I meet the most amazing people on airplanes.  Sometimes I get a seatmate who's a dud, but most of the time the person I sit next to has a story to tell and tells it.  Airplanes are like confessionals.  We're seated at random with total strangers. My seatmate knows that the likelihood of running into me again is extremely remote.  I've been told many times that I have "one of those faces," that people feel they can tell their problems to. Several years ago, on an airplane, I heard the best story I had ever heard-or would likely ever hear again.

Fate seated me next to another mom, about my age. She was a professional woman, just like me.  She had a busy work life and demanding responsibilities on the home front, just like me.  We connected right away.  She told me of her work, and then she shared that she was the mom of a special needs kid.  We started commiserating about how hard it is to balance everything, and I asked her "What's your secret?" meaning, "How do you do it?"  I wasn't prepared for the answer; she literally told me her secret.

The truth was that she hadn't always "balanced everything." She had gone through a very, very dark time in her life when everything-professionally and personally-flew apart.  That was just half of her captivating story.  The most fascinating part was the story of her boss-who may have saved her life-who will never get public recognition for being the hero that she was. 

My seatmate-let's call her Ann-was parenting a child whose behavior was developmentally unusual.  He was meeting some of the benchmarks, but not others.  He was a late talker.  He didn't socialize well.  He had eccentric behaviors.  Cognitively he was very bright, and he was physically healthy. But he was atypical in ways that the daycare providers and the pediatrician couldn't quite put a finger on.

Family professionals who are reading this today are already way ahead of me; they're thinking "Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)."  As it turns out, that was the child's diagnosis-it was a form of ASD called Asperger's Syndrome.  But when I heard this story about 15 years ago, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had not launched their "Learn the Signs. Act Early." campaign.  Higher functioning autism was not on anyone's radar screen; even the pediatrician missed it. It was finally diagnosed by a specialist.

When Ann and her husband got the news, she "fell apart."  She became suicidal and had to be hospitalized for several weeks. She had all she could do to tell her boss-and Ann felt as if this phone call was her last.  She couldn't see a way out.  She was convinced that her life-and her son's life-were over.

Ann's boss-let's call her "Marge"-pulled off an act of compassion that was awe-inspiring.  She told Ann to "forget about work, forget about sick time, forget about anything other than getting well." Everyone always says things like this, don't they?-"take all the time you need," is a favorite. In practice, however, workplace forbearance seems to run out coincidentally about the same time that one's sick time does. Marge's "policy handbook" was different.  She told Ann that she'd "handle it."  She instructed Ann that she was not to talk to anyone from work during her absence.

Then, for several weeks, Marge did both jobs-her own and Ann's. In a performance that could earn her an Oscar, Marge manufactured a "cover story" for Ann's absence.  I don't remember all the details today, but Ann had the type of job that might plausibly involve working out of the area for a few weeks. Marge convinced the workplace that Ann was tackling a special project off-site.  During these weeks when Ann was disabled, Marge did Ann's job to the point of ghost writing documents and filing reports for her. To the workplace observer, it looked like Ann was hard at it.

When Ann emerged from her crisis and was ready to return to work, she dreaded showing up in the office.  She was sure that the stigma was permanent and her career torpedoed.  Everyone would walk eggshells around her.  If she walked up to a gathering at the water cooler, she was sure that the group members would say something polite and then scatter like cockroaches. 

Then Marge told her the news:  "Ann, you haven't been ill.  You've been cranking out the paperwork the whole time."  Marge brought her up to speed and showed Ann all of the memos she had "written" from her hospital bed. She coached her on everything that was done on her behalf, so she could make a seamless reentry.  Ann was stunned. She told her boss that there was no way she could come back and take credit for work that Marge had been ghosting for weeks. 

What did her boss say?  "Ann-you must never speak of this. You know why?  Because if you did, think of what would happen to me?" Ann was stuck.  She was forced to become a co-conspirator with her boss-not to protect herself-but to protect this self-sacrificing woman from the ramifications of skirting company policy. Marge had no cold personnel regulations. There was no coworker gossip. No bureaucracy.  No sick leave. No short term disability.  No doctor's verifications.  No paper trail.  The whole event was off the books.

The end of this story is what Hollywood movies are made of. Ann enrolled her son in a special program, and he got the crucial therapeutic intervention he deserved.  At the moment Ann told me her story, her son was progressing beautifully. They had every realistic hope that he would live a full life.  But the shocking twist to this story is what happened to Ann's boss. I mean, you can't even make this stuff up!  About two years after the incident, Marge was killed in a traffic accident. Marge took Ann's story to the grave, literally.

This is a nonfiction parable about ethical dilemmas, mental health stigmas and work-life policy-but it's primarily one of astonishing love.  Marge took a heck of a professional risk. She worked-around company policy and, who knows, might have even broken some laws.  But Marge didn't see life through temporal rules. All she could see was a colleague she loved dearly who was facing a life-threatening emergency.  Marge knew that Ann was temporarily fragile. If she had been "outed" in the workplace, it could be the final blow that pushed her over the edge. Marge had an ironclad faith that Ann would recover and become all she had been and more.  The work got done.  And Ann got well.

No one other than Ann's family will ever know about Marge and her unsung heroism, except for a stranger on an airplane and now, years later, the readership of the stranger's blog.

The moral of the story is divine and self-evident. At 30,000 feet, I may have been brushed by the wings of a real angel. But the practical lesson I learned from Ann is this: ever since, when I've been on an airplane and my seatmate starts to make small talk, I put away the Skymall catalog and listen.  It's the least I can do to honor Marge.

Epilogue: 

It used to be that when infants and small children were developing slightly atypically, many educators and health providers took a "wait and see" approach. We know that children grow on their own timetables, and we resisted the possibility that we could alarm a parent unnecessarily. 

This is no longer best practice.  Autism Spectrum Disorders and other developmental problems are best identified early to ensure the child has access to therapies during critical developmental stages.  For example, if an infant is slow to make eye contact, or if a toddler is not pointing at things of interest, it's best to refer the parent to a pediatrician to be sure. Check out the CDC's Learn the Signs-Act Early Campaign. http://cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism/actearly/  

In addition, I will disclose that although Ann's story is true, I changed all identifying details in her life to ensure that neither she nor Marge would ever be identified.