TARRA CARLSON’S plan for her old age is simple: to die before her husband.

She’s been nearly inseparable from him since they met thirteen years ago on a dating site. After a few messages and video chats, they learned they lived just blocks apart. The revelation led to a long midnight drive together. Soon, he moved in. They got married a few years later. He is, without a doubt, the greatest and best thing in her life, she says. He is also, in some ways, her guarantee of life.

Carlson, forty-eight, has autism and ADHD. She didn’t get a formal diagnosis until she was thirty-nine—“Only boys in my time had those disabilities,” she says—but her whole life has been marked by social exclusion. She says that, when she was growing up, her teachers and school administrators sensed there was something different about her, but they didn’t know ­exactly what; some, she says, would use the r-word to describe her. Carlson attended separate classes for students with disabilities throughout elementary and parts of high school. She struggled in college because of a lack of disability accommodations. She remembers that when she was a child, a doctor suggested her parents send her to an institution; doctors also warned she’d never be able to live independently as an adult.

Despite the warnings, she did achieve some degree of independence: at twenty-three, she moved to Alberta from British Columbia on her own. She makes a living as a caregiver for people with disabilities and people who hire and train their own support staff rather than rely on agencies.

[It’s like a sci fi/horror flick that was meant to be a warning come to life. ~ Beege]