Eric's Heroes: Fritz's final journey

YAKIMA, Wash. — His friends and teachers, and especially his mother, speak about him with an unabashed tone of wonder and awe.

They marvel at his free spirit, his sense of intellectual adventure, his music and his art and his spirit of fashion. And every one of them speak of a willingness to engage with all types, a desire to seek out the quiet and the shy and the outcast, to make them feel seen and heard.

His name was Fritz Weresch. He was found unconscious two weeks ago. He was pronounced brain dead eight days ago.

Nobody is quite sure why it happened -- or how. For now, at least, it is a mystery that Fritz’s family will have to learn to live with.

Last Thursday, Fritz took a journey through the halls of Yakima Valley Memorial Hospital that was beautiful and profound and, I believe, extremely important for people to see.

One of his friends, Gavin Holt, uses an extraordinary phrase to describe Fritz. He said he was, "completely free." A free thinker, free of social constraints, creative, musical, curious, accepting and welcoming.

His teacher Craig Lacy said, "Fritz was definitely his own person, and he had been forever."

I asked Craig's son Rory to describe Fritz, and he said this: "I would describe him as, I guess, extravagant for lack of a better word. He marched to the beat of his own drum, kind of. He didn't really let anyone stifle that at all."

An "extravagant" 18-year old young man who was "completely free." What did that look like? Well, some friends said they couldn't remember the last time his hair was its natural color.

His fashion sense was, to say the least, unrestrained. He wore makeup sometimes. He wore skirts sometimes. Craig never knew what to expect when Fritz walked into class.

"This year he showed up and he was wearing his mom's muumuu. I was like, 'What's going on?' and he was like, 'Meh, just felt like wearing this today,'" Craig remembered.

Sometimes he'd show up with his guitar and play between classes. I saw a video of him playing music he'd written, and it was quite stunning. By all accounts, Fritz Weresch did his own thing, unapologetically.

But even more than the artistic stuff, people talked about his willingness to engage with everybody.

Craig said, "Kids that knew him liked him because Fritz was a nice guy. He was very much about trying to include people and their differences, and differences are usually what he liked about people the most, because it made them unique. He was a unique kid."

And Eileen Weresch, Fritz' mom, who mourns and honors her son by talking about who he was and how he lived his life, said, "The number one thing I could say about Fritz is he was a friend to everyone who was in need of a friend."

She speaks of him in the present tense, as if he is still with her, still alive. Because to her, he is.

"He's empathetic, he's funny. He's smart. He's a deep thinker. He's a world traveler," said Eileen. "We've been blessed to travel with him. He's comfortable in any situation. He can have blue hair and come to a gathering with my family, which is fairly conservative, and he can fit in, and love, and be part of that, and he could traverse any situation."

When he went along with Gavin to get his driver's license, the two of them spoke about becoming organ donors.

"I knew he wanted to donate his organs," Gavin said, "because we had a conversation about it. It was last spring we went in. He had the same opinion as me. Seems like a no brainer to me. He was like, 'Yeah, I'm gonna be dead, why would I need my organs?' So he had that matter of fact attitude towards it. It was almost like there's no question behind it."

After Fritz passed away, Craig heard some of Fritz' friends talking. "One of them goes, 'I just know something good is going to come out of this, and I really hope someone gets Fritz's heart. because it's so full of love," said Craig.

So now you know who Fritz was, which will help you understand the thing that happened at the hospital a little more than a week ago.

Fritz's body had been kept hooked up to life support, in an effort to keep his organs functioning.

And when his body, on a bed, with machines following behind, and Eileen and Wes following too, left his hospital room to make the journey to where his organs would be taken out of his body and then raced to a waiting plane, which would then race to where there would be a waiting person who was in desperate need of an organ, other people showed up to honor the occasion and the young man and the decision he'd made.

Lots of people showed up, and they lined the halls of the hospital. Hundreds of them, cued up on either side, standing in awe as the bed carrying Fritz went by. Memory Montage Photography took video of the scene. The pictures are amazing.

They were kids that Fritz knew, or that he had touched in some way. Some of them considered him a good friend, others knew him only because of brief greetings or occasional conversations.

Doctors and nurses also lined up, along with family members too. It was quiet, except for a couple guitars that trailed behind the bed playing soothing chords.

And on and on they went, with some kids hugging one another, others lowering their heads as he went by. Maybe they thought about his decision to donate his organs.

In the state of Washington alone, there are more than 1,600 people, right now, waiting desperately for the organs that might save their life. Nationally, that number is over 106,000 people waiting, for kidneys, livers, lungs and hearts.

And the wait sometimes ends badly. Every day, across America, 22 people died waiting for a donated organ. And one donor can save up to eight lives -- it truly is a profound gift.

The journey through the halls of Yakima Valley Memorial finally ended. Wes and Eileen said their final goodbyes. And then in the hours that followed they learned that Fritz's lungs were placed with a recipient, and his kidneys were placed as well.

They tried to give his liver to a recipient too, but the body rejected it on the operating table.

Eileen described what happened next: "We got a text, 9:30 at night and it was that the heart had been placed. And we screamed loud enough to wake up the whole hotel, and then we thought about the screams that were happening in and around another table. Of the recipient. And we were just joyful."

Somewhere, Fritz Weresch's heart is still beating.

I was so struck by Eileen Weresch and her open willingness to talk about her son with such joy and happiness only a week after his death. I said to her as we wrapped up our talk, "You seem to me that, in spite of it all, you feel lucky."

He response was immediate: "Because of it all. Not in spite of it all. I feel lucky because of it all."

"I feel lucky because I had Fritz," Eileen emphasized. "I feel lucky because he died in such a way that he could give his gift. I feel lucky to have known him."

"I feel lucky to have been a part of the growth of his friends. I feel lucky to have been able to give to them and receive from them. You can't even know what has happened in this last week to me personally."

"That's why I feel lucky because of it," Eileen finished.

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