Edward Kirk Smith Aug. 4, 1964-April 10, 1985

Eddie was my 9th birthday present. He was supposed to be a sister. I loved him anyway. He was premature and he had a mass on or around his kidney. After a month, they sent him home to die. God miraculously healed him.

So many memories: He didn't have an imaginary friend...he became his imaginary friends. When he came tooling up on his tricycle with a cowboy hat on, he was "Toy Togers". When his tricycle suddenly became a motorcycle, he was "Bruce". There was another character named "Raj", but I have no clue where he came from. He would become indignant if any of us called him by the wrong name when he was in character.

He was afraid of spiders. Darrell (my other brother) and I tortured him endlessly. We would say there was a spider above his head and watch him freeze into a fear-driven pose. (That's what brothers and sisters do.)

I remember the day he woke up early to go ice skating with some friends and came home less than an hour later missing half of his two front teeth. They were still lodged in the ice. I remember when he was 16 and called the house crying because he had seen a car wreck and thought that one of the cars was our Dad's. (Dad was watching a John Wayne movie at the time.) I remember our last face to face conversation when he told me that sometimes he felt like driving his truck off of a bridge.

I was at home on vacation from my job in the Dominican Republic. He got mad at me because after that conversation I wrote him letters and kept bringing it up...it worried me that he had said it. During our last phone call, he once again assured me that it was just a figure of speech. I told him I loved him. That was the last time we would speak.

The week before he died he stayed up all night on the phone with a friend who was contemplating suicide. He took her the next morning to a support group where she could get some help. I know about this because she told me about it when she came to his funeral.

I don't know why he took his own life. I don't know what seemed so impossible to overcome. I do know that he was loved by many. The funeral director said he hadn't seen such a large turnout since a public official had died a few years earlier. There were people there whose lives he had touched that we didn't even know.

I will see him again. I was there when he asked Jesus into his heart. But I miss him now. I'm sad that he never got to meet Zack. He never got to see Lauren and Alissa (my nieces) grow up and see them have babies of their own. I'm sad that he didn't get to experience marriage and children of his own.

Say "I love you" everyday.