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Sherrie
had met her first love, Len, when they were both teenagers, over twenty
years ago. They married, had two children, remained deeply in love,
and "life went on normally" until Len suffered his first heart attack,
about six years ago, and their "little world came crashing down."
After a hospital stay, he had four years of good health, until a test
in early 1994 revealed "a few things that the doctor said he'd keep
an eye on."
A few weeks after
that test, Sherrie began to sense that their time together might be
drawing to an end. Alone in the house one afternoon, she woke up from
a nap crying over a dream that her husband had died. "Just then I
heard a voice, as if someone were whispering in my ear, 'It's going
to happen this year,"' she recalled. "I was quite shaken, as he had
been doing so well. I tried to dismiss it as nothing but a bad dream,
but it was not to be so easy."
Len suffered his
second heart attack the following month, which necessitated a seven-way
bypass operation. The surgery was successful, and Len came off the
respirator the next morning, but he then came down with pneumonia
and was put into an induced coma and back on the respirator for another
week. "Miraculously, he came out of that fine," said Sherrie. It took
several months to recover to the point that he could return to work,
but within a month of his doing so, he suffered a third attack that
destroyed half of his heart.
"He would not
recuperate this time," said Sherrie. "He became more tired and more
weak each day." The months rolled by as Len's health declined. One
day in early October, as he was helping his sister prepare for a Halloween
party, he drew a sketch of a witch with her tongue sticking out on
his desk calendar, filling the space for a day that at the time was
still in the future; the rest of the calendar was blank. Sherrie didn't
discover this sketch until a few days after that date had passed.
By then she knew that it was the date on which Len suffered his final
heart attack at home—the day on which, according to Sherrie,
"he died for the first time."
After spending
the morning and afternoon with Len, she had left to pick up their
son from football practice. Within twenty minutes, she returned to
discover Len in the agony of his attack. "I called 911 and they came
within five minutes. I did not know it at the time, but my husband
had died before they arrived. They put him in the ambulance, and we
proceeded to the hospital while they administered CPR and brought
him back to life. At one point we had to pull over, and I tried to
see what was happening in the back. The driver would not let me see,
and all of a sudden I felt a surge of warm energy flush through my
whole body, head to toe. When it was over, I felt very weak and numb."
After they arrived at the emergency room, several hours of intense
effort passed before Sherrie was permitted to return to her husband's
side. "When they allowed me to go back and see him, I knew in my heart
that he was gone," she told me. "That poor, defenseless person with
all the tubes running in and out of him was not my husband anymore.
I knew, but I still prayed for a miracle." |
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