13/08/2026
💙💙💙
“If I could choose who my father is, I wouldn’t think of someone else.”
Those are the words of Sader Issa, a Syrian man who was raised by a father with Down syndrome.
His father, Jad Issa, worked for roughly 25 years at a wheat mill to help support his family. When Sader eventually began studying dentistry, Jad supported him not only financially, but emotionally. Sader later described his father as the person who had been there for him whenever he needed him—the greatest source of support throughout his life.
And Jad was enormously proud of his son.
Sader said that whenever his father introduced him to someone new, he could see the pride in his eyes. Jad seemed to be telling the world, without needing to say very much: I raised this man. I helped him become who he is.
Sader eventually became a dentist in Damascus.
But perhaps the most beautiful part of their story is that Sader does not describe his childhood as one in which he had to overcome his father. He describes his father as one of the reasons he became the person he did.
He grew up with affection, encouragement and a father who worked hard to give his child opportunities.
There is a tendency in our culture to look at a diagnosis and imagine that we already know the boundaries of another person's life. We turn probabilities into predictions, and predictions into identities. We begin describing what someone will never do before they have even had the opportunity to show us what they can do.
Jad's life does not mean that every person with Down syndrome will have the same abilities, live independently, marry or become a parent. People with Down syndrome are individuals, with different strengths, challenges and support needs—just like the rest of us.
But that is precisely the point.
A diagnosis can tell us something about a person. It can never tell us everything about a person.
Perhaps one of the greatest gifts we can give another human being is the space to become someone we could not have predicted.
Because sometimes the limits we see in another person belong less to them than to our imagination of what is possible.