Everyone asks how the boys are doing. Honestly they are doing much better than I would have expected.They are resilient. The boys have been able to laugh and play. Even the day Eddie died, they played. That’s what they needed. Their friends around them and to play, just like I needed mine to sit with me and cry. They went right back to life as they knew it, wrestling and just being boys. They told me that playing helped their heads keep busy. In the couple weeks after Eddie died they watched a lot of TV, Max said it helped him not think too much. By no means has the TV turned off, but it’s on a little less.We talk about the fact that he’s still all around us. Max struggles to understand exactly how, but Zac seems to get it. He will tell you that “Daddy is in the sky and all around us and we said bye to his shell”. He draws pictures with Eddie in them. At Halloween he decorated his pumpkin at school with the “Daddy eyes” that he saw in the sky that first week. Most recently he drew a picture of Daddy and Mommy holding a heart and Max and Zac sneaking up on us. There was also a flag “from the place we said bye to Daddy’s shell”. Absolutely broke my heart and I wanted to scream about how unfair this is, but instead I hugged his smiling little self and told him how beautiful it was.

They ask why the doctors couldn’t fix him. Zac thinks bandaids fix everything and he doesn’t understand, how his strong dad couldn’t just put a bandaid on and be okay. He was their super hero… invincible. Max still and always will idolize him. He drew a Fire Department badge for Eddie last week and keeps it on his nightstand. How could this happen to their dad, the strongest guy they knew? He wasn’t supposed to get hurt, let alone die.

After I got my tattoo, Max wanted to feel closer to Eddie, so when I was putting Zac to sleep he went into the spare room where Eddie’s clothes were, got a flannel shirt and wore it to bed. I didn’t realize this until I went to turn off his light. There he was wearing Eddie’s shirt, snuggling his “Daddy Bear”. He told me the next morning that it smelled like Daddy on the right arm. He’s worn it every night since.

There is so much they had to learn from Eddie… from their Dad. I know it’s hitting Max hard. He’s confused as to why other kids all have their dads and he doesn’t. He feels left out when he doesn’t know something that is a “Dad’s job” to teach. I’ll never forget, us being at a friends house and he didn’t want to go play football because he and Eddie had just started throwing the ball, but he didn’t know it very well yet. He was embarrassed and said “soccer was more his thing” so he could avoid playing it. My heart hurt for him. There was nothing I could do to fix that feeling. They were supposed to learn football from Eddie. Next summer Eddie was going to have Max come work with him “snapping lines” on the parking lots to start teaching him striping the lots. They were supposed to learn his amazing work ethic and take over the business some day. They were supposed to have days of fishing and nights of all of us snuggled in a tent at the camp. It was all suddenly and cruelly, taken from them.

My heart breaks for them that they lost their father and everything they were supposed to have with him, their hero.