By Michael Miner
What music did your dad like? I ask.
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David Royko, 39, is a psychologist. He directs the Marriage and Family Counseling Service of the Cook County courts. He sees families as they’re shattering, and he gets only the hard cases, the families that can’t work things out alone. “Our role is to try to help parents negotiate a custody and visitation agreement,” he says. “Part of the job is we interview the kids. I came to realize quickly how powerful their perceptions are, and the way they’d express what they felt and thought–that was the part of the job that really grabbed me.”
“I’ve had more than one kid say that lying in bed at night, the thought of mom and dad getting killed wasn’t as scary as the thought of mom and dad getting a divorce,” says Royko. “After a divorce, that fear often turns out to be justified. With a death, it’ll be, ‘Oh the poor kid, it’s got to be rough!’ The divorce doesn’t seem as rough, and the length of time the child is expected to have a hard time is much shorter. But it’s very unrealistic to expect a child to get over a divorce any quicker than to get over a death. When a marriage dies–that is a very appropriate use of the word ‘death.’”
David had wanted his dad to retire and write his memoirs or a novel–anything but the column. “The stress of the job was extraordinary. Anybody who’s written five columns a week for the length of time he had, with the day-to-day scrutiny he was under–it gets to you. Even though he was a guy who certainly knew his worth, he was not immune to other people’s arrows by any stretch of the imagination. If he wasn’t a sensitive guy he wouldn’t be able to do what he did.
Born To Lose
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