{"id":1734,"date":"2007-08-17T08:25:00","date_gmt":"2007-08-17T08:25:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/deaconsbench\/2007\/08\/attention-must-be-paid.html"},"modified":"2007-08-17T08:25:00","modified_gmt":"2007-08-17T08:25:00","slug":"attention-must-be-paid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/2007\/08\/attention-must-be-paid.html","title":{"rendered":"“Attention must be paid”"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a>Those are among the last words of Arthur Miller’s greatest work, “Death of a Salesman”<\/a>, but they could also serve as a sorrowful footnote to his life, a life that was evidently more complicated than we realized. Word is now seeping out about Miller’s rarely mentioned son<\/a>: <\/p>\n

Daniel was born…in a New York City hospital. The Broadway producer Robert Whitehead, who died in 2002, would tell Martin Gottfried that Miller called him on the day of the birth. Miller was “overjoyed,” Whitehead said, and confided that he and Inge were planning to name the boy “Eugene”\u2014possibly after Eugene O’Neill, whose play ‘Long Day’s Journey into Night,’ which had won the Pulitzer in 1957, had awed Miller. The next day, however, Miller called Whitehead again and told him the baby “isn’t right.” The doctors had diagnosed the infant with Down syndrome. Born with an extra 21st chromosome, children with Down syndrome are often recognized by their upward-slanted eyes and flattened facial features. They suffer from hypotonia\u2014decreased muscle tone\u2014and mild to moderate retardation. Many are born with heart problems, and in 1966 they were not expected to live past the age of 20.<\/p>\n

“Arthur was terribly shaken\u2014he used the term ‘mongoloid,'” Whitehead recalled. He said, “‘I’m going to have to put the baby away.'” A friend of Inge’s recalls visiting her at home, in Roxbury, about a week later. “I was sitting at the bottom of the bed, and Inge was propped up, and my memory is that she was holding the baby and she was very, very unhappy,” she says. “Inge wanted to keep the baby, but Arthur wasn’t going to let her keep him.” Inge, this friend recalls, “said that Arthur felt it would be very hard for Rebecca, and for the household,” to raise Daniel at home. Another friend remembers that “it was a decision that had Rebecca at the center.”<\/p>\n

Within days, the child was gone, placed in a home for infants in New York City. When he was about two or three, one friend recalls, Inge tried to bring him home, but Arthur would not have it. Daniel was about four when he was placed at the Southbury Training School. Then one of two Connecticut institutions for the mentally retarded, Southbury was just a 10-minute drive from Roxbury, along shaded country roads. “Inge told me that she went to see him almost every Sunday, and that [Arthur] never wanted to see him,” recalls the writer Francine du Plessix Gray. Once he was placed in Southbury, many friends heard nothing more about Daniel. “After a certain period,” one friend says, “he was not mentioned at all.”<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s a tragic story about a different time and place — and one that bears revisiting. <\/p>\n

More and more, we are seeing children like this less and less. It’s not that they are being put away, as Miller’s son was. It’s that they’re being aborted out of existence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Those are among the last words of Arthur Miller’s greatest work, “Death of a Salesman”, but they could also serve as a sorrowful footnote to his life, a life that was evidently more complicated than we realized. Word is now seeping out about Miller’s rarely mentioned son: Daniel was born…in a New York City hospital.…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":365,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1734","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n"Attention must be paid" - The Deacon's Bench<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/2007\/08\/attention-must-be-paid.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\""Attention must be paid" - The Deacon's Bench\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Those are among the last words of Arthur Miller’s greatest work, “Death of a Salesman”, but they could also serve as a sorrowful footnote to his life, a life that was evidently more complicated than we realized. 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