To say it's been awhile would be a gross understatement. But, it's a New Year and I'm here with fingers poised and ready over the key board. The following is a story I wrote for my husband. I was his ghostwriter, but the story is his. I thought that honoring the memory of young Eddie Wilson would be an appropriate way to welcome 2013.
The Smallest Angel
At the very least, a personal encounter would be required for a skeptic like myself to even consider the existence of angels, but with my doubting nature would I even recognize it as a celestial meeting? My encounter with an angel did not happen in an ethereal mist of golden light and a heavenly euphony. It was more of a playful elbow into my side by an unheralded source.
I don’t know what it was that drew me to investigate the ground floor of the children’s hospital located across the courtyard from where I had been working. The halls were busy as staff and volunteers moved efficiently from room to room taking care of their young charges.
“Are you on the SWAT team?” I stuck my head in the hospital’s physical therapy room to investigate the source of such a bold inquiry. Barely supporting his weight between a set of parallel bars was a boy approximately 10 years old. It would have been hard to gage his scant years by size or stature. Eddie was slight and a little scrawny even for his age. His blonde hair stood straight up, possibly by design but I’m guessing by accident. His two front teeth were as prominent and oversized as the glasses perched awkwardly on his nose.
I couldn’t resist his inquisitive innocence and was encouraged to enter the room after receiving a friendly nod from the nurse supervising his exercise. I explained to the curious youngster the significance of the department of corrections jumpsuit I was wearing and that I was taking a break from guarding an inmate who was a long term patient at the medical center. “That means you can come back,” Eddie declared without an ounce of timidity.
He was friendly and hungry for attention. I shook his small hand, marveling with exaggerated amazement at his firm grip and asking him if he’d been lifting weights. He beamed and then laughed with obvious delight. In my own head, I had already committed to returning.
A casual examination of medical information posted on the wall of his room, told me that Eddie was suffering from a form of bone cancer. I discovered that his parents had all but abandoned him to the disease that he was fighting and to the medical professionals that were working tirelessly to keep him alive.
Generally, I would stop by to see him twice a week when I was on duty at the hospital. He had his nurse flip his bed around so that he was facing the courtyard between the two buildings and could see my approach.
I learned that Eddie had a tutor to keep him up with his school work. He also had a varied library of movies, but loved to watch Animal Planet, he’d never played any team sports but had taken swimming lessons, and had a taste for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. We talked about sports, but never spoke of the illness that kept him confined to a hospital room.
One afternoon I passed the nurses’ station on my way to see my young friend, but instead of her usual welcoming smile, his nurse greeted me with an anxious shake of her head. I was confused at first and just stared at her expectantly waiting for an explanation. Eddie, she explained quietly coming from behind her desk, had passed away following surgery the previous week. I stood at the counter, my throat so tight I couldn’t trust myself to speak. A torrent of conflicting emotions flooded my head and my heart.
I had witnessed inmates, guilty of despicable crimes, cut open in the hospital operating room only for surgeons to find that a cancerous growth previously diagnosed had miraculously disappeared. Eddie was just a little boy. It wasn’t fair. Where was his miracle?
His parents, the people that should have loved this child the most, had failed him miserably; didn’t he deserve something to cancel out their breach? I was devastated, but I was also angry at what I perceived to be a painful injustice. A nun placed her hand over mine sympathetically. “He’s in a better place,” she said. I just nodded.
The nurse motioned that she had something she wanted to show me. She picked up a box from behind the desk. It contained some of Eddie’s personal belongings. She removed a piece of paper, explaining as she did that Eddie had been given a prompt to draw a picture depicting what he wanted to be when he grew up. The drawing was easily recognizable as my young friend with a head full of bright yellow crayon tinted hair. What stopped me short was the equally recognizable green, corrections jumpsuit he had drawn himself wearing.
Eddie had never displayed a bitter or angry posture in response to the hand he’d been dealt. No one would have blamed him if he’d noisily proclaimed outrage at his parents, the doctors or even God, but he didn’t.
For me, his drawing was more than a childish reflection, it was an obligation, a responsibility that I had to him. For Eddie each day held possibility, every experience was a lesson, every encounter an opportunity. He didn’t complain about what he was missing out on, or dwell on hurt or disappointment, but exulted in all he received.
I thought about the minor transgressions that set me off at home or work. I would take the lessons I learned at his small hand and make Eddie proud of the man that I am and that he wanted to be.
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