the truth—as Francesca Sauro says—that "the more we push differences away from us, the more they frighten us."
Mariangela Bertolini, 2009