2023-09-08
27 分钟This is in conversation from Apple News.
I'm Shamita Basu.
Today, the dark history of institutionalizing people with disabilities.
When Jennifer Sr.
Was 12 years old, her mom finally told her the truth about their family.
Her mom wasn't, in fact, an only child.
She had a sister, a younger sister named Adele.
I was overwhelmed.
I mean, at one point I started crying because I think I also thought in some way, wait, like, I have an aunt.
Like, I want to know who my aunt is.
Jennifer learned that her aunt Adele had been born in 1951 with an intellectual disability and had been institutionalized before her second birthday.
She had lived almost her entire life separated from her family.
I remembered being made unbelievably sad by this fact and grasping immediately that this couldn't have been easy for my mother or my grandparents.
Jennifer grew up not knowing much else about her Aunt Adele, aside from a single visit she and her mom paid her in the 90s.
But a few years ago, Jennifer decided she wanted to know more.
She needed to know to understand her aunt's life story.
And what she learned helped piece together the picture of not just her family tree, but the broader history of institutionalizing people with disabilities and how it ultimately harmed so many families.
Jennifer Sr.
Is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, and she wrote this story about her aunt's life for the Atlantic.
It's a deeply moving piece about regrets, reconnection, and reimagining what Adele's life might have looked like if she'd been born today under very different circumstances.