Michelle & Michael Moore

Michael Moore and his wife Michelle are ordinary people. She teaches Spanish at Fayetteville High School. He designs cable for Cox Communications.

Circumstances forced them to become extraordinary on Oct. 29, 2013, when their 16-year-old son Joshua collapsed. He died Nov. 1 at Arkansas Children's Hospital.

Joshua Moore had gone out for a run that Tuesday evening, something he often did to burn off the energy he wanted to put into sports. He ran cross country at FHS, ran for pleasure, ran with his girlfriend, Kristen Zebell. That night, the family was busy, so a trip to the gym together was canceled. His mom had just come home from two weeks with her ailing mother. Joshua had been home just a couple of days from a high school band trip to Atlanta.

The last words Michael said to his son were "love you, buddy." Then Joshua took off on the course he'd plotted for time and distance -- and because his parents wanted to know where he was. The rule was, he had to take the same route.

Forty-five minutes passed, and Joshua should have been home. The Moores tried calling and texting, and one of the messages showed it had been read. They thought he'd stopped to chat with neighbors perhaps. "But Joshua always answered his phone," his dad says. Finally, they got in the car together -- although neither was sure why they were both going -- to retrace Joshua's route.

That's when they saw a cluster of blue lights. And they knew, Michael Moore says. They just didn't know how bad the situation was.

Two become one

Michelle Woodard and Michael Moore met in high school in Camden.

"He was a jock, and she was a band geek," daughter Elizabeth, 17, says.

"Maybe you shouldn't say band 'geek,'" her mom says. "I was in color guard."

"And drum major your senior year," Elizabeth says.

Michael's first memory of Michelle was seeing her walk into a youth group at church. He didn't know she was the one, he admits. "We didn't even date in high school."

The two are settled comfortably in a cozy living room in Greenland, with Elizabeth next to them, playing with a friend's 3-month-old baby boy. The family dynamic is loving, clearly closer than many share with a teenager. Discussing their courtship, Michael and Michelle are both animated, Elizabeth putting in addendums to their stories and laughing. It's easier to talk about anything that happened before they lost Joshua.

Moore joined the Army after high school and came home on leave for Thanksgiving 1992. He and Michelle ran into each other cruising the downtown, as all teenagers do, and he asked her to the playoff football game. They courted through "snail mail" for the next nine months while he was stationed in Germany.

"I have all the letters he wrote me," Michelle says, face transformed into that teenage girl. "I kept them all."

They were married in 1994 and moved to Fayetteville so she could finish college.

Baby makes three

"I was working three jobs and in the Reserves when she got pregnant with Joshua," Michael Moore remembers. "And I was in college to become a paramedic. But we needed the income and the insurance, so I went back to active duty."

Michelle spent the last two months of her pregnancy being watched over by friends. Michael was very protective. And, after 21 hours of labor, Joshua was born the day after Michael got home -- 10:30 p.m. on Friday, June 13, 1997.

"He was so cute," Michelle says.

"He was a funny looking baby," Michael disagrees.

And Elizabeth jumps up to find a scrapbook to show off his baby pictures. "See," she says, laughing.

"He was a very easy baby," Michael and Michelle agree on that, sleeping through the night at 2 weeks old. He was 7 months old, pulling up on furniture, when his dad was deployed to Kuwait -- "and he was running by the time I got back," Michael says.

Joshua was just 25 months old when Elizabeth was born, and he was always her knight in shining armor. Her face lights up as she talks about wrestling with Joshua and her dad, but the smile turns into full-blown laughter when she talks about some of the things he convinced her to do -- like setting her hand on fire and encouraging her to cut her hair herself.

"He had his moments," Michelle admits, laughing, and Elizabeth launches them into the story about how he ran a stop sign with the family in the car shortly after he'd started driving -- and "he said a bad word." When his dad scolded him for his language, he "just hung his head and kept saying, 'I'm sorry.' He was always quick to apologize when he had messed up."

They all turn serious when they talk about Joshua's faith in God, how he planned to be a preacher, how he wanted nothing more than to share that conviction with everyone he met. Nowhere was his "heart of gold" more evident than on the family's mission trips to Honduras. Michelle says her son was itching to go when he was 6, but in a country where the water wasn't even safe for tooth brushing, it just wasn't possible. Finally, at his persistent pleas, she told him he could go when he was 13 -- and he did. Moore remembers that he always came back to the United States with nothing but the clothes on his back, wearing his mother's Crocs.

"He would have to wear my shoes, because he had given his away," she says. "He'd given away all of his jeans."

His generosity was the same on a family trip to Washington, D.C., and New York City. Both children got only the spending money they had saved themselves. "I bet he gave away half of what he had earned dropping money into the beggars' cups," his mother says. "He was putting 10s and 20s in there, not 1s and 5s.

"He was such a funny kid."

Broken heart

Joshua was born with a diverticulum -- an abnormal pouch -- in the left ventricle of his heart. The doctors discovered it when he was 18 months old, and they kept an eye on it throughout his life. It didn't change, growing in scale with his heart, and he had no heart murmur, no arrhythmia. The only restrictions on Joshua were no contact sports and no heavy lifting. He didn't know about his heart condition until he was 8 years old.

Forced onto different paths -- he'd wanted to be a Razorback football player since he was 3 -- Joshua played soccer when he was little, ran and swam when he was older, and threw himself into the FHS Band.

In an interview last year, band director Barry Harper called Joshua "the mayor."

"He worked the crowd everywhere he went, and he was always positive," Harper says. "I thought the world of him."

Joshua's reputation as a percussionist had already come to Harper's attention while he was still at Ramay Junior High School, but the story Harper chooses to tell about Joshua is coming home from a band contest when the FHS musicians didn't do as well as their director had hoped they would.

"I thought everybody was gone," he recalls. "Then his little blonde head came looking around my door. He told me to 'get some rest this weekend. We'll get on it Monday.' That's just how he was."

On Friday, Oct. 25, 2013, Joshua and the FHS band played in "a huge contest" at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta, Harper remembers. They returned home the Sunday before that awful Tuesday.

When the Moores arrived at the cluster of police cars, they explained they were looking for their son. The officers would say only that a young man had been taken by ambulance to Washington Regional Medical Center. Then they handed Joshua's phone to Michelle.

Elizabeth, then 14, was doing homework when a knock came at the door. It was a neighbor, who told her her parents were on the way to the hospital with Joshua. An aunt and uncle soon arrived to take her to her family.

At WRMC, the Moores were escorted into the chapel to hear the news that emergency workers were still trying to get a heartbeat. It took an hour and half to stabilize that heartbeat, and Joshua was airlifted to Children's Hospital with his parents by his side.

He never regained consciousness.

Elizabeth remembers taking Joshua's favorite stuffed animal, "Mr. Puffs," to him and saying "I love you."

"She has demonstrated a lot of grace," her mother says, eyes shining with unshed tears.

"I do my best," Elizabeth says. "I just try to do what Joshua would want me to do."

The rest of their lives

Several things comfort Joshua's mother. One is that doctors assured her he wasn't in any pain and wouldn't have had time to be scared. Another is that sympathy flowed to the family from "every continent but Antarctica and Australia." A third is knowing that scholarships in memory of Joshua will be awarded through an endowment -- the goal is $2 million -- at Harding University, where he planned to study to be a minister.

Devin Swindle, associate professor of Bible and ministry at Harding, remembers Joshua from Kerusso camp, a "preacher training camp" for ninth- to 12th-grade boys.

"Josh was full of life and fun and energy, and the other students took to him," Swindle remembers. It was only a few months after Kerusso that Joshua was gone.

"His parents wanted to make sure his dream to preach lives on in some other student," he says. "Getting a degree in Bible is not an inexpensive proposition, so we want to remove as many barriers as possible, one being the cost of an education."

Harding awarded the first Josh Moore Kerusso Scholarship this semester, to a student who was at that first Kerusso camp with Joshua. "Right now, it's still a group of boys who knew who Josh was. But I tell Josh's story when I talk about Kerusso to anybody," Swindle says.

Of course, Michelle will be running again in this year's Joshua Run, started by the church her family attends. In its first year, the event raised $6,600 for students in Honduras who need shoes, backpacks, supplies and fees so they can go to school. This year, the Joshua Run falls on Oct. 29, three years to the day.

"The days," Michelle says, "are long, but the years are short." She says she can still hear Joshua's laugh and her son's voice echoing through the halls of Fayetteville High School, as he'd shout, "Hi, Mom! I love you!" whenever he saw her.

"The hardest thing," she says, "is I feel like we're living a life of reruns. Every story we tell, we've told a dozen times before. I wonder when people will get tired of hearing them."

Michael says he works hard not to paint Joshua as "a perfect angel," and both agree that Elizabeth "deserves to have parents that are present." "She is very much her own person," Michelle says. "She has to live her purpose, just as Joshua did."

"Joshua only had 16 years on this earth, but he did what God needed him to do," Michael says. "He had served the purpose of God and got his reward."

"I could be on this earth another 40 years, but I know Joshua will be there waiting for me [in heaven]," Michelle says.

There are still new stories that pop up, untold until triggered by something. A visit by a reporter prompted Elizabeth to share something with her mother.

"She told me about her last conversation with Joshua," Michelle says. "I guess she had considered going for a run with him that night but changed her mind. As he was leaving, she told him that she would make him some dinner and have it ready when he got home. He smiled at her and said, "I love you, little sister." That was the last thing he said to her. She cherishes that."

"I just look forward to seeing him again," Elizabeth says.

NAN Profiles on 10/23/2016