Miami Herald: Autistic child misses his father

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Posted on Wed, Dec. 29, 2004

FAMILY

Autistic child misses his father

BY MAGDALENA BELTRAN-DEL OLMO

''Did Jesus steal my daddy?'' my 12-year-old son, ie, asked me earlier this

year as I prepared his breakfast. I was stunned, not just by the elegant

simplicity of his question, but because it came from a young man battling

autism, and who is still learning to grieve for his father 10 months after his

death.

For nearly a decade, my husband, del Olmo -- a lifelong journalist with

The Los Angeles Times who died on Feb. 19 at age 55 -- wrote a Christmas column

about our son on The Times' opinion page.

was a private man, but he was also a journalist, and he chose to go public

in 1995 with our story, the pain, struggles and victories of helping ie

overcome autism.

hoped to raise awareness about the alarming increase in autism and what

could be done about it, and to help remove the stigma that some associate with

the condition, a neurological abnormality that makes it difficult to

differentiate among the many sensory stimuli like touch, light and sound.

Exposure to such stimuli results in sensory overload that causes people with

autism to shut the world out, withdrawing into themselves.

In the nine years since autism came into our lives, the ''boy with a soft, sweet

smile and big brown eyes'' whom introduced to his readers went from a

nonverbal 3-year-old who made little eye contact, had trouble focusing and

didn't understand the concept of pretend play to a vibrantly inquisitive boy

with a keen intellect, greater social interaction skills, impressive

imagination and improving physical coordination.

We all belong to God

Now here was my ie asking me a profound question only months after saying

goodbye to his daddy. I took a deep breath. I didn't want to make Jesus out to

be the Bad Guy in our tragedy. I was aware of my anger at an unknown force for

taking from us. With help from my mother, I told ie that all people

belong to God. When God takes one of us to heaven, he's not stealing, because

we are already his, I said. ie nodded, sighed and said, ``I just miss him

so much, Mommy.''

When 's sister and I first told ie that his father had died, he was

stunned. He stepped away from us and kept asking questions. But he did not cry.

He didn't cry at the memorial service or at the burial. And he didn't want

people to cry in his presence.

Experts told me later that for people with autism, controlling their emotions is

one way they can make order out of their chaos. For people without autism, the

pain of losing a loved one is hell. For people with autism, that pain can be

magnified in ways we can't imagine. It's the ultimate sensory overload. It

explains why ie was more comfortable exploring death through his

intellect. Asking questions was easier than crying and feeling the pain.

A month after was gone, I opened a box of love letters written to me over

14 years of our courtship and marriage. I sobbed uncontrollably. ie

disappeared into his room and begged me from afar to stop crying. Later, he

approached me slowly -- he was afraid.

He took my arms and wrapped them around his body, compelling me to hug him and

said: ''Don't cry, Mommy. You have me.'' But still he did not cry.

In late spring ie took his classmates to tour ''Daddy's newspaper.'' When

we came to 's office, where he suffered the heart attack that killed him,

ie asked again how his father had died. He wanted to know all the details

about that day. Still no tears.

The breakthrough came in late summer.

I took ie to a therapy based upon the French-developed Tomatis method,

which retrains the brain's sound processing to minimize auditory sensory

overload. Over five weeks, ie listened to music using a headset, as the

frequency levels were gradually adjusted to minimize the distorted sounds he

would often hear.

Soon it was time for him to hear recorded voices, so I lent mine, reading from a

draft of a new book about my husband. ie exploded. He screamed and ran away

from the therapist, a calm woman named Jeannie King. She asked why he didn't

want to hear about his dad, and he finally broke down and cried. He missed his

daddy, he said.

Tears and smiles

I comforted ie, while Jeannie said that it was good to cry and let all the

bad feelings come out. Since then, he has cried often for . But he also

smiles more when he talks about his daddy.

Right after died, I felt fear over ie's future. I don't feel that

anymore -- I am filled with the same hope that and I had when we first

started to help our son. ie is becoming a man, just the way

predicted in his final column.

I told ie recently that he was the best present his daddy ever gave me.

''Well then, hug your present,'' he said without missing a beat and giving me

that broad Cheshire Cat smile he inherited from his dad. And so I did, knowing

that there would be more conversations like this one -- and healthy tears, too

-- as 's legacy blooms inside our son's special soul.

Magdalena Beltrán-del Olmo is co-editor of del Olmo: Commentaries on His

Times.

©2004 The Los Angeles Times

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