From a column in the Mineola Monitor Newspaper in Mineola, TX
By Gary Edwards

A couple of weeks ago we buried the foundation of my life, the inspiration for my successes and my hero... my dad. Along the way I discovered a very special person in our family and his name is Michael.

Michael can best be described as 11, going on 30, going on five and he's always a mystery, not only to us who see him infrequently but much of the time to his own parents. He is one of those children born into a world only they can live in. He is autistic.

When I first met Michael several years ago, adults were still in the progress of figuring out just who Michael was. Oh, they knew he marched to the beat of a different drummer, shoot, he marched when there was no drummer. He didn't need any outside help, all he needed dwelt deep within his mind, locked forever behind those beautiful clear, deep black eyes of his.

I didn't understand then what pictures may have been playing through his mind as he bodysurfed across our coffee table, nor did I handle it very well when he bit his mother, my niece, leaving very deep marks on her skin.

That was then and Friday was now, and by then I'd had the privilege to live in the same house and share the same moments with Michael for several days as we prepared for the Friday service.

I found that once I took the time to understand, that I, not Michael, had to be the one to adjust, it opened an entirely different world for me. On the one hand there was the family grief of having lost a husband, father and grandfather. On the other hand there was Michael.

He communicates mostly with one word sentences. "Thank you," and "Grampa" are two distinctly different sentences and are sometimes issued in passing thought to acknowledge he knows someone has done something for him or that his grandfather, my brother-in-law, is present.

Within his world there is one way Michael seems to express himself very clearly. He draws. He draws about subjects people are talking about, although he appears to be doodling and not listening.

Somewhere in his world he listens to us and I tasted, if ever so briefly, the magic within that child and it will remain with me for the remainder of my life.

The minister had been warned that should Michael become verbal during the service that it was okay with family, and that he should just keep preaching, that those who understood could deal with it okay.

As the service progressed, Michael began to talk, sometimes quite loudly. As he talked he drew with a pencil and as his father would suggest he be quiet, Michael would simply repeat the word "QUIET" and it was always loud enough to almost echo. To those who don't know Michael very well it would have been easy to think he wasn't listening, that he didn't know why we were there.

As the service came to an end and the family filed out of the chapel Michael found a moment of his own to walk to the closed casket and there he created for me the moment I will take to my own grave someday.

He simply laid a drawing, the drawing he'd created while talking to himself during the service, of a dog with a human hand laying gently on the head of the dog, as though to comfort our dad forever.

That little drawing on the casket surrounded by the mountain of flowers sent by family and friends from Texas and beyond, will be the memory I cherish for years to come.

I no longer question why or wonder if Michael is listening.

It took a funeral for me to slow down long enough to understand that Michael is simply Michael and that he will never be the kid next door... and that's okay.
Because of the autism, Michael can be a burden and a joy and sometimes all at the same time.

But I've come to realize he and the thousands of others like him, understand us better than we understand them, and if we'll give them half a chance they can enrich our lives more than we can theirs.

For 11 years he's been Rudy and Tammy's son Michael. Now he's Michael, a child I can't wait to see when we visit them at Christmas.

It seems so far away.