He had to learn it from a child who did not know she was teaching it.

Chapter 23 — A Person, Not a Label

I have thought a great deal, over these years, about the twenty families, and I want to be careful about how I say what I have come to believe, because it would be easy to say it cruelly, and I do not think cruelty is the truth of it.

Twenty families looked at a single page of medical language and made a decision about a whole human being.

They saw a diagnosis, a label, a set of anticipated difficulties, and they concluded that the difficulties were the child, that the label described the sum of what she would be.