And Life Comes Back: A Wife's Story of Love, Loss, and Hope Reclaimed (4 page)

“Tell me what to do! God help me! Help me! He’s not breathing!” I knelt over him, screaming, touching his face, shaking his shoulders, trying anything to break into his unconsciousness. For a moment he opened his eyes. In a valiant effort he pushed himself to a sitting position. He leaned against the wall. His head lolled to the side, and he found me with his eyes.

Kneeling on the floor in front of him, I grasped at his T-shirt, grasping for life. “Robb, please. Please. Please breathe. Please, baby. I love you. I love you. Please.” His eyes held mine. I watched the color drain from his face. His skin turned a deep gray. His gaze fell from mine, and his eyes rolled back. “No! No! Robb! No! Please God, no!” I held his face in my hands. He exhaled a long, hard breath, as
if something were pushing the air out of his lungs. That would be the last sound I would hear from him: his final breath.

When I remember those moments, as I look back on them, I wonder if he felt conflicted. I wonder if he knew he was dying. When did he think,
This is it…
? Did he fight it? Did he try to stay? I know he tried at least once, valiantly. He sat up straight, one more time. I wonder if an angel, a handsome, gritty man whom Robb would trust, came to him and said, “Hey, buddy. It’s okay. She’s okay. The boys are okay. Everyone is strong, and it’s time.” I wonder if he looked over his shoulder as he left, if he watched me, kneeling before the shell of him, screaming his name. I wonder if he had any second thoughts, if he tried to come back. I wonder what he saw, what he knew, how long he was with me before he was present with the Lord. I wonder. I hope he had a moment to know that he was going.

On our bedroom floor I kept fighting for him. I screamed for help. The woman in my ear told me to lay him down, and I tried—I really tried. But he was a big man, that husband of mine. I laid him down as best I could. She told me to clear his airway, to make sure nothing blocked it. Just as I had learned in eighth-grade health class, I cleared his airway with two fingers. He bit me.

I pulled my fingers free, still screaming for help. Screaming, screaming.

“Feel for air from his nose.” I felt only stillness.

“Feel for a pulse.” His neck was a stone.

“Begin chest compressions.” I pounded on his chest with everything in me. He was gray and unmoving. Still, I pounded.

My mom flew into my bedroom to find me kneeling over him, pounding. I later learned that she and my dad had bolted awake and raced out of the house in record time. They lived four blocks from us, and no more than four minutes passed between my five-second frantic phone call and their arrival at my house. My parents entered to the sound of blazing sirens as the paramedics arrived seconds behind them. Dad stayed in the driveway to direct the medics into our home, and Mom raced into the house, expecting to see lights on and a flurry of activity. Instead, she found the kitchen black with sleeping stillness. Even the dog was unmoving. My screams pierced the stillness.

She flipped on lights as she ran up the stairs and into the bedroom.

I looked up at her as I pounded on my husband’s cold, hard chest. “I think he’s gone, Mom … I think he died …”

“No. No. Don’t say that. The paramedics are here. In here, gentlemen, in here.” Her rushed, frightened voice betrayed her confidence. The paramedics had followed her up the stairs, and they entered the bedroom with a fury. In seconds the room filled with at least six—maybe eight—men on a mission.

I continued the chest compressions until a trained professional placed his hands over mine and continued with a stronger rhythm than the one I had begun. I jumped out of the way and across the bed. “Please fix him. Please fix him. Oh, God, please fix him.”

“Ma’am, you need to leave the room please.” I spotted the two shirts I had pulled from the drawer moments ago, the long-sleeved white and short-sleeved orange, and I put them on as the men ushered
me down the stairs and safely out of their way. With shaking hands I slipped into socks and shoes, remaining hopeful they would find signs of life and tell me to follow them to the hospital.

I sat in Robb’s chair at the dinner table. I watched my parents pace in the kitchen. I listened to their phone calls. They called Robb’s parents: “Please come quickly. There’s an emergency with Robb.” They called a friend who lives a few blocks away: “Please come and get the boys.” Their phone calls awakened family all over the country: “Please pray. The paramedics are working on him now. We don’t know. We don’t know. We don’t know.”

Two years earlier I had started at the beginning of the book of Psalms, reading each day until I found something I should think more about. I collected passages, verses, and phrases on a stack of three-by-five cards that I carried in a Ziploc bag in my purse.
Spiritual discipline
has become a buzzword in the Christian culture, but I can’t say I set out to do anything disciplinary. I just wanted wisdom. And a little more knowledge of the Bible. So I began writing things down in manageable chunks, one thought at a time. I’m no theologian, but maybe that’s all there is to a spiritual discipline: wanting to be better and taking small steps to claim it. Maybe it’s not about training for your best time on a marathon. Maybe it’s about taking a walk today, and tomorrow, and the next day. Meditative moments come in small snatches for the mother of young children, and I learned to make the most of fleeting opportunities. I read my cards at stoplights, in the waiting room at the dentist, or in line at the post office. On that early morning as my life came undone, I read them at my kitchen table. My mind was numb with shock; my brain was empty. I leaned only on the
practice of reading the words. I did not meditate on them; I merely said them to myself again and again.

An officer entered the kitchen. He said, “Are you his wife?”

I looked up from my cards. “I am.”

“Ma’am, we’ve been working for forty minutes, and we’re doing
all we can. But there is no heartbeat or breath sounds, and there have not been any. We’re going to need to tell you he has passed.”

We’re going to need to tell you.
As in,
not yet, but soon we’ll need to
? I have since learned that they said it this way to ease the news. Just in case I fell to the floor and they would have a second patient on their hands, they wanted to break it gently.
We’re going to need to tell you.

My wise and brave mom has been down this road before, the path to the door of death. She asked him, “Is that the final word? Is he gone?”

The officer looked to me. “Yes, ma’am. I’m so very sorry. He’s gone.”

Have you ever wondered what you might say if a police officer tells you your husband has died? I never imagined it this way, but I simply said, “Okay.”

I looked again at the handwritten card I held.

He is gone.

Okay.

My help comes from the Lord.

As fervently as I prayed for Robb’s life, I prayed for the boys to stay soundly asleep. I knew I would have a journey to help them through
this loss that was not yet confirmed; I could not fathom the damage of any memories of the scene they would carry. I truly believe angels covered their ears as their world shattered violently outside their bedroom door.

One of the officers came downstairs amid the frantic efforts. “Excuse me, ma’am, but I believe there may be a child awake upstairs.”

Oh, God. It’s Tyler.

I jumped from my chair. “My son—I’ll get him.”

With great authority he pointed one finger at me. A forceful “No. No, ma’am. Not you.” Slowly I lowered myself into the wooden kitchen chair.

My mom said, “Let me. Someone must get that baby.” Nobody could let my three-year-old wander out into the hallway, awakened by foreign sounds, to find his daddy.

“Yes, ma’am. You may go.”

She quickly climbed the stairs to the bedrooms. Several men stood in the doorway, shoulder to shoulder, an impenetrable wall of blue, holding the emergency inside my bedroom. She retrieved a groggy Tyler, my dad lifted a sleeping Tucker, and they carried them down the stairs without a single glimpse of the medical scene. There were no cracks in this fortress of men; they would not be moved.

As long as my children were in the house, my mind was conflicted: I felt torn between fierce protectiveness of the boys against the sights and sounds of this trauma and the need to make some impossible decisions. When a friend arrived to take them for a pajama day at her house, my dad and I carried my boys—shoeless, sleeping, and unaware—into the light of the early dawn, through the flashing lights
in the street, to her van parked on the other side of the mayhem. I kissed both of my sons, pressing my cheek against their foreheads, holding their hands in mine. I whispered to them, “Mommy will come get you later today, loveys. I love you so much. You are safe.”
Oh, my precious children, you don’t know how everything has fallen apart.
I watched her van drive away, her taillights blending with Christmas lights in the neighborhood. With my children in safe hands, I could be fully wife. I needed to grieve my husband.

The sounds of mourning echo in my mind. The heaving sobs from Robb’s mom. Robb’s father crying out to the policemen blocking his path, “That’s my son … That’s my son …” The keening wail of Robb’s brother when he heard the news. We wept, together and alone. There are no words to describe the hollow, piercing ache.

The officer came to me. “You may see him now, ma’am. You don’t have to if you don’t wish to, but you may if you would like. And I must tell you, this is your last chance.” Of course, I will see him. His dad traveled the stairs with me, and together we entered my bedroom, now littered with remnants of urgency, panic, and medical intervention. My bed was wrecked; pillows were strewn all over. The carpet was wet. Medical paraphernalia was scattered. In the midst of the mess, there lay my husband, intubated, with our bed sheet covering all but his face, his shoulders, and his left arm. Robb’s dad held me and whispered, “I’m so sorry, sweetheart. I’m so sorry, sweetheart.”

I knelt over Robb, and I wept. I cried for many things: for his life, for his death, for his sons, for his wife, for his dreams and mine. I cried for things yet unknown to me then. Robb’s face of death looked so different, so absent and cold. But his eyes held the same gaze as when
they had locked with mine. He had died with me before help ever arrived. He had died in my arms. I touched his prickly head, the shaved cut I loved so much. And I thought to myself,
Remember this. Remember this. Remember this.
I held his hand. His fingers were cold and white; his fingernails were purple. But it was his hand, the very hand I held on our first date, on our wedding day, as we prayed over each meal together, as we sat together in church, as our sons were born. I kissed his palm. I slipped his wedding ring off his finger and onto my thumb.

I kissed his forehead. My tears spilled onto his ashen face.

“I will love you forever, Robb Williford. I will love you forever.”

Imagine surviving an earthquake. When you come to, you find the world unrecognizable. The horizon is in a different place. The sun has changed color. Nothing remains of the terrain you know. As for you, you are alive. But it’s not the same as living. It’s no wonder the survivors of such disasters so often wish they had perished with the others.

—Diane Setterfield,
The Thirteenth Tale

A person’s spirit keeps him light. Without his spirit he is a fallen oak tree.

The police stood guard, shoulder to shoulder, between my kitchen and my living room as the firemen and EMTs carried Robb’s lifeless, dense body down the stairs and out the door. They protected me from images a wife should never, ever see. Before they left my home, each one of them came to me, took my hand, and looked deeply and sincerely into my eyes. “God bless you, ma’am. I promise you, we did all we could do.” With their hands and their hearts, they did all they could do. I wish I could remember their faces. They are my heroes.

The remainder of that day and the days to follow are a vague smattering of details, fuzzy bits that never clearly fit together. The storehouse of my mind is filled with floating pieces I can’t seem to catch with both hands. A friend told me she arrived to find my dad at the end of my driveway, standing alone in the cold, holding an empty coffee cup. The shock and trauma tore through us all in cold, nonsensical ways.