Coffee Can of Keys

Synopsis

How many keys does a child collect before finding the door that opens to understanding?

Before the diagnoses, punishments, hospitals, courtrooms, and judgments, Reson was a little boy who collected keys in a coffee can. To him, each key held a possibility: a door that might open, a mystery that might be solved, a safe place he might enter, or perhaps a way out of something he could not explain.

Reson came into the world already fighting—fighting for oxygen, fighting to arrive, and later fighting to be seen as more than the behaviors adults found difficult. He was sweet, perceptive, restless, funny, deeply curious, and often heartbreakingly clever. Yet his energy was mistaken for defiance, his differences became disruptions, and his distress was too often treated as something to punish rather than a message asking to be heard.