A mother is grieving the loss of her son — not because he was dragged to the depths of the ocean by a rare sea creature, but because he had autism.
Noah Michaels, 12, was snatched on a boat trip during a family holiday last year. The large, tentacled mollusc launched on Michaels, pulling him overboard. He was reading an anime comic at the time — a fact that his mother, Mary Michaels, 41, finds especially devastating. “I wish he’d do something less weird,” she said.
Michaels has begun the long road to acceptance but still finds it too much to bear.
“I didn’t react at first, as I thought the creature was trying to suck the autism out of him,” she admitted. “And I’d have loved to have seen him in one of those North Face puffer jackets.”
“Yes, I know the squid ate him,” Michaels kept repeating. “But the autism.”
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