Ten Years Later (15 page)

Finally, in September 2007, thirteen months after Sue’s death, the trial of Peter
G. Whyte began. Each morning, the Weiland sisters
put one sunflower, Sue’s favorite, in a vase outside the courthouse. After two weeks
of proceedings, the jury made its decision.

“I’ve never been so tense in my life,” Patrick says, shaking his head with raised
eyebrows. “It was hell.”

The jury did not believe Whyte had acted in self-defense and convicted him of second-degree
intentional homicide. A first step toward justice for Sue.

The family’s next pressure cooker was the sentencing. A month later, KARE-TV, the
NBC affiliate in the Twin Cities, covered the sentencing hearing. Videotape shows
Sue’s sisters and one of her nieces describing their loss to the presiding judge.
Middle sister Anamaria simply says, “We remain devastated.”

The judge imposed a sentence that ensured that fifty-four-year-old Whyte would most
likely be incarcerated until he died: forty years in a maximum-security prison in
Wisconsin.

“After the conviction, I went into a one-month . . .” Patrick’s palm glides downward.
“I don’t even know what happened. I remember vividly after a binge, with bloody arms,
and being sick, I remember lying there thinking,
Okay, when I close my eyes the next time I’m not going to wake up. I think I’m gonna
go. This is the knife’s edge.”

Patrick says it was on that proverbial edge that, oddly, his mind became sharp for
an instant. Sue entered his thoughts—his beautiful sister, whose death was preventable.
In the days ahead, he would realize that he and Sue had been living a similar story.

“She could not escape for whatever reason, and I couldn’t escape. I was just like
a battered woman with the drug,” he says. “I was in the same helpless, hopeless, powerless
situation, but my attacker was the drug I was doing.”

Patrick said that for the first time, his thinking changed. He realized he could not
put his family through another catastrophic loss.

“It saved my life, in the end. In the end, on that knife’s edge, I knew that watching
my parents and the people who love my parents suffer from Sue’s death,” says Patrick,
“I knew that I could not die.”

In January 2008, Patrick set about the business of living, with no savings remaining
and no medical insurance to buy HIV medication. He was in very rough shape: weak,
extremely thin, no appetite.

“I moved home to my family and lay in my mother’s house for months,” Patrick says.
“I had no strength to summon all of the wreckage I had caused in my life, and the
tremendous loss of Sue. But I was never going to use again. I was determined.”

After four months, Patrick sought medical help from a community center in Minneapolis.
Staff there made it possible for him to see a doctor who prescribed a series of HIV
drugs. He told Patrick his chances for survival.

“He said, ‘You have a fifty-fifty six-month mortality. That means fifty percent of
the people who are in the condition you are in will not be alive in six months.’ And
that took my breath away,” Patrick recalls, “because I was clean at that point for
five months.”

There was no plan. Patrick simply spent time with close friends in Minneapolis and
healed his body. He opted out of meds that were suggested for depression.

“I was gonna be miserable. And depressed,” he says logically. “I needed to be depressed.
I
was
depressed. There was a reason I was depressed. And I needed to make the changes in
my life and reengineer my life.”

To say a switch flipped in Patrick’s brain discredits the amount of mental muscle
he already applied to his recovery; he’d made many attempts to recover over the years.
But, he does say, the pairing of devastating loss with genuine gratitude acted as
kindling and
a match; they ignited his changed thinking. He now saw himself as worthy of repair.

“I do believe in the power of the mind. It is a powerful, powerful tool. All you have
to do is change your frame of reference and the way you’re thinking, but it’s a long
and slow process,” he says. “Do I feel like damaged goods? I don’t. And that is a
miracle.”

In the fall of 2008, ten years after Patrick’s HIV diagnosis and crystal meth addiction,
he received a call from a former colleague who runs a production company in Minnesota.
She’d developed a successful show for the Travel Channel and needed a freelance field
producer. With no idea that Patrick had struggled with addiction, she offered him
the job. Coincidentally, the host of
Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern
is himself a recovering drug addict of twenty years.

Bizarre Foods
features the kind of far-out fare that makes people both squirm and tune in by the
millions in seventy-two countries around the world. As field producer and director
for the program, Patrick always has a bag packed. It’s routine for him to travel to
Amsterdam, Tokyo, Bangkok, Rio de Janeiro, and Montreal within three months. The show
has also bellied up to the bizarre in Namibia, Hong Kong, Finland, Argentina, Nicaragua,
Germany, Greece, Italy, and the jungles of Southeast Asia.

“I had a bucket with two hundred fifty tarantulas in the back of my car, and I’m not
a spider person,” Patrick says, recalling a trip to Cambodia. The crew tagged along
on a tarantula-trapping trip. The
hairy spiders are defanged, deep-fried, and sold as snacks at roadside stands.

“I couldn’t eat the tarantulas,” he says, defeated, “even though they were fresh.”

At forty-nine, Patrick says he’s excited about his professional future, and is personally
joyful and physically strong. He embraces not only who he is now, but who he has been—all
of it.

I then ask the question you have to ask recovering addicts. After all, I know he’s
asked himself. It’s been four years.

“Do you worry about a relapse?”

Patrick answers that he does not, saying, “You always have to remember your lowest
point, and mine is so tangible and so present in my sister’s murder that I can instantly
access that pain and use that.”

Cold, hard facts are effective, too.

“I know with absolute certainty,” he says, “if I use, I die. Addiction specialists
say relapsing addicts pick right back up where they left their habit, no matter how
long they managed to stay clean. In my case, the amounts would be deadly. So, for
me getting clean and staying clean meant I had to change. I had to choose to want
to live. Even on my worst days—and they happen—I am so grateful to be alive and present.”

Would he change the murderous events of August 20, 2006? Of course, but, clearly,
the hole in his heart from losing Sue is shaped like a halo.

“If my sister hadn’t died, I would have died. I have no doubt about that.” Patrick
begins to cry. “She struggled with her alcoholism, and she struggled to get free of
this guy, and she couldn’t.” He points to himself and chokes out the words, “But I
could. She helped me. I know that her dying saved my life.”

Patrick says there’s only one thing left he can do for his beloved Sue. He can honor
her life by living his well.

If you’re looking for amazing people, tap into the world of sports. Athletes are mentally
tough and physically strong, and their journeys to the top are often unique and filled
with challenges. Hall of Famer Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in Major League
Baseball. Pro surfer Bethany Hamilton excels with only one arm. Comeback kid Dan Jansen
won Olympic gold in speed skating after the devastating loss of his sister. A long
list of names came my way when I asked for inspirational stories from the NBC sports
archives. So many of the candidates were impressive, but one in particular jumped
off the page. This against-the-odds athlete couldn’t help herself. That’s just how
Diane Van Deren is; she attacks life with a positive energy that’s undeniable and
magnetic. Diane’s life story is remarkable, and to walk a mile in her shoes is impossible.
After all, Diane would never just walk a mile—she’d run at least fifty.

Diane Van Deren is the first brain surgery case of the day at University of Colorado
Hospital in Denver. It’s February 1997, but for the next three hours, the date and
time will be of no concern to Diane; she’s under general anesthesia. The neurosurgeon
has been instructed
to remove as much as possible of his thirty-seven-year-old patient’s hippocampus,
an area of the brain tucked deep inside the temporal lobes. In Diane’s case, the problem
area lies within her right hippocampus, just below her right temple.

The surgery is elective for Diane and routine for the highly trained specialists at
the hospital. Just before eight
A.M
., the neurosurgeon begins to slice through the muscle of Diane’s scalp. Next, he
drills holes in her skull, and then connects the holes using a handheld electric saw.
He removes the rectangular piece of bone, about the size of a playing card, and wraps
it in a moist towel. Next, the surgeon folds back the lining of Diane’s brain. Using
a vibrating tube the diameter of a swizzle stick, he knocks loose the damaged brain
cells and suctions them out. He then backtracks, closing up each layer. Finally, he
reattaches Diane’s skull piece using wax and bone chips.

Why would someone possibly
elect
to have this brain surgery? Routine in the operating room, perhaps; undoubtedly not
routine in terms of the decisions most of us make in life. But, clearly, Diane Van
Deren is not like most of us.

The trouble began deep inside Diane’s brain when she was only sixteen months old.
A healthy baby, Diane suddenly developed a high fever. When she started to convulse,
her parents and grandmother rushed her to a hospital in Omaha, Nebraska. Packed in
ice, Diane’s little body quivered for nearly an hour. While doctors spoke with Diane’s
parents in the hospital room, her grandmother waited just outside. As the doctors
came back out into the hallway, her grandmother overheard them saying that Diane’s
lungs were weak, and her prognosis was questionable.

“One doctor said to the other doctor, ‘We don’t know if she’s going to be a vegetable,
we don’t know if she’s going to survive,’ ” Diane says. ‘She might be better off if
she didn’t.’ ”

In 1961, not much was known about the brain and its ability to recover from trauma.
What caused the seizure? Was Diane born with an underlying abnormality, or did the
high fever cause the seizure? And would the seizures continue? Thankfully, Diane recovered
and showed no signs of brain damage. She grew up healthy and happy in Littleton, Colorado,
south of Denver.

“I wanted to be a cowgirl,” Diane says, thinking back on her active childhood. “I’d
be out on the golf course in the private club area whippin’ rope around a bale of
hay with a plastic bull horn stuck in it. The golfers would drive by in their golf
carts and say, ‘Hey, Diane!’ ”