EchoBlog

The vacation was everything Bobby and Deanna Engram had hoped — a time to relax before football took hold of their lives, a celebration of the improved health of their oldest daughter, and a chance to share their many blessings with extended family members.

Twenty-one of them, in all, traveled to Jamaica last July. They ate three meals a day together, hung out in a private pool, drove around in golf carts and basked in the sun.

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But as they sat on the beach in Negril on July 4, 2018, they realized that somebody was missing.

“We looked up, and Bobbi is up in the sky parasailing,” Deanna said, smiling at the memory of her oldest daughter. “She would have never done that. Bobbi would never even go down a big slide. We were amazed. It showed how far she had come.”

Three months earlier, Bobbi, who battled sickle cell disease her entire young life, was in the pediatric intensive care unit at The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. She was on life support and doctors prepared the Engrams for the worst. Bobbi, though, had other plans. She freed her arms and removed her breathing tube, and eventually regained enough health and strength to leave the hospital with a new lease on life.

“We felt that God blessed her with five amazing months,” said Bobby, the Ravens tight ends coach. “If you would have seen her in the hospital, and then saw her for the next five months, it just didn’t make any sense. She was doing her own thing. She was like, ‘I’m living it up.’ After the hospital stay, she came out a totally different person.”

Bobby, 46, has the parasailing video on his phone. His daughter filmed it herself while she and her boyfriend, Ryan Forbes, were several hundred feet in the air. They flash wide smiles and shout nervously, a vast sky and miles of blue water in front of them, the dark days seemingly behind.

These are the memories that helped the Engrams navigate through the most challenging year of their lives.

Last January, Bobby’s mother, Dorothy, died. Seven months later, Bobby was in a South Florida hotel room in the early morning of Aug. 25, with the Ravens set to play the Miami Dolphins in a preseason game. He had FaceTimed with Bobbi about six hours earlier. Having just attended her brother Dean’s high school football opener at Gonzaga High in Washington, D.C., she looked exceedingly happy and healthy. With Bobbi, those went hand-in-hand.

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When the phone rang this time, with Forbes on the other end, Bobby knew something was terribly wrong. Bobbi made a few noises in her sleep, Forbes said, but she didn’t wake up. Forbes performed CPR on her as he awaited the ambulance. By the time Deanna and other family members arrived at the hospital, Bobbi had died. The Towson University student was just 20 years old.

“At the end of the day, they said she passed from complications of sickle cell,” Bobby said. “It was diagnosed as cardiac arrest. What happens is people don’t see the internal strife that goes with sickle cell. We talk about the lack of oxygen and the deficiency, but over time, it affects the internal organs. With her, it was her heart. Her heart had to fight so hard to recover from everything.”

Bobby and Deanna, who spoke extensively about their oldest child’s death for the first time last week, don’t want anybody’s pity. Prayers, yes. Pity, absolutely not. They take solace in the fact that Bobbi died peacefully in her sleep, and the day before her passing, she was surrounded by friends and loved ones.

One of the reasons they agreed to an interview is because they wanted to thank all the people who helped and inspired them along the way. They’ve been buoyed by the support of family and friends, and by an unshakeable faith. An unrelenting purpose guides them: to celebrate Bobbi’s life and to find a cure for the terrible disease that cut it much too short.

“When Bobbi was healthy,” Deanna said, “she showed you how to live.”

Sickle cell disease is a blood disorder, characterized by the hemoglobin — the protein in red blood cells that carries oxygen throughout the body — becoming abnormally shaped. Usually, in patients affected with sickle cell, round blood cells become crescent or sickle-shaped, and they block the flow of oxygen to areas of the body, causing significant bouts of pain and other issues.

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By some estimates, sickle cell disease affects 70,000 to 100,000 Americans, but the exact number is hard to pinpoint with no national sickle cell registry. It’s an inherited condition and only possible when both parents possess the sickle cell trait. If both parents have the trait, there is a one-and-four chance that their baby will be born with the disease.

Like many families with children who are affected, Bobby and Deanna had no idea that they had the trait until they got the sobering news when Bobbi was born. Their two sons, Dean, 18, and Trey, 14, don’t have the disease. Their youngest daughter, Phoebe, 8, does. That inspires the Engrams even more to raise funds and awareness for a condition that’s not fully understood.

“It’s been extremely tough,” Bobby said of Phoebe’s condition. “We try not to shield everything, because she’s smart, she knows what’s going on. The questions that she asks have to be addressed. There’s questions about death; there’s questions about her life. ‘I have the same thing as Bobbi. Is that going to happen to me?’ Those are some tough conversations to have, but we always want to be honest with her. At the same time, we give her hope. That’s what we’re working for. We’re working to find a cure. We tell her, we’re going to find a cure in her lifetime, and hopefully sooner rather than later. That’s our mission.”

Even with her father playing wide receiver in the NFL for 14 seasons and then moving into coaching, and with her brothers embracing the game, football and sports were never Bobbi’s thing. She’d watch her father from the stands and yell, “Go Dad Go,” until Dean interrupted to tell her that the defense was on the field. Dad played offense.

She was interested in the arts. Moving around the country to accommodate her father’s playing and coaching career, Bobbi found comfort on her keyboard and in school music departments. She also loved to write. She spent hours at the hospital during a sickle cell pain crisis, recurring episodes of varying severity caused by blood cell blockages, writing the discomfort away in her journal. Bobbi was once at UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh for 35 consecutive days, and she wrote about the doctors and nurses as if they were her closest friends.

An English major and a writing minor at Towson, Bobbi wanted to be an author of short stories and have her younger sister, Phoebe, illustrate them. All the while, she kept her sights on another goal that she set years earlier.

“She was about 7 or 8, and she looked at me and Bobby from her hospital bed and she said, “‘What do other kids do when they’re struggling?’” Deanna recalled. “She said, ‘I have you and Dad, and I have my medicine, and we have doctors, but what about kids who can’t even afford medication? What about them?’ Our jaws dropped. We left that hospital and we were changed. We went and we got to work.”

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The Bobby Engram Foundation was formed in 2008. It’s recently been rebranded as the Bobbi Engram Foundation, and its mission is to provide awareness, hope and resources for those who struggle with sickle cell disease, and to honor Bobbi’s legacy in the process.

“There was a lot of times people didn’t know (she had the disease). She didn’t want people to know,” Deanna said. “The only reason Bobbi started sharing was because she realized that she had a platform; she could help other people. She didn’t want people to look at her any different, or feel sorry for her, or feel like it was contagious. She just wanted to make a difference.”

They met at Penn State. Deanna was studying and Bobby was taking a “study break,” eating pizza and fooling around with his Nittany Lions teammate and roommate, Ki-Jana Carter, the eventual first overall pick in the 1995 Draft. Surrounded by students nervously cramming for exams, Deanna was taken aback by how carefree Bobby looked. They had a mutual friend, so Bobby came over to talk to her and to introduce himself to Deanna.

Later that day, Bobby left his apartment for a late-night snack at a nearby McDonald’s. When Deanna was there too, he figured it was meant to be. They shared a Happy Meal on their first date and Bobby made a strong impression by saying a prayer over his food. It took Deanna back to her upbringing in a close-knit, and religious family.

The two grew inseparable and Bobby, who still holds some receiving records at Penn State, proposed when he returned from the 1996 Senior Bowl. Deanna had always said that whenever she got a nice ring, she needed to have had her nails done, too. Bobby made her an appointment for a manicure and came with the engagement ring in tow. Deanna’s lone regret was that she wasn’t dressed for the occasion. She had on Bobby’s Senior Bowl sweatsuit.

Bobby’s NFL career started in 1996 as a second-round pick by the Chicago Bears. He played five seasons in Chicago, followed by an eight-season run in Seattle. He was a dependable target and a locker room leader. Seahawks coach Mike Holmgren once said that his “coaching life was blessed having a guy like (Engram).”

Engram’s playing career seemed just about over in 2006 when a thyroid problem left him so weak that he struggled to pick up his children. Yet, he returned a year later, and as a 34-year-old, he caught 94 balls for 1,147 yards for a Seattle team that won the NFC West.

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“He was one of those guys that when you meet him, you know immediately that if he allows me, I would love to have him in my life forever,” said former Seahawks teammate Nate Burleson. “There are some very powerful, strong, impactful, influential men that I’ve taken a piece of everything from. Bobby Engram has had the most profound impact on me. When I was in Seattle, I was brought there on a four-year contract, so essentially, I was just another guy to take food off his table and compete for his spot. He embraced me. I was a young father, a young husband. He walked in such a way that you can mimic his steps. If you just did that alone, you would be a better man.”

When he retired from the NFL in 2010, coaching was a natural draw. Bobby’s father, Simon who died in a tragic car accident involving an Amtrak train when Bobby was at Penn State, was a youth coach. Bobby’s two siblings also have coached in some capacity.

Bobby took a quality control job with the San Francisco 49ers under Jim Harbaugh in 2011, but the number of hours it required posed a challenge to his growing family. He told Deanna that he needed a good five years to get his coaching career off the ground. If he was sputtering at the end of that window, he’d step away, no questions asked.

He spent two seasons coaching wide receivers at the University of Pittsburgh, but Bobby’s goal was to coach in the NFL. He had a few inquiries and offers. They just didn’t feel right. Then, early in 2014, Bobby was on a recruiting trip at the McDonogh School in Owings Mills — four miles away from the Ravens facility — when he got a call from Ravens coach John Harbaugh. The Ravens needed a receivers coach for the upcoming season and Harbaugh wanted to speak to Bobby for the job.

“The Ravens were just different,” said Bobby, who took over as the tight ends coach this year after five years of working with the receivers. “I knew what they stood for; I knew the type of men and the character of the team. I wanted to be associated with the type of organization and the team that was here.”

Former Ravens receiver Steve Smith Sr. signed with the Ravens in 2014, partly because he hit it off with Bobby on his free-agent visit. Smith and Bobby spoke in the cafeteria for nearly 90 minutes, as team officials occasionally peered in to make sure the free agent meeting was going OK. Smith challenged Bobby and asked him what he’d do to make him a better player. That laid the groundwork for a close relationship that also extended to their families. Smith and his wife, Angela, regularly keep in contact with the Engrams.

Smith was recently cleaning out his office when he came upon a picture of him and Bobby at the Ed Block Courage Award ceremony.

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“I was looking at it and I just smiled,” Smith said, his voice cracking with emotion. “He’s a good man, and he’s been through a lot.”

Under Harbaugh, children and families of players and coaches are not only allowed to spend time in the team facility, but it’s also widely encouraged. Bobbi, who grew up having no interest in football, loved going to the Under Armour Performance Center. One day, she was under the weather and Bobby left his daughter at home. He never heard the end of it.

Before each season, Bobbi would get a copy of the Ravens’ schedule and circle the games she planned on attending with her father. She called them Daddy-Daughter dates and she’d spend time hanging out around the team hotel and on the sideline before the game with her father. A few months before the 2018 season, she told Bobby that the Pittsburgh Steelers game at Heinz Field was a must. She had become a true Baltimorean, in that she despised the Steelers, and wanted to witness the Ravens exact revenge on their AFC North rivals.

When they did, the Ravens going to Heinz Field last season and coming away with a 26-14 win in late September, Harbaugh presented Engram with a game ball.

“We talked about somebody who really desperately wanted to be here and was here in all of our hearts, Bobby Engram, this is for your beautiful angel, Bobbi,” Harbaugh said, tossing the ball to his wide receivers coach as the players cheered.

Bobby reluctantly stepped into the middle of the room and delivered a brief message that focused on the team. What Ravens players didn’t know was that just moments earlier, he was in a bathroom stall in the locker room sobbing, completely overcome with emotion.

“She grew up in Pittsburgh. That’s where she was born. We had a house in Pittsburgh for 15 years,” Bobby says now. “Just a lot of great memories, a lot of struggle there. It was almost like the culmination of a whole lifetime of memories and other things. To win that game, she would have been cheering the loudest.”

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Deanna interjected, “She was cheering the loudest.”

For Bobby and Deanna, grief accompanied their every move last year. Each day brought a flurry of reminders that their beautiful daughter was gone. Their primary concern was how their kids were handling the tragedy. Bobbi and Dean were only 20 months apart, and they were extremely close. Dean made sure that Bobbi never fell too far behind in school during her extended hospital stays, and that she always had a group of friends to hang out with. Phoebe spent some weekends with Bobbi at college and there was nothing better than when her oldest sister returned to the family’s Columbia, Md. home and took her out to the mall or movies.

“We had to talk to our (kids) about finishing and not quitting,” Bobby said. “Sometimes, your strongest character is revealed in your darkest moments. You have to wake up; you have to do your homework, you have to go to school. We’re not callous about it, but life has to go on. We have to put on our pants. Even though we’re grieving, we may be crying; there’s things that we all have to do. There’s obligations and responsibilities that we have. People were counting on me here, so I had to do my job. You can’t just quit; you can’t just walk away. That’s not going to take away from the pain anyway.”

As Bobby readied his players for each week’s game, Deanna, a bible study teacher, lectured to 500 women for 40 minutes each week. For more than two weeks after Bobbi’s death, members of their bible study group dropped off meals at their home. Bobby’s former teammates, Shaun Alexander, Trent Dilfer and Joe Jurevicious, who had all lost children, reached out to show their support. Bobby and Deanna woke up early each morning so they could talk and have a “coffee and a cry.” They also regularly met with their pastor and went to grief counseling, using all the available resources.

While at work, Bobby leaned on the Ravens chaplain Johnny Shelton and took comfort in support of Ravens players and coaches. He tried to hide his pain from the players, but they understood.

“Bobby doesn’t show his emotions. He doesn’t wear his emotions on his sleeve. He comes to work every day and is a professional,” said Ravens receiver Willie Snead IV. “But we all know what he’s going through. I just know that he’s in a better place now than he was a year ago.”

Following Bobbi’s death, Bobby and Deanna attended a memorial for their daughter at Atholton, Bobbi’s former high school. About 40 kids let balloons into the air in Bobbi’s memory. Afterward, the Engrams allowed each student to speak about Bobbi. They told stories of Bobbi sticking up for other students who were getting picked on and making sure nobody was sitting by themselves in the cafeteria.

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“If there was someone that’s excluded, she wanted them included,” Deanna said. “That’s just how Bobbi was because she knew how it felt to be an outsider.”

Bobbi had one request for her Homegoing Service. No one was to wear black. One-by-one, members of the Engram family went up to speak about Bobbi with Dean going first and Trey going last. The common themes were to love your children, to value the brevity of life and to make a positive difference.

“I believe that speaking about Bobbi is healing and the more we speak about her, the more healing we receive,” Deanna said. “You have to realize that the grief is going to be there until we get to heaven, but so is our joy. There was a period where, for me, my hope was low. As time has gone on, I’m getting back to where we were. Although grief continues, so does the joy.”

Burleson said that he and his wife spent a significant part of their three-plus hour ride back home to New Jersey following the service, discussing ways to make a difference.

“I just remember thinking to myself, I have to do more and I have to have more of an impact on people who are surrounding me,” said Burleson, a broadcaster for NFL Network and CBS. “It was a very sobering realization that you’re not doing enough because you look at Bobby, you look at what he was able to do in his lifetime and if you know Bobby, you know that he’s not done. He has so much more to do and he’s been through so much already — the good, the bad, the ugly. Yet, you know Bobby is going to have a profound impact on the world, just like his daughter.”

On Nov. 2, the Bobbi Engram Foundation, in connection with the Ravens and St. John Baptist Church in Columbia, will host Run Walk-N-Roll at St. John with proceeds going to finding a cure for sickle cell disease. The foundation continues to sponsor kids and their siblings to attend sickle cell camps, allowing kids afflicted to spend time with others who have the disease. Phoebe will also be a panelist at an upcoming sickle cell symposium with the National Institute of Health.

“We always told Bobbi that there was a purpose for her pain, and she believed that,” Deanna said. “We believe that the purpose for her pain was to help others and find a cure.”

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After practice Sunday, the Ravens commemorated the first anniversary of Bobbi’s death by kneeling for a team prayer. Later, Forbes, who had previously told the Engrams of his plans to marry their oldest daughter, stopped by their house to talk about his recent graduation from Towson. They FaceTimed with Dean, now a freshman cornerback for the University of Wisconsin.

They told stories, they laughed and they reminisced about Bobbi. They tried to keep everything normal even though everyone in the house knew that is no longer possible.

“Of course, it was an emotional day, but we continue to choose to celebrate her life and her legacy and not focus on her not being here in the physical,” Bobby said. “She’s with us in spirit and we never lose those memories. We always cherish those memories and the times we spent with her. Those are ours. We own those. That’s where our focus is.”

(Photos courtesy of the Engram family)

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