I’ve been thinking a lot about what will be the impetus for Chris to finally come home. It’s clear it’s not going to come from Chris — he’s as stubborn as Buck can be. I’ve also been wondering why they brought up Eddie being an army medic a couple times in the last episode — the episode that was so clearly about Eddie’s relationship with his son and his own father. To me, the most important part about Eddie being in the army, for his character, is that he was far away from Chris. Wasn’t able to be there as he grew. And it was a choice Eddie made to enlist, one undeniably influenced by his father telling him to be the Man of the family, but it was also a choice made in fear. He was scared he wasn’t ready to be a dad, and that fear made him, in a perverse way, just as absent as his own father.
So here he is again — a manufactured distance from Christopher, due to his own decisions. This time Chris chose to leave, but it was because of Eddie’s choices. And Eddie is ‘giving him space,’ but it’s clear that this distance is being kept, again, because of Eddie’s fears. He’s scared because to get Chris back, he’s going to have to have a scary conversation — one about how, even though he told Chris that they could still talk to Shannon and remember her, he hasn’t been able to figure out how to move on from his grief. Because that grief isn’t just about letting Shannon go. It’s about the hard work of forgiving someone who you can never talk to again, and the even harder work for forgiving himself. But like he told Weston’s dad, Eddie’s the grown-up in this relationship. And just like he’s told Chris — they’re going to talk about the scary stuff, together.
I think Eddie is going to talk to the priest about this first, and come to the realization that he’s still the one choosing to keep this distance between himself and Chris. He’s going to talk about his dad, telling him at 12, that it was his job to step up and be a man, and how he’s never really healed from that. (And maybe, he’ll remember that when his dad told him that, he was on his way out the door to another long absence for work, and he’ll remember that Ramon just happened to be sporting a mustache. And Eddie will go home and immediately shave. Rip, but symbolically, cleansing).
The funny thing about Eddie’s Catholicism, to me, is that it’s really only been visible when he wears his St. Christopher medal. Those times that it’s present — the times he’s dragging himself out of the desert, and a well, and from a gunshot — are all about him getting home to Chris. But they’re also inextricably linked to Buck. Buck was just as present in Eddie’s flashbacks in the well as Shannon was. And one of the first things Eddie did when recovering from the sniper was to make sure Buck knew how vital he was to Eddie and Chris’s life. Part of getting Chris back will be to acknowledge the truth of Eddie’s grief, but it will also hinge on accepting the future he’s already built with Buck.
And when Eddie pulls up to his house with Chris, there will be a brief moment when he feels like something is still missing — until Buck opens the door. And Eddie will still feel like he’s broken, but I think he’ll remember that Buck loves nothing more than to help fix things. He’s been patching up Eddie’s holes since the day he met him. And maybe there is still a hole in Eddie’s life, but curiously — it’s shaped a lot like Buck. And Buck will smile at him and say “you got home fast,” and Eddie will smile and say, “yeah. They finally finished that construction on Sunset.”
