Looking After

Meet Lionel, Caroline's older brother. Lionel was born in the 1950s, when no-one knew what autism was, nor how to study or treat it. Terrifyingly, at the time, most autistic children were institutionalised and often died in their thirties or forties.Luckily, over the course of Lionel's life, an understanding of autism - and even its name - has become more embedded in our individual lives and in society. But this is not to say that autistic people have it easy. There is still a gap between the life experiences and expectancy that neurodivergent and neurotypical individuals have. As Caroline found, nowhere is this truer than in end-of-life care.Looking After is a portrait of Lionel - an extraordinary man who often looked a bit dishevelled, and whose life was certainly unusual but never dull. He had perfect pitch, could multiply three-figure numbers in his head, or work out which day of the week you were born on, the instant you told him your birthday. Through Caroline's account of Lionel's life, from his childhood to his musicality, his time at work to the challenges at the end, this is both the tale of the impact of one man on many people, and the story of how everyone's sense of autism has changed over the past seventy years, and how there is still more to do.