On a weeklong trip to a house on a California beach one summer, in a burst of spirituality on a beautiful Sunday morning, I decided to step off the sand and out of the waves for a couple of hours to attend church services. I’m like that, a worshipful man with a constant prayer in his heart. Or it might have been because my wife, Lisa, an authentic stalwart of good faith, grabbed me by the throat and said, “C’mon, you loser, we’re going to church.”
We went.
As we sat in the back of the congregation, listening in and lying low, looking at the back of the heads of a couple of hundred strangers, someone at the podium said something that made me think less about what I was going to have for lunch later at the house and more about this earthly life, how short it can be, how meaningful it should be, what we can make of it if we’re fortunate enough to build positive relationships and do a few good things along the way.
Profound, I know.
When the meeting ended, I was tapped on the shoulder by some folks with familiar faces. A whole family of warm, cheerful faces. One of them belonged to the family’s matriarch, a woman by the name of Patti Edwards. You might have recognized her, too.
She greeted me with a kind smile, despite the fact that 1) as a former columnist herself, she may not have always agreed with my spoken or written points of view (neither did my own mother), and 2) she was still carrying a heavy heart.
LaVell Edwards had died the previous winter and Patti was doing what widows of all sorts have no choice but to do — she was getting by, making her way in the absence of her soulmate, a man who was important to many, many people, BYU football fans and beyond, but nowhere in the same stratosphere as he was important to her.
The feeling was mutual on LaVell’s part. The coach once invited me up to his house — he drove the two of us there in his green sedan — as I threw as many questions at him as his quarterbacks threw touchdown passes at the stadium that would later bear his name.
LaVell loved a lot of things, far past just football. Yeah, he got a huge charge out of crafting teams together, he said, especially watching them form during spring practices, and then witnessing what they could do on the field in the fall. Mostly, they lit up scoreboards and they won.
But his life was larger than just that — indeed, unusual for a head football coach. He loved the little things and the big ones, too, stuff, on the one hand, like the flowers he planted and tended around his home and the way the sun bounced off the canyon walls a stiff 5-iron from his front yard. As we stood there, gazing up at Rock Canyon, the famous cliff east of Provo, he said, “I just looked up there and thought, ‘Holy Cow! What a sight.’” He paused and then added, “I’ve noticed that it’s especially that way when the leaves turn in the fall.”
This was literally days before BYU’s season opener that year.
Edwards loved golf, he loved nature, he loved friends, but what he really loved was driving home from his office each day to eat lunch with Patti. That was his thing. He did it whenever possible over the span of three decades. She was his partner and he was hers. Partnerships are never perfect — and appreciation or not of flowers, there were times when Patti was no shrinking violet, not that she should have been.
There was the time when she went after UCLA coach Terry Donahue in the postgame after the Bruins beat the Cougars, 31-10, in the 1986 Freedom Bowl. Late in the game, UCLA coaches called for a halfback pass that padded the final score. In the interview room, Patti asked Donahue: “Do you really think it was kosher, running that halfback thing with the score the way it was?”
Donahue stumbled around for an answer.
“I think I made my point,” she said as she left the room.
As a writer and a wife, she most definitely was pro-BYU.
LaVell didn’t make a show of it, but he quietly whispered what Patti and his kids and grandkids meant to him. I wrote about some of that during his career and when he passed in December, 2016.
And now, just the other day, a little over nine years later, Patti also died, going wherever good people go when they’re done here, who knows, maybe to have lunch again with LaVell, to have a million of them.
Patti, surrounded by family members, each one evidence of just some of the many things she’d accomplished in her life, patted my hand that day in the back of the church, thanking me with that kind smile for what I wrote about her man, the man she so badly missed. If your belief rolls that way, maybe she misses him no more.