25 years ago today

This past weekend was a time of remembering Shirley and celebrating her legacy, but today is the actual anniversary date of her death. In fact, it was at about this time of night that we were in vigil by her bedside, Betsey and me, and she died sometime around 11p.m. as I recall. In the mid-afternoon, we had a feeling of hope that the blood thinners were working and that she would recover from the stroke she had suffered at the beginning of the day. The doctor sounded hopeful; his mother had suffered a stroke, he said, and recovered well from it. I went home with Betsey to have supper with her and Rob and Katie, and I had picked up a book at the motel for Shirley to read while I was at supper. But when I came back to the hospital room after supper, everything had changed. Shirley was very ill and could barely talk, and when she tried to talk, it was mostly gibberish. Her doctor was not around and had apparently gone somewhere and wasn't answering the phone. Finally he came and ordered a brain scan. That is when we learned Shirley was suffering a cerebral hemorrhage, and that already the brain damage was severe and irreversible. She could not be expected to ever recover from it. By then Betsey had joined me at the hospital. We had to decide whether there would be an effort for Shirley to have brain surgery to relieve pressure and possibly clesr some of the blood from her brain. But the liklihood of that actually helping seemed almost nil. Back in 1957, I had gone through the experience of my father having brain surgery and never regaining consciousness, being in a coma for four months before dying. I could not wish that for Shirley. So we decided to let nature take its course, and in a matter of a few hours, Shirley was gone. We were devastated. The painfulness of that time is still vivid in my memory. But then we had to do so much - notifying people, making decisions and arrangements for travel back to Vermont, and on and on. I don't know how we did it, but we did. Shirley and I had flown out of the Providence, RI airport to Arkansas (I don't remember why) , and our car was in the parking garage at the airport in Rhode Island. Our friend, Phil McKean (who we just saw last Saturday), agreed to go to the airport and get the car and bring it to Vermont. I don't remember how he got the keys! We managed to "get by with a little help from our friends." And that is still true today. Thank you, all you loving family and friends!

Phil McKean's wife, Deborah, with Shirley, at the time of her ordination, May 1, 1994.