We are older now than we ever dreamed we'd be, Rosemary and I. When we were children, best friends forever, Rose pricking her finger to seal the vow, me chickening out, we imagined a lot of things. But never this. Grandparents were what we had, not what we would grow up to be. It wasn't conceivable that we could be so old…

The words are ugly in the 1952 Funk & Wagnalls Standard Encyclopedia. Trisomy 21, called Down syndrome now, was called mongolism then, and the description of the condition was graphic and cruel and wrong….

It was the Sunday before Halloween and the children came to church dressed not as ninjas or vixens but as saints. They'd been asked to do this and dozens did, young kids and older ones, arriving in flowing robes and sandals; and the priest invited them all up to the altar. "Can you tell us a little about your saint?" he asked. And the children…

They sit in their homes and tell their stories and show you photographs and sometimes they show you their child's room. Books. Trophies. Posters. Clothes in the closet. Shoes on the floor. Things are all they have left. And their stories run in the papers. And on the news. And into each…