The Woman Who Didn’t See Stuttering as a Flaw
My friend Lee Caggiano, who died several weeks ago, was not famous. But through her work, she changed one particular corner of the world: Lee made people who stutter, like me, want to talk.
Like 99 percent of the population, Lee was fluent, meaning she never knew what it was like to stutter herself. But her son did. His experience with stuttering made her pivot her life and go back to school. She completed a master’s degree in speech-language pathology in her early 40s and went on to treat patients and teach at NYU and elsewhere.
Her greatest accomplishment, and the reason hundreds of stutterers across the country have been mourning her death, is the profound work she did to de-pathologize this disorder. Lee didn’t see stuttering as a weakness, a failure, a flaw. She didn’t think she could “cure” you. She didn’t try to. She refused to infantilize us because of the way
