How do I know? His mother, Kim, told me. And her family and friends, all with missing pieces, confirmed it.
All of the people gathered at Kelton’s home Wednesday afternoon had a tale to tell of Kelton. How he had touched lives and brought total strangers together . . . and each story ended in laughter.
It was what Kelton would make you do. A mischievous grin never left his face - even through the most horrid times of oxygen tanks and suction machines that took over his life. The chemotherapy, the medications that made the once-active child listless in the final stages of his life - there always was the grin.
His body was not the same as the skinny bag-of-bones 5-year-old who was diagnosed with inoperable cancer in June 2007. Drugs caused his face and body to swell, he was no longer able to walk and his speech had been replaced with stares when he needed anything or wanted his mother’s attention. But his mother assured him, during his last breaths, that he would run again, play baseball - his passion - and laugh a lot when he reached the Pearly Gates.
“I told him he could go fishing, he could ride a bike and he could play baseball,” she said.
Everything that he was robbed of on this earth as the heinous tumor took over his small body.
Kim, a nurse by profession, knew his time had come late on Tuesday night and wanted to make sure he knew everything she had been teaching him in the short time she had him. The last thing she wanted was for him to be scared.
She whispered to him, “It’s OK to let go. Everything will be better in heaven.”
Lisa Collins, a friend, said Kim sang and talked to Kelton for an hour before he died. To Kim it felt like only 10 minutes left with her son.
Where does a mother get the strength to sing “Amazing Grace” and “Jesus Loves Me” to her dying son? From her faith. Kim has prayed every day for her son.
“We got to do a lot of things, meet a lot of people that we never would have if not for Kelton,” she said - for that she is thankful.
On May 9 of this year Kelton became a member of the Temple Youth Baseball Association Astros team. Kelton loved his baseball and especially his Astros.
He was allowed to sit with the team in the dugout. Temple Mayor pro tem Patsy Luna proclaimed the day Kelton Edmonds Day. The little boy left his wheelchair and, with the assistance of his mother, headed to the mound to throw out the first pitch at Miller Park. There was not a dry eye when balloons left the hands of players and Kelton got to cross off another on his “things to do” list.
Fifteen days later, after hearing about his love of baseball, the Houston Astros invited Kelton and his family to Minute Maid Park in Houston where he was able again to throw out the first pitch of another Astros game.
Kelton received treatment for his disease until the end of March.
“It made him so sick it just didn’t seem right,” Kim told us in May this year.
She said the decision to stop treatment wasn’t as hard as she would have thought. It gave the family time to do all the things they could in the time they had left.
On Wednesday, Kelton’s 9-year-old sister, Katelyn, sat on the couch, sometimes pensive and then chattering about being a cheerleader.
“The girls are OK,” Kim said. Kelton’s younger sister, 4-year-old Kyrstan, hadn’t yet grasped what had happened.
There have been no secrets in this family. Since leaving work to spend quality time with Kelton, Kim has made sure the girls knew what was going on and what changes they all had to make.
But nothing prepared her for the biggest change - life without Kelton.
Funeral services will be Saturday at the Christian Life Church in Temple. More information about that is on Page 3B.
