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Charlie Willis Charles Andrew Willis · November 3, 1975 – February 8, 1996 |
Adrienne: We are Charlie's mom and dad, Adrienne and Jeffrey Willis, and we live in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Charlie died of meningococcal meningitis in February of 1996, in the middle of his sophomore year of college. He was twenty. He called home on a Wednesday night to tell us he thought he had the flu, and by Thursday afternoon he was gone. We started this page on the first anniversary, in February of 1997, because we wanted somewhere to put the things people told us about him, and because we wanted other parents to know what we didn't. We've written it together. Jeff writes less than I do. He always has. You'll see. Jeffrey: That's true.
Adrienne: Charlie was born on November 3, 1975, a little early and very loud, and he stayed loud for twenty years. He had his father's long legs and my red hair, and by the time he was three he had learned that if he asked "why" enough times, eventually a grown-up would give up and give him a cookie. His sister, Alisha, came along when he was two and a half. He announced to the nurses that she was his. He loved two things more than anything, history and soccer, and he never could explain to anyone why they went together. I think I know. In both of them you have to know what happened before to understand what's happening now. Jeffrey: Gettysburg is about forty-five minutes from our house. We took him the first time when he was seven. He walked the whole battlefield, all of it, and asked me questions I couldn't answer. I bought him a book in the gift shop so he could answer them himself. He came back in the car and told us all of it, the whole way home. After that we went every summer. By ten he could give the tour. Adrienne: He started playing soccer at six, in the little league with orange slices at halftime, and the first time a coach put him in goal he refused to come out. He liked being the last one, he said, the one who has to see the whole field. He was a goalie for the rest of his life. He had a pair of yellow goalie gloves that I washed by hand for four years of high school and that I still have, in a shoebox in his closet, and that still smell like grass. In high school he was not a perfect student. He was a wonderful student in history and English and a sincere disappointment to every math teacher he ever had, which drove his engineer father to distraction. He worked summers at a custard stand. He had a lot of friends, the loyal kind, and a few girlfriends, the short kind. He graduated in June of 1994 and went off to a state university a few hours from home to study history. He wanted to teach it, in a high school, the way it had been taught to him. Jeffrey: He wasn't good enough to play varsity soccer in college. He knew it. So he played intramurals, in goal, for a team of guys from his dorm floor. They won the fall league his freshman year. He called me at eleven at night to tell me about the final. He described every save. There were a lot of saves. Adrienne: His freshman year went fine and his sophomore year went better. He had good roommates and a professor in American history who took him seriously, and he'd started talking about graduate school. He came home for Christmas in 1995 with a bag of laundry and a reading list, and he went back in January. That was the last time we saw him well.
Jeffrey: Adrienne asked me to write this part. On Wednesday, February 7, 1996, Charlie called home at about nine at night. He said he felt lousy. Fever, headache, achy. Half his floor had the flu, and he figured he had it too. He sounded tired. Adrienne told him to drink fluids, take something for the fever, and go to the health center in the morning if he wasn't better. He said he would. He said he loved us. He always said that at the end of a call. I'm grateful for that every day. At ten after six the next morning his roommate Craig called us. Charlie had been very hard to wake up. He was confused. He had a rash. The ambulance had already taken him to the hospital. We were in the car in fifteen minutes. It's a long drive. We got to the hospital a little before eleven. He was in intensive care. The doctors had started treatment as soon as he came in, and they were doing everything they could. They told us it was meningococcal meningitis and that it was very serious. He didn't wake up. He died at a quarter after one that afternoon, Thursday, February 8. We were with him, holding his hands. Afterward one of the doctors sat down with us for a long time. She told us that this disease can move faster than almost anything else they see, that it often looks like the flu at first, and that a lot of good, careful people have mistaken it for the flu. She told us it was nobody's fault. It took me a long time to believe that about myself. I'm mostly there now. Adrienne: I've asked myself a thousand times what I would have said on the phone that night if I'd known. I wrote the section below for parents so that maybe someone else's mother will know.
Adrienne: The health department came to campus that same day and gave antibiotics to everyone who'd been close to Charlie, his roommates and friends and teammates. That's how it's done with this disease, to keep anyone else from getting sick, and no one else did. But it meant that by the time we got home on Friday, everyone at his school who loved him already knew. The funeral was the next Tuesday, at our church in Harrisburg. More than sixty of his college friends drove three hours on February roads, in borrowed cars and a van from the dorm, and came in out of the cold in their good coats, and filled four pews. His intramural team came in their jerseys, with his number. Craig and Ryan, his roommates, spoke, and couldn't finish, and finished anyway. Alisha, who was seventeen, read from his journal about Gettysburg. Mrs. Fritts, his high school history teacher, sat in the back and cried through the whole thing and then came up to me afterward and said, "He was the reason I kept teaching." I've kept that. After the service his friends stayed at our house until after midnight. They ate everything in it. They told stories we had never heard, some of which we probably should not have heard. Jeff laughed for the first time in five days. Many of their memories are on the Charlie's Friends Remember page, and they keep coming, three and a half years later. Jeffrey: Six of them still come to see us every February. They're mostly graduated now. Two are teachers.
Jeffrey: The Charles A. Willis Memorial Scholarship goes each spring to a history major at Charlie's university who plans to teach. It's $1,000. It was started with gifts from his funeral, and his friends added to it with a soccer tournament they call the Charlie Cup, which the intramural league plays every April. The history department picks the winner. We go up and shake hands. The winners so far:
Adrienne: If you'd like to give to the scholarship, please e-mail us and we'll send you the address. Every gift, even five dollars, goes to a student. Charlie would have hated a fuss. He'd have liked this.
Adrienne: We are not doctors. Jeff builds bridges and I teach children to read. What follows is what our own doctors, and the ones at the hospital, and a lot of reading have taught us. Please talk to your own doctor about any of it. We aren't trying to scare anyone. Meningococcal disease is rare. But it's serious, it's fast, and it's treatable if it's caught early, and that is why we want you to know about it.
Jeffrey: Since this page went up, four parents have written to tell us their kids got the vaccine because of it. One mother wrote that her daughter had a terrible headache and a fever last winter, remembered this page, and went to the emergency room. It turned out to be the flu. She wrote to say she was glad she went anyway. So are we. Adrienne: Thank you for reading about our boy. If you knew Charlie, or if you have a story, or if you have a question we might be able to help with, please write to us. We answer every letter, though sometimes it takes us a little while.
Charlie's Friends Remember >> Visitors since February 8, 1997:     
Adrienne and Jeff Willis: [email protected] Last updated September 7, 1999 |