32 Days A Memoir of Love and Death

By Morgan Malone and Deborah Sabin

Mitch and Debbi were beshert. Soulmates. She knew it from the first day of law school. He came to the same conclusion just a few months later. From that day on, they were rarely apart. Debbi made one, five, and ten-year plans for their future. Mitch always replied, "Yeah. Maybe someday."

Someday came too soon. A terrible freak accident put Mitchell in a hospital remote from home, with a spinal cord injury that left him paralyzed from the neck down.

Alone in the ICU with her husband, away from her children and family, Deborah struggled to manage their days and find a way to keep their love and their marriage alive. Every night, she wrote him a note of news, hope, and love.

But, thirty-two days were all they had. Mitch died and Debbi was left with two small children. With the help of family and friends, she struggled to make a life for three seem as good as the life they had when they were a family of four. All traces of her time in the hospital with Mitchell were stored in the "sad" box, stuffed high on a shelf in the back of the closet.

Twenty-five years later, the notes resurfaced in an unlikely space. Deborah knew it was time to share the letters with family, friends, and the world.

32 Days is the story of a wonderful man, taken from this world much too soon. A husband, father, son, brother, friend, lawyer and advocate, and the courageous battle he fought to stay alive. Until someday.

Mitchell and Deborah's story is one of love that transcends time and space. Of faith that grows stronger even in the face of the unimaginable. Of the healing strength given by family and friends. Of hope that life will go on. Of someday.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Morgan Malone
• Release date: Jul 8, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393278993

Morgan Malone

ABOUT THE AUTHOR             Morgan Malone has been reading romance since the age of twelve when she snuck her mother’s copy of Gone With the Wind under the bed covers to read by flashlight. A published author at the age of eight, Morgan waited fifty years, including thirty as an administrative law judge and counsel, to write her next work of fiction. Retired from her legal career with a small NYS agency, Morgan lives near Saratoga Springs, NY, with her faithful Labrador retriever, Marley. When not writing “seasoned romance” about men and women over 35 who are finding love for the last, and maybe the first, time in their lives, Morgan is penning her memoirs, painting watercolors, or hanging out with her delightful grandson. Visit Morgan online: morganmaloneauthor.com www.facebook.com/MorganMaloneAuthor www.Twitter.com/MMaloneAuthor

Book preview

Mother’s Day

May 12, 2013

We planned nothing special for the day. Just breakfast in bed for me, prepared by my daughter, the soon-to-be clinical psychologist. We lazed around in my room, enjoying croissants and scrambled eggs, reading the Sunday paper and cuddling with the dog.

Not used to lazy days, we both got fidgety before noon. She untangled herself from me and the dog and scrambled to her feet.

What else do you want to do today, Mom?

I’m not sure. It’s a little cool outside—too early to put in plants for the herb garden, I think. And I don’t feel like going out, anyway. I was lethargic and a bit melancholy, my usual state of mind on family holidays.

Ever persistent, my daughter had some ideas. Do you want to rearrange your closet or maybe change your winter bedding for your summer bedding? I am one of those people who changes out my bed linens and bathroom linens each spring and fall. But it was dusty work and I just wasn’t feeling that ambitious. I shook my head no.

I know, my daughter announced a bit too brightly, let’s clean out your night stands!

Well, I can do that without getting out of bed, so I agreed. She went downstairs to get a garbage bag and some dusting rags. We decided I would empty out the contents of the nightstand next to my side of the bed, and she would clean out her father’s nightstand.

For the next half hour, I was subjected to numerous and sometimes derisive comments about the amount of crap I saved, the number of books perched precariously on each stand, and the dust bunnies hiding behind and under them.

My husband’s drawer contained batteries, playing cards, two ancient hand-held electronic games, his college honor thesis, and some odd photographs and greeting cards dating back to 1976. It was the cards that drew my daughter’s attention.

Look! Here’s one I gave Daddy when I couldn’t even sign my name! It’s all scrawly in purple crayon! She snorted. Mom, why did you print my name below my signature? It’s not like Daddy wouldn’t know it was from me!

I smiled as I looked at my precise letters. Because I’m anal, you know that—you’ve diagnosed me often enough! But we laughed at the silly and sometimes sentimental cards, throwing away some from members of my family we no longer liked, along with a few corroded batteries and a deck of cards missing two aces. The drawer now closed easily and there was a stack of five books destined for Goodwill piled on the floor by her feet.

I had halted perusing my nightstand drawer to watch her, but now my cleaning efforts began in earnest. My daughter removed a number of books from the small bookshelf on top of my nightstand and carried them down the hall to my office—and the bookcase for books Mom has not read and will probably never read but can’t part with just yet.

My drawer was also crammed with photographs and greeting cards, along with my college diary and a dozen playbills from Broadway shows of two decades past. I decided to toss the programs, except for Phantom of The Opera and Camelot. Mementos of the only two Broadway musicals my husband had attended with me, and I wanted to keep the evidence of those two momentous events. He hated musicals.

As my daughter plopped back down on my bed, thumbing through the soon-to-be-discarded remnants of Broadway shows, my hand closed around a sheaf of papers. The outer two sheets were faded yellow pages from a legal pad; they were wrapped around an assortment of odd bits of note paper, blank scraps and what looked like a few sheets from an old lumber company in my hometown. My fingers froze on the bundle.

My daughter glanced over at me. What’s all that? Looks like old school papers. Are they mine or my baby brother’s?

No, they are just some old notes of mine. Nothing important.

Give them to me—I’ll throw them in the garbage bag. It’s over here next to me. She glanced back at the television. I scooped up the discarded envelopes from some of the greeting cards I had sorted through earlier and handed those to her. She had her eyes on the television, some show on the Food Network, I think. She did not notice I had stuffed the papers in my right hand back behind my pillow. The slightly chilly day had grown noticeably more frigid, it seemed, because my hands were frozen to the touch.

With the show over and the drawers of the nightstands much neater, my daughter exited the room, garbage bag in hand. I retrieved the note papers from behind my pillow and put them back in my nightstand drawer. Why had they been in there? They were supposed to be in a box on the top shelf of my bedroom closet. A box I had not opened in almost 25 years.

The rest of the day was, as we had planned, a quiet one—though my heart seemed to be beating with an odd rhythm. My son called to wish me a happy Mother’s Day and brag about the expensive bouquet of flowers he sent the day before from Seattle. I assured him, in a voice that I hoped didn’t sound strained, the stargazer lilies were beautiful and had filled the house with perfume.

After a dinner brought in from Outback and a movie on the large television in the family room, I retired to my bedroom. My daughter was ensconced down the hall with her laptop and the dog.

I took a longer shower than usual. I carefully brushed and flossed my teeth. I smoothed the quilt and fluffed the pillows—before and after I climbed in between the sheets. I could delay no longer.

Quietly, I opened the nightstand drawer and withdrew the faded sheets of paper. I had recognized them immediately. They were the notes I had written to my husband on almost every one of the 32 nights he had been hospitalized in the summer of 1988. They contained the words I had hoped would heal him, would bind him so tightly to me that not even God would be able to separate us. Words of hope, of love, of loyalty. Words that now blurred through the tears that stung my eyes; words that brought that tragic summer back to me with such force that I could barely breathe. Words that had been locked away for a quarter of a century, and which I now knew I must face.

I read the opening words of the first note:

Well, we got through….

The Accident

Friday, July 8, 1988

He cried. It was a little after one in the morning and he was crying. Mitchell hadn’t cried very often in all the years I had known him. Not from lack of emotion; he could be an emotional guy. But his family was not terribly demonstrative. It had taken me years to get him to talk about his feelings. But, lying there in the dark, our packing done for the trip later that day, my husband pulled me to him, wrapping an arm around me when I rested my head on his shoulder and placed my hand on his chest.

I think something bad is going to happen.

Me, too.

I was referring to a troubling telephone conversation with my youngest brother, Jon, shortly before we went to bed. He told me he and his family would not be attending the family reunion in Malone the next day. When I pressed him, he admitted he and his wife were having problems. Though he assured me they were working on their issues, I felt there was something he was not telling me. I hung up with a queasy roil in my gut and the beginnings of a headache behind my eyes.

I think my dad is going to die.

He whispered the words and pulled me tighter to him. His father had been in the hospital on Long Island in June for some unidentified gastro-intestinal disorder and, although much better, was still not himself. Mitch’s family was also not big on sharing information, so we still didn’t know the whole story.

I just feel like someone is going to die and that it’s my dad.

I brushed the tears from his eyes.

I, too, was feeling Death’s cold finger tracing a line down my back, and I shivered in the humid heat of the July night. I worried it was my brother who was at risk but couldn’t say why.

We finally slid into a troubled sleep but, awakened by a three-year old boy and his six-year old sister at dawn, we put our worries aside to ready them for a weekend trip to Malone.

We were having our first family reunion in years. My older brother, Thomas, and his family were in Malone from Kentucky; and my younger brother, Bob, and his family were there from Philadelphia. Only Jon and his family, from New Hampshire, would not be coming. We would stay with my parents and have the party in their big backyard. My son and daughter were bouncing in the back seat of our mini-van as we began the trip. They loved their Malone grandparents and all their cousins. They drifted into sleep just south of Lake George, giving us the quiet time I loved to just plot, plan, and chat with my husband. We talked about the home improvements we would start in the next year, and about his plans to leave his law partnership in Mechanicville to open his own office in Clifton Park. It was a big move, but he was excited and confident and so was I.

I drifted off to sleep shortly after we got off the Northway at Exit 30. Mitch’s hand was resting on my shoulder and my chin was tucked up against it. I often dozed on road trips, secure in the knowledge that he would guide us safely to our destination, comforted by his soft touch and the low notes from some cassette tape he had created from his vast collection of albums. I didn’t wake up until after we had passed the turn-off for Lake Titus.

Party plans changed almost immediately upon our arrival in Malone. My mother announced that because of the heat, we would have the afternoon’s festivities at my sister’s house in Skerry, so we could cool off in her pool. That meant Mary would be bossing all of us around, as was her nature. Still, swimming in cool water beat sweating in my parents’ 100-year-old, un-air-conditioned home.

Mitch and my brother Bob somehow commandeered my brother-in-law’s pick-up truck and went careening off in search of ice, Glazier’s hotdogs, and beer. I drove the mini-van and kids to Skerry in the early afternoon laden with towels, swimsuits and potato salad.

We spread out across Mary’s large back lawn, scattered groups of those old-fashioned metal-and-mesh lawn chairs making interesting plaid islands in the green grass. The older boys, Mary’s two sons and Thomas’ son, climbed on a tractor parked behind the shed. My mother’s brother, Uncle Frank, had Thomas deeply engaged in a discussion about baseball. Mary’s husband, Carl, flitted in and out of the garage that was bigger than their house, tinkering—as always—with his truck, and setting up the grill. Thomas’ wife, Sherry, dressed and undressed Barbie dolls in the playroom with her daughters, Mary’s daughter, and my daughter, Leah.

It was so hot I stayed in the pool, guiding my son Benjamin around in the shallow end, his swimmies giving him the appearance of bulging biceps. My dad sat in a lawn chair on the pool deck near me. My mom perched carefully on the far edge of the pool, her slim legs, covered with varicose veins, dangling in the water. She never learned to swim, so she never got all the way into any pool or lake. My sister hovered around, seeing to the start of the barbeque in the breezeway between the house and the garage. Shortly before five, my sister’s oldest son, Craig, joined us as did my brothers and Uncle Frank. Bob’s wife, Janet, and their son, Will, sat down near my mom at the deep end of pool. Then my husband emerged from the garage to ask about our barbeque orders.

Grill is heating up, who wants hotdogs and who wants hamburgers?

Mitch wore an ugly white tank top over dark blue nylon swim trunks, both covered by an even uglier grilling apron. He needed to lose thirty pounds. I had been hounding him for the last six months as I lost fifty pounds on a grueling diet. I told him we could lose the next chunk of weight together—I had 15 pounds to go. He would just smile and bring me home an ice cream sundae from HoJo’s. He still looked good to me, so I didn’t nag too much.

Uncle Mitch, make a big splash! my nephew called out to his favorite uncle.

Daddy, jump in the pool and splash us! Ben joined, following Will’s lead.

My nephew and my son chorused their demands. Mitch smiled and looked at me. I frowned and shook my head. He was famous in the family for his cannonballs. The children loved them and my brothers thought they were great because they annoyed me so much.

Mitchell, don’t. You’ll splash everyone.

But he was already stripping off the apron and his shirt. I turned away from him, facing my father, so I wouldn’t get water in my eyes, but my son gleefully watched over my shoulder, clapping his hands in anticipation. Mitchell’s splash was loud and covered my head and back with cool water. Everyone cheered. I turned back toward the center of the pool, prepared to launch some choice words at my husband. Craig was in the deep end, by the edge of the pool, near my mother. My husband was floating face down in the pool.

Craig, give your uncle a shove and tell him that’s not funny.

I was irritated he would try to scare us. Craig reached out and touched Mitch, who simply drifted away in that peculiarly lifeless way of dead fish floating on the ocean. I screamed.

Take him, take him away! I called to anyone who would take Ben from me.

I threw my son into my father’s arms and swam toward my husband. Bob and Thomas were already in the water, pulling Mitch to the side of the pool. I clambered out and they pushed and pulled him onto the deck. People rushed all about. Carl, a volunteer firefighter, called an ambulance; Mary called a nearby nurse. I saw Sherry running across the breezeway and I yelled, No, keep the girls in the house!

I went back on the deck to see my brothers trying to breathe air into my husband’s lifeless body. I screamed at them.

Stop! If he hasn’t breathed, he’ll be brain damaged. He doesn’t want to live that way!

Someone, maybe my mother, maybe my sister, grabbed me and pulled me back into the garage. The nurse arrived and knelt with my brothers next to Mitch’s body.

I hadn’t been Jewish that long, only six years. I didn’t know many prayers in Hebrew, so I chanted the Shema over and over and over and over, as I watched my heart and soul dying in a puddle of water on my sister’s deck.

The ambulance arrived; they bundled Mitchell onto a stretcher and into the back but they closed the doors in my face. My brother-in-law pushed me into the front seat of his truck and we pulled out of the driveway in a swirl of gravel and dust. We were speeding; he was holding my hand, maneuvering the twists and turns of Route 11B with only his left hand.

He’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead. I think I was speaking the words—my mind was screaming them.

We ran into the Emergency Room. I was still in my swimsuit and was barefoot. The staff wouldn’t let me go to him. They kept me at the desk with forms and questions. Someone put a cotton blanket on me, and soon my sister arrived with my T-shirt, shorts, and flip-flops. And my purse with the magic health insurance card.

It seemed like hours, but it was not much later when they let me in to see Mitchell. He was on the table in the middle of the room, draped in a sheet. I saw his cut-up swimsuit lying in a sodden mess on the floor. An oxygen mask covered his nose and mouth and an IV tapped into a vein in his arm. Dried blood crusted in the corner of his mouth. His eyes were closed.

What happened? The doctors and I spoke the words at the same time.

Did he have a heart attack? I whispered.

But they were already asking, Did he dive into the shallow end of the pool?

No. Simultaneous answers revealed how little any of us knew.

He didn’t dive, he did a cannonball…you know, where you jump in with your arms wrapped around your knees, pulled up against your chest. He didn’t hit his head. I kept squeezing his hand.

His heart stopped twice in the ambulance, but we don’t think his heart caused the accident. We are sending him to Plattsburgh via helicopter. They are the trauma center for this area. You can follow him there. Doctors and nurses all spoke at once.

Will he live? Will he be okay?

We don’t know.

His hand was cold in mine and he didn’t squeeze me back. I leaned over and kissed his forehead, whispering to him, I love you. If you die on me, I swear, I’ll kill you.

They shuffled me out. I went to my parents’ house to change. Everyone from the party was there. I told my frightened children that daddy was in the hospital and I was going to stay with him. I think I told them he would be fine. I called his parents. They were speechless, though I think my mother-in-law opined that Mitch had probably had a heart attack. They hung up after assuring me they would come as soon as they could make arrangements to get to Plattsburgh from their home on Long Island.

I drove with Mary and Carl to Plattsburgh, past the Mohawk Indian enclave. I wondered, based on events of the recent years, if there had been shots fired at the helicopter transporting my husband over their territory. Is he already dead? If he is not, what is he?

We wandered through the halls at Champlain Valley Physician’s Hospital until we found the Intensive Care Unit. The nurses wouldn’t let me in to see him until the doctors met with me. They put me in a conference room with two doctors. The one who spoke was Dr. Patak, a neurologist. Dr. Gelinas was a cardiologist. They told me Mitchell had broken his neck, a C1, C2 and C3 fracture—the very worst kind. His heart had stopped in the helicopter. They had intubated him to keep him breathing. I told them he had a living will, and that I was his health care proxy—Thank God I’d had cancer the year before and we both filled out those crucial documents!—and he did not want extraordinary measures taken if he was not going to have quality of life. And that he had a do not resuscitate order. They tried to tell me it had no effect. I told them he was a lawyer and I was a lawyer. They pushed back from the table in unison, putting distance between me and them.

Then they said they wanted to drill four holes in his skull to fit him with a halo from which they would hang weights to stabilize his neck.

You want to drill holes in his head? I squeaked, too astonished to scream. This will help him get better?

He isn’t going to get better. I began calling them Gloom and Doom in my head from that moment on.

Then why do you want to drill holes in his head to stabilize his neck?

In case he gets better.

You said he wasn’t going to get better. Is he going to die?

He might not make it through the night.

Then why drill holes in his head tonight if he will be dead by morning?

He might live.

For how long?

We don’t know.

"What do you know?"

They proceeded to bombard me with statistics for spinal cord injuries. Most people died instantly, especially with this kind of fracture. Mitch was paralyzed from the neck down. He couldn’t speak, he couldn’t move his head, he couldn’t move anything. His muscles would atrophy; the havoc being played with his nervous system would cause his internal organs to shut down. The prognosis was not good.

"So he is going to die, if not