Kennedy took public's battles to heart

— -- Evelyne Milorin says Edward Kennedy gave her back her life.

After 15 months of fruitless appeals to elected officials to help her autistic son after he lost government benefits at age 21, the Haitian immigrant wrote to her senator, "the only one who can understand what it takes to raise a child with disabilities."

Within three weeks, Kennedy, whose sister Rosemary was mentally disabled, replied and set his staff to work. They secured vocational and life skills training for Reggie that allowed a young man who once went six years without speaking to hold a job, rent an apartment and live on his own at age 37. And that allowed his mother to finally earn a college degree last year at 58.

"I have my life back, and my son is no longer under my care 24 hours a day," says the Medford, Mass., community organizer. "He made my dream come true."

The "lion of the Senate" never roared about his work for Milorin. Or for the families of 9/11 victims from Massachusetts whom Kennedy phoned as the World Trade Center still smoldered. Or Washington, D.C.'s Brent Elementary School, where he mentored students every week for more than a decade. Yet as the rich and famous gathered to pay tribute Friday, those with lesser-known names recalled how he touched their lives, too.

"He was always reaching out," says Democratic strategist Donna Brazile. Kennedy called her after Hurricane Katrina destroyed the homes of her family in Louisiana four years ago.

"He offered to use contacts that he had through (wife) Vicki's family to help me find my folks missing after the storm and to help with relocation," she says. "He always wanted to give back."

Kennedy wrote a letter to Andrea Casanova after her daughter was killed by a repeat sex offender in 2002. The senator was "constantly with us" as she and her husband started a foundation and worked on sex-offender legislation.

"He's bigger than life," says Casanova, tearing up as she realizes he is gone. "He understood, having all the tragedies in his life … how it can impact you and how you want to really strive to do something about it."

Cindy McGinty remembers picking up the phone soon after her husband, Michael, died in the terrorist attack in New York and hearing the distinctive Kennedy accent on the other end. "He never spoke about the things he did" for 9/11 families, says McGinty, then a Foxborough, Mass., mother of two boys. "He just did it because it was the right thing to do."

In the days afterward, Kennedy's office helped locate Michael's Navy discharge papers so he could be buried with military honors. A month later, at a meeting of Massachusetts 9/11 families, McGinty told the senator she "could barely get out of bed in the morning, let alone fill out 30-page forms," so Kennedy assigned each family an advocate to cut red tape. Three years later, Kennedy invited McGinty to go sailing and asked her to keep tabs on the needs of 9/11 families long after public interest had faded.

"He understood what it was to lose somebody in a public way and to have to share that grief with the public," says McGinty, 52, now of Bloomfield, Conn.

McGinty was at Thursday's vigil for the senator at the JFK Presidential Library in Boston. So were Brian and Alma Hart, and others touched by Kennedy, whose empathy they say was born of personal experience.

The Kennedys became a Gold Star Family when Joe Jr. died on a mission in World War II, when Ted was 12. The Harts joined the same ranks of those who have lost loved ones in military service in November 2003, after their son John died in Iraq. Kennedy was at their side as they prepared to bury him at Arlington National Cemetery.

As the funeral procession waited, the Bedford, Mass., couple met their senator in the cemetery's administration building and told him of their 20-year-old son's complaints about the lack of body armor and armored vehicles. Kennedy would later hold pivotal hearings that led to better protections for troops on the battlefield, but on that day they spoke of families sharing a small, mournful plot of land overlooking the nation's capital.

"We asked him how do you deal with your family being buried at Arlington," a magnet for busloads of tourists, Hart recalls. The senator, who will be buried near his brothers Saturday, replied, "You go in the morning, because you want a private moment in a public place."