Henry's Story
(Published in The Providence Journal in 2013)
NORTH PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- Nothing has changed in the room where Henry Alexander Andrade lived.
A huge image of his soccer idol, Lionel Messi, races at you from one wall. A crest of Henry’s favorite team, Barcelona, enshrines another, above the bed where he used to dream.
Nothing has changed, except for unopened boxes of the things from Henry’s few fleeting months at college, and the tear that trickles down his mother’s face as she stands in the room, so much the same but for a gaping absence.
“I remember his last days,” his mother, Carolina DaLomba, says, “when we had a conversation about dying.”
They didn’t talk about death until they had to.
A year ago this month, Henry was doing what most 17-year-olds do. He was graduating from North Providence High School. He was planning to go to college. He had traveled with his family to Cape Verde and to the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. He was the kind of guy who cared a lot about the way he looked, the numerous shoes he wore and the ball caps that had to match them.
He was going to be an architect.
“He was just one of those kids that was motivated, happy all the time, very athletic,” said Henry’s mother.
But in 2009, a sharp pain struck while he was playing soccer. In his high school freshman year, Henry had been happy to make the varsity roster, playing a full 90 minutes in some matches.
But as he sat down, one of his knees seemed to lock on him.
An X-ray found cancer in Henry’s thigh bone.
Chemotherapy, week upon week, shrank the tumor. He braved 16 hours of surgery. His hair fell out. A metal rod became part of Henry’s leg.
He could play other sports. So he signed up for track and field ––the field part, mostly. He learned to swim, joining the school’s team.
Then, a tumor in Henry’s lung. Fought it.
Then, a tumor in Henry’s clavicle. Fought it.
Then, a tumor in one of Henry’s ribs. Fought it.
Henry could not dribble past it or swim away from it. He could not run around it.
The family’s adopted home for a time came with a name: Ronald McDonald House. Staying there, near the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Boston, DaLomba enrolled Henry in a clinical trial that sought to strengthen his bloodstream to fight the cancer. There were no guarantees.
When back in Rhode Island, Henry went to see friends play soccer. He volunteered with the Providence recreation department, teaching little kids to play, something he had been doing since 2006.
But in October 2012, his health faltered again.
Family members spent days and nights with him in the hospital room. There, they celebrated Henry’s 18th birthday in October. There, Henry and his Mom laughed at episodes of “Family Guy” watched at 3 in the morning. There, Henry delivered a kind of address to his younger sister, one that floods his mother’s eyes in the recounting. Henry told his sister there was a reason he sometimes razzed her.
“Henry said, ‘Remember, a lot of times I did that just to show you that I was [feeling] better, so you wouldn’t feel bad for me.’ ”
Because kids can be mean in older grades, “and if you’re weak, you won’t be able to handle it,” Henry’s mother recounted him saying.
“Remember, all these days I’ve been in the hospital and I can’t go to see your soccer match; now you don’t need to feel like I’m not there anymore,” Henry’s mother recounted him saying. “Because I’m always going to be there,” Henry told his sister, “to watch your every game.”
On Jan. 7, Henry and his brother, Alvin Andrade, played a basketball video game in the hospital. It was about 2 p.m.
“I sat behind him and held [Henry] while he lay basically on me,” his mother said, “and with his step-dad [Orlando Monteiro] holding his oxygen tank.”
Four hours later, Henry died.
A family finds ways to remember and also go on. They found it in the color orange, Henry’s favorite. They have planted a garden in the yard, shaped like a heart. Orange flowers sway when a sunny breeze summons them to dance. And Henry’s mother is always seeking orange ornamental butterflies. Several decorate the garden now. An angel catches water when it rain. Four orange chairs line a rear porch.
Henry’s mother plans to plant a tree with orange blooms, and invite Henry’s friends over to help.
Some days, she will come home from work to the Victor Street house that her daughter, Lourdes-Maria, picked all those years ago when they drove by because it looked like a home in the TV show, “Dora the Explorer.”
She will sit in the living room, where an acoustic guitar’s strings were still and silent on a recent afternoon. She will hold a framed photo of Henry. “It makes me happy,” she says.
She will go to the kitchen, where Henry made the steaks that everyone loved.
“And I look out the window and I see this soccer ball,” she says, her voice breaking, “and he’s not playing.”
Others now play in his memory. The family raises money for pediatric cancer research, and in May the Rhode Island Reds soccer team donated proceeds from a match at Cranston Stadium in honor of Henry and all the other people taken too young.
“You know,” his mother says, “a lot of times I ask God to forgive me because I find it so unfair to give me such a beautiful gift and just take it away.”
