The first item she found online that had belonged to her brother was a pair of green cleats with his No. 18 scrawled inside.
She bought them immediately.
“It’s not much,” Carly Eidam told me, “but it’s something.”
Then there was a pair of white cleats. And a pair of University of Oregon gym shorts that still reeked of sweat. When a memorabilia broker listed Spencer Webb’s helmet from the 2021 Fiesta Bowl, she cobbled together the $2,500 to buy it.
“I would literally pay anything to just have something that’s not even football, that’s just truly his,” Carly said. “A favorite shirt, jacket. A backpack for school. A picture he had on his wall.”
She began to cry.
“I don’t really have much use for football memorabilia when I had to Google what a tight end was when he joined the Ducks.”
Grief takes many forms.
And for Carly, the 32-year-old half-sister who cared for Spencer when he was a baby — and she was still a child — this is part of how she has coped.
Literally picking up pieces wherever she can find them, trying to piece together a family bond with the brother that she lost for so many years and then reconnected with only to lose him again in a horrible tragedy.
It’s been one year since July 13, 2022, the day Webb died after falling from a cliff while climbing near Triangle Lake in a remote part of Lane County.
Eidam, who is one of Webb’s four half-siblings, has spent the past 365 days doing all she can to maintain a link to her brother.
After learning how long it took for witnesses to reach the paramedics, she became an advocate for solar-powered satellite call boxes to be installed in rural parks like the one near Triangle Lake.
And while some members of the Webb family waged a public paternity battle when a woman Spencer had recently met online announced she was pregnant with his baby, Eidam instead sent gifts. She sent Ducks onesies and blankets and a flag that read, “Baby Duck on Board.”
When the woman, Kelly Green, visited Webb’s hometown of Dixon, California, Carly showed her where Spencer used to live and threw a small baby shower in a hotel room.
When the baby boy was born in March, Green named him Spider in honor of Spencer’s nickname. Carly celebrated the arrival of a nephew.
“I wasn’t just going to sit there and have family be out in the world and not have that relationship,” she said.
Carly had done enough of that in her life.
She was, after all, still getting to know Spencer again when he died.
“I lost everything that we were heading towards in terms of having that close brother-sister relationship,” she told me this week. “I can’t make up for anything I missed, I’ve come to accept that.”
She paused.
”But I know that basically four years prior we were total strangers.”
They weren’t always.
When Spencer was a baby, much of the responsibility of caring for him fell to Carly. She was 9. They had the same mom but different dads and lived in the same house the first two years of Spencer’s life.
“It was a chaotic home,” she said, “and it just wasn’t a really good environment.”
She remembers putting Spencer in the stroller and walking him to daycare before going to her elementary school. Buying groceries, diapers and clothes.
“He was my little buddy,” Carly says. “We went everywhere together and hung out with my friends.”
But the state eventually stepped in. Carly went to foster care and Spencer moved in with his grandparents and, later, his half-brother Cody, who helped get him through high school and to college on a football scholarship.
Carly Eidam (right) remembers caring for half-brother Spencer Webb when she was 9 and he was a baby. “He was my little buddy,” Carly says. “We went everywhere together and hung out with my friends.”Courtesy of Carly Eidam
Family is messy. Particularly families as complicated as Spencer Webb’s. He and his four siblings came from four sets of parents.
Carly saw Spencer only a few times after she went to foster care. She left Dixon, was sent to live with her birth dad and was later adopted by another family an hour away in Folsom.
“It’s hard to maintain a relationship between two children when the adults aren’t helping bridge that gap,” Carly said.
She visited him once when he was 10 and he proudly gave her a ribbon he had recently won at a swim meet. By the time she made it back home, she says, a family member had called and asked her not to visit again.
It would be too confusing for the little boy.
But she never forgot the baby brother she had helped raise or what it felt like to tousle his hair when he was falling asleep or how much he loved playing games of “tackle,” a precursor to his football career.
When Spencer turned 18, she says, he got his first cell phone. And they started over.
Carly and her husband, Devin, traveled from their home outside of Sacramento to Eugene for Webb’s first home game against Bowling Green in 2018. Even though he was redshirting, they proudly watched him stand on the sideline. The day after the game they hung out and visited until 3 a.m.
She remembered telling him, “Thank you so much, because I know it’s not normal to meet your siblings and reconnect at this point in your life.”
Before leaving to drive back to their hotel in Portland, Carly remembers asking Spencer for one more hug.
“If I’d known what I know now I just never would have left,” she said.
They stayed in touch. Mostly by Snapchat. She said Spencer told her about girls he was dating.
She patiently explained to him what had happened with their family when he was a baby. How she felt like she was basically his mom at such a young age.
“I love you, sis,” he wrote to her.
In October 2020, Carly was diagnosed with breast cancer. Five days later, she discovered she was pregnant.
Traveling was already impossible because of the pandemic, and now she was undergoing chemotherapy and preparing for surgery while carrying a baby.
The last thing she ever told her brother was that she was cancer-free.
“He was so excited I was in remission,” she said.
That was last spring.
Carly told him she could finally start visiting again and wanted to travel to every Ducks game in Eugene in the fall. He could finally meet his niece, Vivienne, who was born in May 2021.
“I would love that,” Spencer said.
On July 13, Eidam’s mother, Sam, called her. She ignored the call.
Her phone rang again.
Another relative texted that she needed to pick up.
Finally, she did.
“I just went outside and I cried in the grass,” Carly said, “because I don’t know what else to do.”
What else is there to do when the news is that horrible? That sad?
Funeral services were held in Eugene and in Dixon.
The Oregon football team dedicated its season to Webb. Shortly after the tragedy, coach Dan Lanning took the Ducks on a hike to the top of Spencer Butte south of Eugene in his honor. Visiting teams paid tribute, too. And the hashmarks at the 4-yard line at Autzen Stadium — Webb had switched from No. 18 to No. 4 after his junior season — were painted yellow in his memory.
The Ducks have said that no player will wear No. 4 on offense this season, either.
On Thursday morning, Carly woke up at 4 a.m. so she could be at Spencer’s grave at sunrise. When she arrived, their mother was already there.
Carly laid the flowers she had brought for Spencer. White daisies and roses wrapped in a green ribbon stamped with little ducks.
Her mom read a poem she had written.
Together they wept.
Carly will continue to search for items that belonged to her brother and do what she can to forge any relationship she still can, even in his memory.
Four years ago they may have been strangers. Not now.
“I think we had really gotten to a place of being connected,” Carly said. “And us being fighters.”
— Bill Oram | boram@oregonian.com | Twitter: @billoram
