Remembering Loved Ones Dinah Murray NLCS 1957 – 1964

identify less ambiguously as autistic, as did I.

There’s a long section in that chapter titled ‘Being rather weird’, and Dinah’s acceptance of her own and other people’s weirdness was a defining feature of both her professional and personal life. She was always friends with a wide range of fascinatingly weird people, and when her kids turned out to be fairly odd too, in our different ways, she made sure we didn’t see that as a problem, even if other people sometimes might. I owe to her my ability to be proudly weird, and I shudder to think where I would be without it: probably no less weird, just much less comfortable with it.

I think she helped a lot of people to accept themselves, and I know she helped a lot of people to understand themselves better. Her framework for understanding autism, and her insights into thinking about neurodiversity more broadly, will make a difference for decades to come: she died feeling she had achieved her life’s work, a firm foundation for people to work from, her ideas increasingly accepted and recognised.

We talked a lot in her last weeks about the lives she’d touched, the ways that people appreciated her and how much she loved them back. She had a way of connecting people who needed to be connected. I read to her from the book ‘Humankind’, about the weight of evidence that people, by and large, are fundamentally decent; Leo read to her from ‘Entangled Life’, about mushrooms, mycelia and the interconnectedness of all living things. Both books felt like they were filling in details of things she already deeply felt, understood and embodied.

Dinah died of pancreatic cancer on Wednesday 7 July 2021. She was well cared for and surrounded by love, and experienced surprisingly little pain.