Thank you again, friends, for the love you have expressed to Eddie's family and to me this week. I was privileged to give the eulogy at Eddie's Funeral Mass yesterday afternoon. I know many of you were unable to attend, and I want to share my thoughts with you. May we all choose to learn from Eddie's passing what he experienced throughout his life--when we suffer, when we hurt, love remains.
LOVE REMAINS
Funeral Mass of Eddie Rodriguez
Eulogy by Melissa Winchell
February 19, 2014
Kori,
You and I met in the strangest of ways. In fact, “strange” is a really good word for it, because we were two strangers on an elevator in Children’s Hospital when we started talking across the crowd. I remember riding to the basement with you and walking you to the place where you could obtain your hospital ID card—oh friend, what I wouldn’t give for both of us to know so much less about that place!—and leaving you there saying, “I really do hope to see you again.” Later that day, because of a connection through our doctor who recommended that I reach out to the other Mass General family on the bone marrow transplant floor, I slipped a silly junior-high-ish note under the door to Eddie’s room (one of those, “I know you don’t know me but can we be friends?” letters). And I still remember the moment when I opened my door to find you—the friendly and kind woman from the elevator—standing there with my note in your hand. “You’re Rodriguez?!” I remember shrieking, as if I had met a long lost friend. You were. And truly, friend, we could not have imagined that day how our nearly eight-year friendship would feel, and become, destiny.
Kori, there is something very important I want to tell you today, and to say here in front of your family and friends: I think, that when many people look at our friendship, they think that you are very lucky to have me as your friend. Because of Eddie’s Fund and because of your difficult situation these last eight years, they probably assume that I am the giver in this relationship, and that you have benefited more from me than I from you.
They are wrong. In truth, I have received more from you than you will ever know. Befriending you and Eddie has changed my life more than any other friendship I’ve had. For eight years I have been what our Catholic and Protestant friends might call a witness, a privileged witness. I have been witness to your grit and determination, the phone calls during which you’d tell me you chewed out a nurse or doctor and I cheered you along in your advocacy. I have been witness to your silliness and laughter, the way you would laugh with me until we cried, even while sitting bedside with Eddie in a hospital room. I have been witness to your inner strength, your wisdom, your resolve, and your unending desire to make other people’s lives—even when you were so consumed with Eddie’s—happier and healthier. And most of all, my dear sweet friend, I have been privileged to witness the tender, fierce, encompassing, beautiful love you have for Eddie, and he for you.
Truly, Kori, I have never seen a mother and son as connected as you and Eddie have been in these eight years. I have one vivid memory of watching you both during a visit with you in the ICU; as we talked, you pushed buttons and suctioned tubes and adjusted pillows and smeared lotion. What struck me was not that you did those things—I have done them, too, and any mother in our position would do them—but that every time Eddie so much as grunted, you knew, you just knew, what he was asking of you. I remember very clearly that I suddenly felt like I was a complete stranger, watching from the outside something so intimate, so private, so deeply loving. I wasn’t sure I should have been there to witness such a thing, but I didn’t want to leave. I felt something shift in me that day, as I watched the two of you—an opening in my soul, a desire to love as you both did, without pretense or reserve, with all the risk that loving in this mortal world of ours entails.
I am still learning this from you, Kori—how to love. You are a sage, a master, at it; Eddie, too, was in his love for you a wise, loving old man living in a teenager’s body. Eddie worried as much for you as you did for him; it was Eddie who hoped for your future and this year pushed you out the door each week to your college classes. He thanked you often, telling you again and again what a wonderful mom you were to him, and how much he loved and needed you. I have never seen a son—especially a thirteen-year old son—love his mom the way Eddie loved you. Your spirits were so connected, and are still.
On Thursday, as Eddie passed, I was with you and was again a witness, a very privileged witness, to the love between you. As I watched you love, even when the pain felt like it would kill you, I just kept praying that somehow, somehow I would have the courage and the grace to love as beautifully, as wholly, as completely, as unreservedly, as you have. You keep teaching me, friend: Love Remains. Love, as Saint Paul would say, never, ever fails.
And as your friend, I want you to know that I have all the confidence in the world that you are going to navigate through this grief. I know this is true because you have already chosen so very wisely—you, and Eddie, chose love. And even now, you have in greatest measure that which lasts—love. I have seen you access love on dark days of suffering, lean into love when you are falling, breathe in love when you are not sure you can go on. You are well practiced at loving, my friend. And nothing, nothing separates us from love—Saint Paul gives us the reassuring word that not even death can separate us. Nothing can. Because love is all around us. It is here. It is in us. It is in you. Love remains. Love won’t fail you.
You keep saying that Eddie is your angel. In the Scriptures, angels, when they appear in people’s lives, always say the same thing. They say, “Do not be afraid.” And so, my friend, I whisper what Eddie’s spirit and love are whispering to you today: “Do not be afraid.” Love has not left you. Love is here. Love remains. And even if you cannot quite believe it today, I and all of your friends and family gathered here will believe it for you: Love is going to see you through.
I love you the world.
