Welcome back, everyone.

There are stories within stories to tell about my mom’s other son and our mutual favorite person, my little brother Eddie.

For Mother’s Day, I wanted to tell one that touches back on some of the material covered in Intro to Rita (a preface to this course).

Thanks to our mom, Eddie undertook a crucial, secret mission for the most well-known Captain in the 60-plus year history of Star Trek.

Three years after Moisés was born, the family welcomed a second son, Eduardo. “Eddie” was a joyful baby who loved to play with his big brother.

When Eddie was found to not be meeting expected linguistic and neurocognitive developmental milestones, Rita and José Moisés took him to a specialist. “Baby Eddie” was a toddler and still communicating like an infant. He was diagnosed as being on the Autism spectrum, a diagnosis that would change the course of the entire family’s lives.

In a long conversation this week, mom and I covered a lot of ground talking about Eddie.

It’s still difficult to think about having lost him just over 15 years ago. The more space we’ve had to breathe since then, the brighter and more treasured the best memories get over time.

Rita started taking Eddie to fan conventions after I left for college over 1000 miles from home. Prior to my leaving for FSU, mom deemed going to these conventions as too loud, too noisy, and far too difficult to manage with Eddie.

Once he no longer had me around though, mom had to find more things to do with him, inevitably including things outside what she considered her (and his) comfort zone.

If you’ve never been to one, they’re like a bizarre bazaar of all manner of nerd stuff that springs up in a hotel conference hall or convention center for a weekend. Just as quickly, it vanishes by the next Monday morning. In the weekend between, all manner of Geek Commerce occurs.

Vendors sell all manner of vintage, new, and reproduced memorabilia. Quite literally, some people re-buy their childhoods from Friday to Sunday, and often at a premium. Comic book professionals sell original art, signed comic books, and hold court to talk about creating the mega franchises that have gone on to make mega corporations loads of money.

Most interesting to Eddie, though, was always the row of celebrities from beloved shows and movies signing autographs and taking photos with fans.

Among his first brushes with his favorite actors from his favorite things was the Star Trek: The Original Series trio of Nichelle Nichols (Uhura), George Takei (Sulu), and Walter Koenig (Chekhov). They were all incredibly kind and patient with Eddie. Everyone at these conventions turned out to be kinder and more patient with him than at the average store or other public place.

Not long after this first convention, she decided to take him to the Star Trek-specific convention in Las Vegas. He had begged her to go for years. At the time, the Las Vegas Hilton had a collection of immersive installations that collectively made up “Star Trek: The Experience,” a sort of micro theme park for specifically Star Trek nerds.

Rita stayed awake for their entire 36-hour voyage to Sin City out of fear that Eddie would decide to sneak out of the hotel room and go “where no Eddie had gone before” in the middle of the night. As wearying a prospect as that was in advance, the exhilarating experience of the convention itself made powering through her sleepless Countess of Monte Cristo night shift much easier than she expected.

Rita had long-since resolved that she would make damn sure Eddie had his own special experiences that gave him as much joy as he gave his mom. He would never have the freedoms and experiences that his older brother could and would have.

He would get his own unique journey across the galaxy of life.

From Intro to Rita, again:

[A little over 20 years after his childhood Autism diagnosis] Eddie received his second big, life-changing diagnosis.

What had been thought to be and had been treated as an upper respiratory infection turned out to be a tumor growing on his trachea. Eddie began aggressive chemo treatment. His brother, who a couple years before had been upgraded to “Big Moses,” made more frequent drives up from Austin to Dallas to help ease Eddie’s anxiety and resistance to the various invasive and scary aspects of his treatment.

Rita kept teaching.

She had Eddie “guest lecture” more often in her classes as his health allowed.

It was after his cancer diagnosis that I went to a convention with them for the first time.

I’d been living out of state prior to then anyway, but I had never been very big on getting autographs or photos with celebrities in the first place. I’d been on another end of things interviewing people from shows and movies as an online and occasionally print journalist.

It was against the spoken and unspoken rules to ask for autographs or outgoing voicemail recordings or proto-selfies with your pre-smartphone camera. Beyond being a Rule Follower, asking for things like that just seemed like a betrayal of trust with people I wanted to remember me for the good job I did of not bothering or annoying them. Despite the rules, it was alarming just how often I would see my ostensible colleagues finish an interview and immediately pull something out to get it signed or ask for a selfie.

I went into my first convention experience expecting to be miserable the entire time, but I wanted to share every experience I could with Eddie in the time we had left.

I could not have been more wrong about what the actual experience would be like.

I saw the kind people who knew Eddie and that my mom had told me about, in addition to people who were kind and patient with him who were meeting him for the first time. I bathed in the vibes of an environment where everyone was a weirdo/geek/nerd/outcast who sought refuge in the same imaginary worlds that Eddie and I had escaped into as kids and now adults.

Rita took Eddie on various “bucket list” trips to meet his heroes from across pop culture, but mostly Star Trek. William Shatner once took him by the shoulders, fully in-character as Captain Kirk, and insisted that he had to fight the cancer, by God, if he wanted to get well enough to serve on the Enterprise.

It was that experience with William Shatner that had just preceded my first and only convention experience with my brother. He talked to me about it almost every day for the rest of the days that he ended up having left.

In the wait to meet “Bill” in the private meet-and-greet, Eddie was urged to not hug Shatner too enthusiastically. His first words to his hero were “I won’t hug you TOO hard, Mister Shatner.” In one retelling of the experience, mom told me that Bill said “I didn’t realize I was meeting a comedian today” with a wry smile.

William Shatner has always had a well-known and multifaceted reputation for being alternately egotistical, rude, and “above it all.”

In every telling of Eddie’s meet-and-greet experience, he came off as nothing but the man who makes a point to host an annual charity horse show that has always prominently benefitted causes serving people with developmental disabilities.

There’s always a sort of expectation for how long people get with their heroes in these private meet-and-greets, but I’d later find out that Bill was known for making more time for the people who were owed it, people like Eddie.

He’s the Captain of the U.S.S. Enterprise, you know, and the Captain gives the orders out in space.

In a composite of the various ways mom and Eddie told me the story, as well as how Bill’s convention “handler” related it to me many months later, it went something like this:

After finishing his time with the person before Eddie, Bill’s handler related what Rita had told her about Eddie’s “when not if” prognosis, and how this particular handler had gotten to know both Eddie and my mom over the years.

I like to imagine it playing out like an actual episode of Star Trek, where a non-main cast Ensign serving on the bridge of the Enterprise provided Captain Kirk with an urgent communiqué from Starfleet Command.

The Captain furrowed his brow and then tilted his head up toward Eddie and beckoned him forward, saying “I hear you want to serve on the Enterprise, do I have that right?”

That first part did happen for absolute certain. Then Eddie told him he would not hug him too hard (we think).

I know that the rest of this happened, because Bill later told me in a private setting somewhere on the convention circuit that he very much remembered it happening the following way, and that it moved him very deeply. “The persona” dropped when he said so, and William Shatner the person said as much.

At some point down the road, I’ll get into that delineation and how I saw it with various heroes who got to meet Eddie and most certainly remembered him.

Back to the meeting, already in progress:

“Starfleet Medical has advised me that you have some…challenging days ahead. Is that right?”

Eddie’s brow furrowed a little, over a half-smile. “Yeah.”

“I’m also told that you want a spot serving on my ship, the Enterprise.”

“Yeah?” the smile grew.

“Well Ensign, I need you to listen very carefully to me. Do you understand?”

“Yeah okay.” The grin got bigger yet.

“If you want to serve on the Enterprise, I’m going to need you to listen to your mother and everything all of the doctors and nurses at Starfleet Medical tell you to do. Can you do that?” Bill beckoned Eddie in for the not-too-hard hug and held my brother by the arm (as seen below) until they parted company.

“Yeah.” His brow wrinkled a bit as Eddie processed that he needed to be in character.

“Good.” A considered, Shatnerian beat. “Now this is the most important part, young man.” Another beat. “I need you to fight the cancer, dammit. By God, anyone who serves on the Enterprise has to know there is no such thing as a no-win scenario.”

“Kobayashi Maru.”

“Anyone who went to the Academy knows all about it, of course.”

“Starfleet Academy.”

“Are you going to follow orders and fight the cancer?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah? Is that any way to address your commanding officer?”

“Yes sir.”

“Yes sir who?”

“Yes sir, Captain Kirk sir.”

“All right then, you are dismissed…unless you need anything else?”

Eddie gave him another big hug and said “Thank you Mister William Shatner.”

A crooked smile. “Bill, call me Bill.” Another beat. “But…not in front of the Klingons, ok?”

“Yeah, ok.”

He had hit some uncharacteristic low moments in advance of his audience with The Captain. There could not have been a bigger before-and-after transformation for Eddie. Rita moved heaven and earth to make sure Eddie had that memory to fortify him for the hardest days yet to come.

Following his meeting with Bill, Eddie volunteered “I’m not going to die!” to various members of his care team over his last months, with an energy that mom thought that Captain Kirk would have been proud of. Some years later, I showed Bill the photos seen further up from their meeting and told him what that meeting meant to Eddie and to my mom.

Captain Kirk remembered him, of course, and was, indeed, proud of him.

The last movie I watched with Eddie, during what ended up being his last hospitalization, was Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. As I was leaving, he was loading up Star Trek III: The Search for Spock to follow it. For those unfamiliar, the two movies deal very directly with “no-win scenarios” and the notion of death not being the end of things.

Eddie will return in future installments of Office Hours.

See you next Sunday…probably brighter and earlier than this week, since I accidentally got ahead on next week’s Office Hours by virtue of pivoting on this week’s a couple of days ago.

It’s five minutes into Monday, but that’s sooner than I got this out last week, which I count as a win.

This was expected to be a “no-win” sort of week, but we didn’t quit, held our course, and we’re still here. The expected/most likely worst case scenarios haven’t come to pass (yet), but we (I) have a lot to accomplish to keep the ship steady.

Regardless of how today or this week went, here’s to a better tomorrow for you, me, and whoever needs to believe it’s possible.

-Moisés

Thank you for subscribing to this weekly update from Dr. Rita Deyoe-Chiullán, written and edited by her son and Teaching Assistant, Moisés Chiullán.

The best ways to contribute to Rita’s ongoing care are detailed in this post.

Whether you were already one of her nearly six decades of students or not, you are now! Office Hours will remain “pay what you can” on an ongoing basis. Please just keep showing up for class.

If you have a story about “What Rita Taught Me,” please send us an email (WhatRitaTaughtMe@gmail.com), whether you learned something from her in a classroom (in-person or online), or even just from reading Office Hours.