DEL.ICIO.USMY OPINION / MIKE KING, mking@ajc.com
Love, laugh, learn: A good life’s work
She loved this yearly ritual, when kids close the book on summer and head back to school. Since retiring from teaching four years ago, she’d taken to waiting with neighborhood kids at the school bus stop in front of our house, quizzing them about who their teachers were, telling them how much fun they would have learning new things this year. If she missed them in the morning, she’d catch them when the bus brought them home.
When she left her third-grade classroom, she didn’t look back. She always said that if it ever became just a job, she’d stop. You don’t teach halfway, or hold anything back, she said. You go all-out.
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Still, she missed the kids. I could tell. The start of the school year reconnected her with a nearly 30-year career as a teacher. It was fun to watch her with them at the bus stop.
But this year, the kids from up the street aren’t at the bus stop. They moved over the summer.
She’s not there either. She died over the summer.
And I miss her desperately.
I miss the dogs running upstairs to wake her for breakfast after I’d taken them for a walk. I miss the 15 minutes of small talk we had each morning at the breakfast table. I miss the recurring arguments about her moving my iPod. (She never did that, but it was important for me to accuse her, to maintain our 35-year debate over why she felt the need to move my stuff.)
Mornings are the worst. Sometimes I just want to stay in our now much-too-big bed.
It’s been a little over seven weeks since the neurologist, a handsome Brazilian doctor with a thick accent, sat knee to knee across from me in the intensive care unit of Tallahassee Memorial Hospital. That conversation is seared in my memory.
Doctor: You need to tell me what you want me to do.
Me: You need to tell me her status.
Doctor: Mr. King, your wife is going to die. There is no chance for recovery. She is going to die.
Me: Are you 100 percent sure?
Doctor: 100 percent. You should think about this and let me know what you want me to do.
I’ve recounted those words to dozens of friends and family members and replayed it in my mind hundreds of times a day since she died. It wasn’t that I was surprised by his prognosis. I knew the seriousness of her condition. Still, everything was happening so fast.
Two days before, we had been relaxing on the beach at St. George Island — her favorite place on Earth — midway through a two-week vacation. Our daughter, Katie, had just arrived from Pensacola, Fla., to join us. Our son, Patrick, was coming down a few days later from Atlanta.
Then, just like that — with the swiftness and power of the thunderstorm that popped up the morning she was stricken — it was over. She stopped breathing.
I tried CPR, as did the first responders to our 911 call. EMS crews from Apalachicola arrived and eventually got her heart restarted. Another EMS crew took her by helicopter from Apalachicola to Tallahassee. A machine did her breathing for her. She never regained consciousness.
The official cause of death is listed as nonischemic dilated cardiomyopathy (an enlarged heart caused by something other than a blocked artery). That’s all I know for sure. For the rest of my life, I’ll be haunted by the mystery of what caused her cardiomyopathy. She was troubled by chronic, allergy-induced bronchitis, which could have masked a more serious condition. Then again, maybe that had nothing to do with it. I’ll never know.
She had been fine our first week there, relaxing on the beach, reading a half-dozen books, cooking and laughing with our friends who had shared beach time with us nearly every year for 25 years. A brilliantly clear sky the night before revealed the Milky Way and its celestial glory. We stayed up late admiring it. It was the last thing we talked about.
The day-shift nurse in the intensive care unit saw me staring blankly at the floor when the doctor left. She put her arm around me and told me I needed to think about one other thing — organ donation.
Having lost control over anything that could save her life, the notion of organ donation provided a glimmer of light in two dark days in Tallahassee. Of course, she would want that. When tests later confirmed she could be a donor, the nurses in the ICU cheered.
By then, her sister and mother had arrived from Kentucky. My sister from Indiana was there. Our friends from the beach drove the 80 miles to Tallahassee. A good friend from Marietta brought Patrick. We held on to each other and surrounded her bed in the ICU. We said goodbye. Amazingly, we held it together.
Where does such strength come from? Roman Catholic tradition once held that the soul stays near the body for three days after death before ascending to everlasting life.
My wife was not religious. She would have scoffed at that. You are here and then you are gone. Make the most of your time while you are here, she said. In matters of spirituality, we rarely agreed. But who can argue with her belief in making the most of this life?
Truth to tell, I don’t buy the three-day-surviving-soul theory myself. I am of the opinion that good souls retain a lot more staying power. I think her soul remains here now, with me, with her children, her extended family, her many friends and all those lucky enough to have ever met her.
It was her kind and loving soul that attracted more than 750 people to a memorial service for her in Marietta a week after she died and another 150 to a memory night we had in her honor in our hometown of Jeffersonville, Ind., a month later. Her soul continues to move my friends to stay in touch with me to see how I’m doing, to move one of them to write me and tell me that she starts every day with a prayer for me and Katie and Patrick. Her soul has reconnected us with friends as far away as Norway and China.
Hers is the soul of a teacher whose former students write in her obituary guest book about how important she was in their lives; they write about how she instilled in them the joy of reading, the importance of writing a daily journal and the fun of celebrating a hard week’s work on Friday afternoons by singing and dancing to Tina Turner songs.
Read, learn, sing, dance, laugh, love, live. These are the lessons of Anne King.
In my hardest times — and there are many when I’m imploring Jesus, Mary and Joseph and all the saints in heaven to come to my aid — the powerful force of her soul hovers near me and tells me that there are other kids out there waiting for the bus on other corners.
So I leash up the dogs and go find the kids and ask them about their teachers and tell them to have fun and learn a lot this year.
• Mike King is a member of the editorial board. His column moves to Saturdays beginning Aug. 23.
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