I built parachute because I could not find an honest answer.

Michael was born in 1997.

For almost thirty years I have carried his world in my head. The way he likes the curtains opened in the morning. The exact phrase that helps him transition from one thing to the next. The food he will not eat, no matter how many ways we try. The music that finds him when nothing else can.

I wrote pieces of it down. Sticky notes. Notebooks. A binder I tried to keep up with for a while. Long emails to every new staff person, retyped almost word-for-word. Most of it lives nowhere except inside me.

For a long time the question I could not say out loud was: what happens to all of this when I am gone?

I built parachute because I could not find an honest answer. This is the record I wish I had been keeping for almost thirty years. The one I am keeping now, for Michael, and the one we want to make possible for every family who knows what we know.