SUSAN AGER: Parents turn sorrow into others' hope

February 2, 2003 - When Herbert Ouida put his 18-year-old son on a plane for the University of Michigan, he couldn't help but marvel and smile.

"I savored that moment," Ouida told me this week. "I could never forget what we had lived through, and to see him flourishing!"

Just a few years earlier, Todd Ouida (pronounced o-EE-da) was a troubled little boy.

He wouldn't go to school. He cried. He flailed. He sweated. One day his father tried to carry the 9-year-old into school but the boy made such a fuss that a custodian raced outside to shout, "What's going on here?"

The custodian, confused, told Todd's father, "But that boy loves school."
He recalls: "Right then I realized that what was happening to Todd was not as simple as I wanted it to be."

It wasn't pretend. It wasn't rebellion. His panic attacks were diagnosed as childhood anxiety disorder.

For 30 months, from the fourth through the sixth grade, Todd wouldn't go to school. At home, he was sad and anxious. Drugs didn't work. But psychotherapy did.
Four days each week, his mother Andrea drove him to sessions with a psychoanalyst near their New Jersey home. The doctor concluded Todd's panic attacks weren't about school but home: He feared his parents would die if he went away.

In time, the boy and his therapist grew close. By the seventh grade, Todd was back in school, never missing a day.

Family means the most

He described his problem in his U-M application essay: "I learned that with family a person can overcome anything." Otherwise, his father says, Todd went on to achieve great things, win friends and travel far. "He never looked back." His parents look back often now. They lost Todd Sept. 11, 2001. A foreign currency option trader for Cantor Fitzgerald, Todd was on the 105th floor when the first jet hit the World Trade Center. His father, with whom he'd commuted in that morning, was at work 28 floors below. Todd called his mother: "Don't worry, Mom. You're going to hear about an explosion, but I'm all right. I'm headed out right now." His mother asked, "But what about Daddy?" Todd said: "He's fine, too. He's leaving, too."

Those last words to his mother were a lie. Todd and his father never spoke after the blast. But Todd wanted her to believe his father would live. He wanted to believe it, too.

Legacy for kids

Todd died at 25 with a sizable estate, from life insurance and savings, since he lived at home.

This month, his parents donated that $250,000 to U-M's new Depression Center. It will support research and lectures on childhood anxiety disorders, which afflict about one in 10 young people and which, if untreated, can lead to depression.

The Ouidas also created a Web site (www.mybuddytodd.org) and a foundation to raise money for poor children with the same problems.

"We've joked between us," Todd's dad says, "that he'd rather we gave that money to U-M's football team."
But, he said, "we're trying to fill our own loss by helping other children in his name."
Those children, too, deserve happiness and promise for a life as good as Todd's -- but longer.

Contact SUSAN AGER at 313-222-6862 or ager@freepress.com.