Category: Richard

Richard was a Boy Scout.

His troop was very active. They did a lot of fun things, and of course camping was big on the list.

One morning Debbie was fixing breakfast. Frying bacon.

Richard came into the kitchen and asked, “Mom would you make some of the bacon black?”

“Why?” she asked.

“We had some like that at camp last weekend and it was really good.”

So Debbie burned some of the bacon for him.

At breakfast Richard dug in. He had a bit of a funny look, but he ate his black bacon.

He later told Debbie that it hadn’t tasted as good as it had when he was camping out.

And thus Richard learned one of life’s great lessons. Just about everything tastes better out in the open air. This is especially true for breakfast cooked over an open fire. There’s just something about the great outdoors that’s a flavor enhancer for food.

He never asked his momma to cook black bacon again.

I was often told that Richard was just like me. While not always true, one area we were in sync was our love of sports.

And Richard was a sportsaholic for sure.

Richard wasn’t a gifted athlete (sorry kid, but it’s true). But he had a big heart.

He loved to compete. And I think he really enjoyed being on a team and just hanging with the guys.

He’d play just about anything.

As the picture above shows, he was always ready for a game. Missing from the picture are his racketball gear and his golf clubs.

In high school he was on the power weight lifting team, the ultimate frizbee team and he did shotput and discus on the track team.

He never could make the basketball team. But he played intramural basketball every year, often hunting down guys and starting his own team.

At one of the Compassionate Friends meetings Debbie went to, she had to bring in something that was important to Richard.

Richard’s state championship ring from the track team was one of those things. He was really proud of that.

This is my first “March Madness” without Richard here to talk over the games with. You can bet he has his brackets filled out for the tournament.

The early rounds of the tournament have late games. It wasn’t unusual for a game to still be in progress when I got home from work at 12:30am. Debbie would be in bed sleeping and Richard would be sitting there with no lights on in the house watching the games. He would be updating his bracket.

We would watch the remainder of the games together and he’d update me on the games I missed. We’d usually get in a debate about who we thought would win the next round and why.

I’m really going to miss that.

Many times Richard and I were told we were just alike. One of our shared quirks was not liking it when someone was watching over our shoulder. We like our privacy.

When Richard was in his late teens and early twenties he didn’t often share what was going on in his “private life” with us – unless it required money from home. This didn’t bother me much because I knew Richard wasn’t doing anything bad and I understood him.

In October 2007, Debbie got a call from Richard’s roommate Drew. He was panicked because Richard was having a seizure. She told him to call an ambulance and have Richard taken to the nearest hospital. She called me at work and told me where they were taking him and we met at the hospital – St. Joseph’s.

He had a massive seizure. The emergency room people had a hard time calming his body down. He had to be put in restraints. They had a tough time getting an IV in him. Every time they tried to insert the needle he’d convulse, his muscles would tense with powerful contractions and the vein would collapse.

It was a long, tense time, but finally the drugs stopped the seizure activity and Richard slept.

It seems most people that have seizures come back around as soon as the seizure activity is over. They’re sleepy but alert.

Not Richard. His seizures were totally consuming. When the seizure was over he was out of it. The doctors and nurses couldn’t get him to respond for hours.

So we waited.

The afternoon pressed on into evening as we waited by his bed in the emergency room. As we sat there worrying, a little blond girl walked into the room. She glanced at us, went over to Richard and took his hand. She stood there with his hand in hers, gently stroking it with her other hand.

I looked at Debbie, she looked at me, both puzzled. Who was this person?

Finally we said, “Hi, we’re Richard’s parents. Who might you be?”

Her name was Ivy. Turns out she was Richard’s girl friend. And we’d never heard of her before.

Hell of a way to meet your kid’s girl friend.

We chatted during the early evening hours. We took her out to eat when it became obvious Richard was going to be out of it for a while.

She stayed with us for a long time that night. It was a comfort to have her there.

And when Richard finally woke up in the ICU the next day, having her there kept him from being depressed about having another seizure.

Ivy made Richard happy for the last couple of years of his life. We like her.

We just wish he’d have introduced us in a more conventional manner.

But that was Richard.