09 September 2015
Newsdesk
Eazy-E’s son Eric Wright Jr. coped with his father’s death through AIDS awareness.
The late N.W.A. rapper would have turned 52 on September 7, but died at the age of 31 in 1995 from complications to do with HIV.
And his son Eric, also known as Lil Eazy E, reconnects with his dad’s spirit by doing charity work related to the disease.
“I started doing AIDS awareness work," Eric told The Recollectors, a website which shares stories of people who have lost loved ones to HIV and AIDS. “I went out and tested with individuals and campaigned for people to go get checked, talked about what it meant and how it affected me, how it’s important to the community.”
Eazy-E is in the spotlight again through hit movie Straight Outta Compton, a biographical film centering on the rise of his legendary hip hop group N.W.A.
Eric loves seeing his father, who he is named after, being reborn onscreen in the feature.
“It brings him to life again, in a positive light,” he noted. “He’s being homaged and recognised for how iconic he was for the entire music industry.”
Before Eazy-E died 20 years ago, he was just a regular dad to son Eric.
Losing him to the disease was very tough for Eric.
“He was just a great father. We mostly did a lot of father/son things. Family things. He’d take us to Disneyland and people would go to the furthest extent to get his attention or his autograph,” he recalled, noting the sickness took hold almost overnight. “Everything changed when I got a phone call that we were going somewhere, but my family didn’t necessarily want to tell me where. We arrived at Cedars-Sinai: Dad was in the hospital. I didn’t understand because he was so uplifted.
It didn’t seem like anything was wrong. We were just cracking jokes on each other. He’s joking about what he wants to eat and I’m like, ‘Well you can’t be eating no hamburgers from McDonald’s!’ He had a little cough at the time, but he was just himself. I didn’t think nothing of it then; I just want to go see my Daddy ‘cause he wants to see me.
“Then my uncle, my father’s little brother—my grandparents were at the hospital all the time—got a call that my dad was supposed to have surgery to clear the leakage in his lungs from the cough. He went into a coma. I saw him rushed back into the hall, and then when he got out, he had tubes in his mouth and couldn’t talk. That’s when I broke down. This all happened within two weeks.”
