‘LIKE THE FACE OF GOD’
Dad feels pride, fear for developmentally disabled daughter
That day nearly three years ago, when Julia Katz walked to the school bus in Swampscott with her dad for the first time without a wheelchair, was one of the proudest of her father’s life — and at the same time terrifying.
“I never thought that Julia would ever be mobile in any way except in a wheelchair,” said Jeff Katz, a former Boston radio host now on the air in Virginia on WRVA. “It was one of the proudest days of my life, one of the happiest days of my life.”
“But I also have to tell you,” Katz told me yesterday, “it’s a terrifying situation because Julia’s like a toddler. She has no real understanding of, ‘ooh, the stove is hot,’ or ‘I could fall here or trip there.’ We’re thrilled that she’s trying to explore on her own a little bit and we are terrified at the same time.”
Yesterday, on Julia’s 15th birthday, Katz posted the heartrending poignant letter he wrote to his precious daughter on Facebook.
Julia has what the doctors call global developmental delays and disabilities, Katz said, which means she functions physically and mentally at the level of an 18-month-old child. As Katz typed his letter, he said, it was hard to see the computer screen through his tears.
He wrote how he and Julia’s mother, Heidi, worry about what will happen to their daughter when they’re gone. He wrote about Julia’s love of cookies and her giggle — “the happiest sound that I have ever heard.” He wrote about the pain of hearing others insult children with disabilities.
“I hear people in this world use horrible insulting language to describe kids like you and I want to shake them and yell at them,” he wrote. “Some mock disabled kiddos like you and I feel like crying. You don’t understand their words, but I do. Sometimes, I really wish I did not.”
Julia’s diagnosis, Katz told me, was heartbreaking. “Heidi and I kept asking ourselves, ‘What did we do? Why is it like this? What is Julia’s life going to be?’”
It’s tough, Katz said, to realize that Julia’s not going to go college or that he’ll never get to embarrass her by dancing with her at her wedding.
“But she’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” Katz said.
Katz told me his amazing Julia, who attends the Kevin O’Grady School at the North Shore Consortium, has made him a better man.
“She’s never spoken a word, she’s never said a word to anybody,” Katz said. “But she’s touched more people in her 15 years than I ever have. Her joy is pure. To me, she’s like the face of God. She’s the essence of good and she shares that joy with everybody.”