Weeble’s Story

On many Saturdays the members of the Eckhardt family are pulled in two or three different directions as they involve themselves in various activities. February 26th, 2011 began with our family working together for our annual Boy Scout troop garage sale. This is a well-planned event that involves many different families working together over several months gathering donations and then organizing and pricing them.

Ordinarily, the younger children who help are permitted to choose a few items to keep from among the items for sale. My son Silas, who was six at the time, chose a small stuffed animal which he gave to Elijah, his brother, who was three months short of three years old.

As the day wore on, Kaj, who at 13 years old was the oldest of our children, went to a friend’s house to play.  Jennifer, my wife, and Silas went to Walgreen’s to sell Boy Scout discount coupon cards as a fund-raiser for the troop.  That left me at home with the other four children: Japheth, 11; Heike, 9; Elijah, 2; and Katie, 1.  As Katie slept in her crib, Japheth, Heike, and a few of their cousins who live in the house next door approached me asking if they could swim in our swimming pool.  Our family policy is that swimming season begins on April 7th, which is Japheth’s birthday.  Even in Florida, there is a season during which unheated pools are just not that much fun.  Knowing that they would be back very quickly, I permitted them to go.  Elijah, whom we nicknamed Weeble, also expressed interest in going, and the other children asked if he could come.  I told him that he was not fat enough to go swimming.   (His lips turned blue even in reasonably temperate water.)  He was also far too young to go swimming without an adult present.  As the other children left for the pool, I put Weeble to bed in his room.

 Over the next several minutes, a series of events happened.  The freezing children returned from the pool as predicted.  Jennifer and Silas came home, and I got in the shower to get ready for a Cub Scout crossover during which two boys from another pack were being welcomed into our troop.  As I was preparing to leave for the scouting event, Jennifer and I noticed that the bedroom window was open.  At five o’clock, as I arrived at the lake where the ceremony was to take place, I got the frantic phone call from my wife:  Weeble was in the pool.

I arrived at the hospital minutes later and joined my wife and our extended family next to the ER bed on which doctors and nurses worked on our son.  After the doctor decided to call his death, a nurse refused to stop trying to resuscitate him.  Thanks to her devotion, Weeble regained a weak pulse, and he urinated.  He was air lifted to the children’s hospital in Orlando, and we began the hour-long trip.

After the longest night of our lives, during which Weeble’s heart stopped several times, the doctors explained that there was too much damage, and that Weeble would never survive.  We reluctantly agreed not to revive him the next time he coded.  Our son was pronounced dead at 10:27 AM on February 27th, 2011.

In the years since that accident, there have been bright spots, blessings, grief, guilt, what-ifs, and many, many other experiences, but they all started on that February afternoon when my family set out on the darkest journey we’ve ever had to face; that day when one of us was pulled further away from the others than any of us had ever been, for an eternal activity that those left here can only imagine.