Bar Harbor Rallies for Diver Ed and Edna After Cancer Diagnosis
Mar 04, 2026
BAR HARBOR—Money can’t buy love, but sometimes it can reflect the love that people have built, cultivated, and grown in a community.
That’s not quite right when it comes to Eddie and Edna Monat. They don’t just cultivate love. They cultivate joy, silliness, adventure, and superhero acts of conservation, pulling together a community that they love and that loves them back.
The duo run Diver Ed’s Dive-In Theater on the Starfish Enterprise, which won’t run this season because two weeks ago, the dynamic duo received exactly the kind of news they didn’t want. Edna has stage three ovarian cancer. She began chemotherapy, Eddie said, today, March 4.
“Like many of you, my life has been greatly enhanced by Eddie and Edna. They are incredibly generous, wonderful humans. And right now they need help,” Bo Greene wrote on the GoFundMe for the couple.
Edna had been feeling not quite herself for a bit and went to her primary care doctor, Dr. Mary Dudzik, for symptoms like constipation and a lack of appetite.
“Two weeks ago, tonight,” Eddie said, “on the 18th, at 5:30, Mary called Edna and said, ‘I have bad news.’”
The news was big and it was overwhelming.
“We were packing when we found out she went to cancer,” Eddie said.
They’d been packing for a dive trip in Florida that Eddie was the guide for. Many of those who were going on the trip were going to be at their friends’ house for a low-stakes, high-laughter, semi-weekly poker night/playdate. The gathering began at 6:30.
So, Eddie and Edna did exactly what they usually did—they went to their community to tell them, to talk, to be together.
Poker night is a long-running friends’ event that typically features potluck food, laughs, kids running around giggling, people catching up. It is often the highlight of people’s week or month, a safe place, a joyous place.
“We decided to go to poker anyhow and let some of those people know,” Eddie said. “It was hard. I asked Mary to come to poker. I wanted people to know that we had a good support team.”
Dr. Dudzik came too. Immediately, people began figuring out how to help Eddie and Edna before they headed out to the dive trip on Saturday without Eddie.
“Half of that gang went to Florida. I started to let some core people know, and before you know it, they were like ‘we are doing this.’”
“Like a shark and a remora, a clownfish and an anemone, Diver Ed and Edna are inseparable. They have spent their lives giving back to this community, and have introduced thousands of people to the wonders of our oceans,” Raney Bench wrote about the couple as she shared a MealTrain.
They met 25 years ago when they both worked at Conners Emerson. Since then, they’ve created their businesses, expanded their community, hosted potlucks, lead clean-ups of multiple coves, piers, beaches, culverts, and lakes on the island, hauling the wildest of rubbish out of the water. They’ve engaged people with the magic of the ocean, taught about the creatures of the sea to countless visitors and locals, entertained children and seniors, delighted each other and their community. It’s a litany of service.
People call the community of divers and adjacent helpers that they lead the League of Underwater Superheroes. Ed leads it all a bit more loudly than Edna’s quiet, stable presence.
“Everyone who knows Edna knows that she’s the sweetest person on earth,” Eddie said. “She is the kindest, gentlest, sweetest person.”
Pretty much every single year for more than twenty years, “Diver Ed” Monat, Edna—who goes by Captain Evil in the most ironic nickname ever for a diligent, detail-oriented woman known for her superhero level of kindness—and the League of Underwater Superheroes and some sidekicks and crew have cleaned the ocean’s bottom by Ells Pier or Bartlett’s Landing, usually around Earth Day. Monat actually began before that, back when he was Bar Harbor’s harbormaster in 1995.
It sounds like hard work.
It is.
The duo are famous for a lot of things: their hard work, the hysterical, educational fun of the Dive-In Theater, their generosity with their friends, their care and service to the community where they both taught, where Eddie was once harbormaster and where he is now on the Bar Harbor Harbor Committee. But they also are known for their love for gigantic dogs, particularly Newfoundlands.
“She’s like a Newfoundland in a human body,” Eddie said of Edna.
It is, of course, the kindest compliment for a couple that’s spent just about a quarter of a century together.
Bo Greene set up a GoFundMe. Raney Bench set up a meal train where other people—friends—some who have cancer too are bringing food for Eddie.
As news of Edna’s cancer spread, people would show up at the hospital. They sent messages. They called. They shared stories. They wanted to help the people who have helped their neighbors for so many years.
“Thank god for the community. They’ve made my life so much easier,” Eddie said. “Every day is a super long day. It’s trying to keep Edna going, the dogs, and the house going.”
And some things are going to be dropped for a bit out of necessity. Edna needs to eat a very restricted diet every 90 minutes. Eddie is in charge of that, which is why there’s a meal train for his food. They won’t be able to run the Dive-In Theater.
“She was unstoppable before this. I’m just the diver in the business. She does everything else,” Eddie said.
Teagan White also works for the theater and picked up a lot of responsibility last season.
Still, he said, “it’s the two of us, me and Edna. We do everything together.”
“It’s been a disaster,” Eddie said of the implications of the treatment. “She’s toxic for two days and then susceptible to getting illness for a few days every round.”
That means less face-to-face interactions with the community that they love. It also means that they can’t do much of the work they love either.
“The implications of this news on Eddie and Edna are profound, emotionally, logistically, and financially,” Greene wrote in the GoFundMe. “Neither Edna or Eddie are able to work right now, and their main source of income, the Dive-In Theater, will likely have to be on hiatus for this season. Edna is irreplaceable in their business as she is the captain, naturalist, reservations organizer, and logistics coordinator. It is unrealistic to think the trips could run without her, and this is a huge blow to them as a family. With no income coming in, and potentially enormous costs coming up, they really need our help.”
Help has been coming.
In two days, the GoFundMe has raised approximately $75,000. No one knows how much the superheroes will need for uncovered treatment costs/copays/deductibles, travel expenses for non-local treatment, animal care (two dogs, a cat, a bird and a horse), and home expenses.
“Eddie and Edna work together in their business and losing both of their incomes for the foreseeable future is an enormous source of uncertainty and fear. All of their energy will be needed to try and fight this cancer and anything we can do to alleviate other drains on them will be crucial,” Greene wrote.
Eddie and Edna are still finding hope despite a chaotic two weeks.
“Her cancer was super widespread, but there’s so many people who have chimed in and said they had the same stage and widespread and they’ve pulled through,” Eddie said.
Some people have reached out, people who survived ovarian cancer, stage three like Edna’s, and been in remission for ten years. That gives them hope.
“I don’t know that much about cancer, but I’ve learned a lot in a short amount of time,” he said.
That knowledge has come from people sharing resources, private messages from people they’ve met.
“It’s a lot of positive stuff,” Eddie said. “Edna is in unbelievable good spirits. Everyone is just so sweet. Even though its super sad, super hard, and the outcome is so unsure, Edna is in good spirits. She’s my hero. She’s unbelievably, unbelievably, unbelievably strong.”
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