Eddie Moments
Today marks five years since Eddie passed away.
This post is mostly about Eddie and the last five years but more specifically, it's about five years of what Audra and I have come to call Eddie Moments.
An Eddie Moment can be any event that just seems a little too lucky or convenient to be chance. It can be something as big as a proclamation by the Governor of West Virginia (more on that later) or something as small as a unmarked box of books in a new, strange city. You don't even have to realize that an Eddie Moment is actually an Eddie Moment when it happens. It may only be in retrospect, years later, that you realize something was actually an Eddie Moment.
To the extent possible, these are going to be in chronological order of some of our biggest Eddie Moments.
Farewell and The Trip
Eddie passed away in Morgantown and as a result, was cremated in Pennsylvania. This seems like a boring detail but it means that when this happened, one of us had to go get his ashes. I volunteered to make the trip and this is honestly a story by itself. I asked the the guy from the crematorium to meet me in Fairmont (about halfway) in the parking lot of my friend Leisha's office. Long story short, he got lost and I got to spend the afternoon sitting and talking with Leisha and it was wonderful.
Once I'd secured Eddie, we left for Fayetteville. I talked to Eddie a little bit on the ride, mostly joking that he was going to late for his own party tonight and that I felt very strongly that he sent that guy in the opposite direction on purpose.
We're in the car for about two hours and I glance at the ashes one last time. I said something along the lines of "This is the last time you and I are ever going to be alone, isn't it? If you have something, anything, that you want to say, now's the time." The music in the car was on shuffle and I hit next, hoping for a little message from Eddie.
And I think I got one, in my first Eddie Moment.
West Virginia Donor Day
This is a good example of an "after the fact" Eddie moment.
When Eddie passed away, some portion of his eyes were donated and transplanted into a living patient. This allowed this person, miraculously, to see again. We received a letter from CORE explaining how much his donation meant and I was able to attend their Donor Day celebration in Charleston that Fall.
It feels obvious but it's important to point out that organ donation did not mean to us then what it does now. We were not yet waiting on a kidney and had no idea that organ donation would one day be very important to us.
Fast forward to 2021, and Governor Jim Justice declares August 1st to be West Virginia Donor Day, celebrating donations made by both the living and the dead.
Eddie, Ripley's namesake, died on what would become West Virginia Donor Day.
Cafeteria Lemons
Fast forward about a month and a half from the declaration of West Virginia Donor Day and we're living in a hospital room at CAMC Women and Children's, waiting for Ripley to be born. He's not due for a while but we've been told this is where we'll be until he gets here.
I don't want to tell the entire lemon story, but I will say that lemons have a special meaning to our family as it relates to Eddie. Eddie pulled a long, elaborate prank on someone very close to him involving fake potted lemons that was not revealed until he passed away and they've become a kind of unofficial mascot since.
On a particularly stressful day filled with what seemed like entirely bad news, I walked into the cafeteria at the hospital to find some new foliage had been added near the door.
Jurassic Park
Fast forward a few more weeks and Ripley is born. Making another long story short, he was born the night of September 14th and flown to Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus from Charleston via helicopter around 3PM the next day. We got to Columbus late that night, having gone home and packed for an indefinite stay before hitting the road, and arrived at their Ronald McDonald House well after dark. We got a tour of the house, the largest in the world, which included a library.
After we'd been there a few nights and started to get settled, I took to exploring the house. I made my way to the library and I remember thinking "It would be so nice to see something familiar in here." after being so far from home. Specifically, I remember thinking how cool it would be to find some Michael Crichton books. Something dense and technical and elaborate that I could just read until I fell asleep.
I went through all the shelves and came up empty handed, but I noticed some unmarked boxes in the corner. Opening these, I found not one, but about a dozen Michael Crichton hardbacks, right on top.
The List Goes On
This is far from an exhaustive list. There was the time that I am convinced he tore a framed Blink-182 concert poster off of our living room wall. Eddie Moments come in all shapes and sizes and you just don't think to snap a photo every single time.
More recently, I mostly see them around Ripley. When Ripley randomly busts out laughing or stares deeply into a certain spot in a room before grinning and waving his arms, those feel more like Eddie Moments than maybe any of these. They feel reassuring and warm in a way that is also somehow sarcastic and a little rude, which is distinctly Eddie.
Five years later, I wish Eddie had gotten to meet Ripley. To be honest though, I'm also not sure that we would have been catalyzed to even attempt to have Ripley without losing Eddie, who was convinced we could have kids despite every possible signal demanding otherwise.
In that way, Ripley might be an Eddie Moment, a kind of ironic "Bet you didn't think this would happen" manifestation of love and affection, rolled into a little boy named after his Grandpa Eddie's favorite scary movie about aliens.