In the late hours of that December evening, just one week before Christmas, among the whispers of old ghosts living in the Stoughton, Massachusetts, home-rumoured to have once belonged to the cousin of Paul Revere-Ed shivered, violently. In that moment his entire life changed for ever. In the recesses of his mind, he worried that his father might catch him out of bed, but as he wandered back to his bedroom he was in shock over what he’d just witnessed.
It wasn’t long before Ed heard the sudden rush of people coming and going outside his door. In a frenzy, his father told to him to get up and get dressed, and he was taken to the home of an aunt. No one mentioned his mother’s death, and Ed feigned ignorance, still in shock from the physical and emotional trauma of the evening.
Two days later, while Ed was having a breakfast of bagels and cream cheese and hot tea, his father arrived to break the news of Rita’s passing. Ed was taken by his father out of the kitchen and into the den. His dad said, ‘I’ve got something to tell you, son.’ But before he had a chance to speak, Ed looked up and said, ‘Dad, I know. Ma’s not here any more.’ Surprised, Bob assumed that Ed had overheard a conversation, and asked how he knew, but Ed refused to say anything else. This was the beginning of a silent treatment Bob would have to endure for a long time.
‘Before his mom passed, he was always a quiet kid, always happy,’ recalls Bob. ‘But he was a really good kid-who wanted to spend time with me. We always watched movies together and things like that. But after her death, everything changed. I couldn’t get him to do anything. He was shellshocked. He wouldn’t talk to me, at all.’
Even if Ed had had the emotional capacity, and the words to express what he had seen and what he was feeling, he didn’t dare tell anyone; with the beating he had sustained for leaving the lid off a jam jar, the consequences, he felt, of admitting that he had disobeyed his father by leaving his room and subsequently witnessing his mother’s death were too great. He would carry this impossible secret, buried underneath the grief of extraordinary loss, for years to come, until he could no longer manage its profound effects.
At his mother’s wake, Ed sat quietly in the back of the church, trying to figure it all out, as everyone else was busy dealing with his or her own individual grief. He had become an outsider, alone, left behind in the sorrow of his mother’s wake, and his mind was filled with a mix of memories that he could not reconcile. At one point, as he stood in a queue at the front of the room, greeting mourners with his family, he turned to look at his mother lying in the open casket, and thought he saw a facial movement, a tic of some sort, indicating she was still alive. He watched her for a long time, hoping that her death was a mistake and that she was maybe just sleeping, because she looked so peaceful and thin, all of the fluid of her cancerfilled body now gone.
Ed, who had always been at the centre of his mother’s world, was now someone else’s worry. He remembers family members scurrying around to find something of his to place in the casket, and they came up with a toy airplane. It should have been a Star Wars toy…that would have meant something. His mother would have understood the significance of that-but there was no one listening to him now.
Back at school, after the Christmas break, Ed’s friend Rudy didn’t understand why Ed wasn’t in class. Rudy had spent the holidays with family and didn’t hear about Rita’s death until the headteacher came in and made the announcement to the class. Rudy, whose own mother had died when he was seven, had lost not only his neighbourhood mother figure but also his best friend, whom he greatly missed and who would not return to school for a long time. When Ed did finally go back to school, his home life was so unsettled that he struggled to get through the rest of the year.
After Rita’s death, everyone in the family seemed to scatter. While his older siblings were off living their lives as they had before his mother’s death, his brother Tommy, with whom he shared a bedroom, went off and joined the service. His older sister Tami moved out of the house and into her own apartment down the road, while Deena, who is closest in age to Ed, withdrew into her own world and spent every night crying herself to sleep.
Ed spent a lot of time thinking about the fights and the harsh words that had passed between his parents before his mother’s death. He wondered if his dad, whom he describes as ‘disconnected’ during the funeral, never crying once, even cared that his mother was gone. But then one night, as he passed outside the room where his father was packing up some of his mother’s things, he was witness, once again, to a rare expression of his father’s despair as the strong, proud Marine broke down and wept.
Like most men of his generation, raising and nurturing children did not come naturally to Bob. It was something that women were supposed to do while men worked for a living. Now, without a wife, he was completely at a loss as to how to deal, sensitively, with his two youngest children. ‘I kept Christmas in the new room for them. I didn’t know what else to do. I tried to talk to them, but I wasn’t any good at it. They’d had a bomb unloaded on them. And then Eddie started to act strange, standing in the corner, talking to himself, all mumble-jumble,’ recalls Bob. ‘He would stand in the corner making strange noises, waving his arms and grunting to himself. I didn’t know what to do. I swear to God, I didn’t.’ Before heading off to the service, Tommy remembers, at night Ed would lie in bed making strange sounds in his sleep. Tommy knew something wasn’t right.
As Ed’s trauma over the loss of his mother continued to manifest itself in bizarre physical affectations, his inability to articulate his sorrow and pain created concern. ‘The problem is,’ says Ed, ‘nobody knew what I saw; only I knew. So they’re thinking, “Poor kid, his mom just passed away and he doesn’t understand what’s going on.” At that point I not only understood what had happened, I had more going on inside of me-more emotions stirring-than anyone could possibly understand.’ The one person who would have understood was gone, and life was confusing. Ed was wrestling with many strange new feelings and fears. ‘Suddenly, whenever I would get in the car with my sister to go do something fun,’ he recalls, ‘I felt like something bad was going to happen if we went a certain way, or did a certain thing.’
As the situation grew more desperate, and Bob’s frustration increased, he made a decision that he thought was in the best interests of his children: he sent Eddie and his sister to live with his brother and sister-in-law. He hoped they would be better equipped to bring Eddie back to life than he would be on his own. But for Ed, being uprooted from his home, and the place where the memories of his mother were alive, was devastating. It was also compounded by a certain fear. Even at his young age he was trying to conceptualize death, and the idea that his mother had gone to a place where Ed couldn’t see or touch her was terrifying. He didn’t want the same thing to happen to his dad. He wanted to stay by his side, be near to him, watch him to make sure nothing bad happened to him. Ed nevertheless yielded to his father’s wishes, and the traumatized boy went to live with his aunt and uncle. ‘I didn’t have the words to express myself, and what I was feeling,’ remembers Ed. ‘I could only do what I was told to do.’
Ed may not have had the ability to express his thoughts and feelings aloud, but his deepest emotions rose up in silent expression as he related to the scenes of the movies and television shows he watched. He connected with storylines dealing with the issues of love, honour and family, as they played out before him on the television set.
Ed recalls a specific moment during this time when he was visiting his Auntie Queenie’s house. Auntie Queenie was upstairs making his favourite chocolate-and-marshmallow sweets, while downstairs he watched Uncommon Valor with his Uncle ‘Crunch’ Mac in their new entertainment room. ‘When you see moments like this on television, or in the movies-the love of a son, played by Patrick Swayze, for his father-those are real moments of emotion that live inside of us, and stir us at the very core,’ Ed remembers. ‘I