[Linganth] Danilyn Rutherford's Beautiful Mystery

[Ilana Gershon]

Dear Colleagues,
This week on the blog, Danilyn Rutherford chats with Joshua Reno,
discussing her book, *Beautiful Mystery: Living in a Wordless World.*

www.campanthropology.org

Best,
Ilana

Press blurb: When Danilyn Rutherford and her husband Craig noticed that
their six-month-old daughter Millie wasn’t making eye contact, they took
her to their pediatrician. And an optometrist. Then a neurologist. Later,
to a team of physical and occupational therapists. None of the doctors
could give Millie a diagnosis, but it was clear that her brain was not
developing at the rate it should. At an age when some children take their
first steps, Millie had the cognitive ability and motor skills of a
three-month-old. Three years later, Craig died suddenly of a heart attack
and Danilyn found herself on the precipice of her anthropology career as a
widow and single mother, still trying to solve the puzzle posed by Millie’s
inaccessible mind.

Now in her twenties, Millie has never been able to express herself
verbally, but she has a thriving social environment rooted in the people
around her and in things her companions and family can see, hear, smell,
and feel. Life in Millie’s world is far richer than might be immediately
evident to those who think and communicate in conventional ways.

*Beautiful Mystery* explores what it means to be a person in the spaces
between what we can and cannot say, and how we can fight to care for those
we love when they don’t have the language to fight for themselves. Through
her unique lens as a mother and an anthropologist, Rutherford tells the
story of arriving in Millie’s world, what she found there, and how Millie
showed her that words aren’t always what makes us human. Enlightening and
deeply felt, *Beautiful Mystery* proves that you don’t have to understand
someone to love them—a lesson that, if we all learned it, might allow us to
live together in a fractured world.
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