“You have a child with special needs.”
It was the first time, and to this day, maybe the only time, I heard those exact words directed at me. Yes, it was a statement of the obvious. But it focused everything.
“You.” Yes, it was me, sitting there at that moment, like it or not.
“Have.” The fact, not a ‘maybe’ or a ‘what if.’ It was real, no denial allowed.
“A Child.” Our son, our beloved boy, Ben.
“With.” This is what Ben has and what he, and all of us, will have to deal with.
“Special.” An extraordinary, life-changing condition.
“Needs.” Profound, severe, and our responsibility to help him with them.
It was our family’s new universe being described in the most simple, precise, and direct — and profound sentence. Like Mozart’s notes, not one was expendable, and together, they perfectly hit the mark.
They weren’t said in a “well, of course” manner, but softly, empathically. They summarized everything I’d been describing for the past ten minutes in disorganized, distraught and depressed bits and pieces, as he sat, looking deeply concerned, for Ben, and for me.
And perhaps paradoxically, they mixed a touch of comfort with the between-the-eyes arrow of heartbreaking reality. He got it.
They were the words of my dad. The next words were: “Anything you need, you’ve got.”
He meant it. And for 21 months, he did it.
That was all the time he had left. He died, unexpectedly, 21 years ago today, April 29, 1997, at 64.
They summed up my Dad. They also summed up Mike Royko. And at that moment, as in most moments, he was both.
And today, I am thinking, hardly at all, about what he meant to his readers and to the world — which was plenty — but what he meant to me. And to Ben. And how much I’ve missed him.
That’s what his fans tell me all the time. They miss him. “What would Royko say?”
He was the same in his column writing to readers about somebody confronting tragedy as he was as he sat with me in his office at the paper when I walked in that afternoon and told him about Ben.
He cared deeply, he understood, he wanted to help, and did everything he could, generously and with no thought to pay-back. The term “pay it forward,” one I never heard him use, he defined. He did it for readers every day.
That day, he did it for me. And for 21 more months, with tangibles and intangibles — like love — he did it for Ben.
Damn Dad, I miss you. And so does Ben, more than either of you can ever know.