Until I Say Good-Bye

by Susan Spencer-Wendel

  My proudest moment as a journalist, though, was the time I tracked down four killers and crossed our top prosecutor to tell a story nobody involved wanted told.

  It started with a plot to murder a beautiful blonde named Heather Grossman. Her ex-husband, Ron Samuels, was a megalomaniac businessman who always got what he wanted. And he didn’t want Heather alive, not after she got custody of the kids.

  It wasn’t that Ron didn’t love his three young children, Ron’s new wife later testified. It’s that he hated paying child support.

  So Ron turned to a crack-addicted friend, who turned to a crack dealer, who hired two crack addicts to “whack the wife.” On October 14, 1997, one of them—Roger Runyon—loaded a high-powered rifle and fired at the base of Heather’s skull as she and her new husband sat at a stoplight.

  Heather survived, a quadriplegic.

  Ron Samuels was eventually arrested and tried for attempted murder. In October 2006, he was convicted and sentenced to life. The other four conspirators walked free. They had been given immunity in exchange for their testimony.

  I sat near Heather Grossman in the courtroom for weeks. I saw her pushed down the aisle in her wheelchair day after day, her head permanently slumped on its rest. I watched tears roll sideways into her ear and listened to the machine breathing for her, sh-sh-sh-shewww, one mechanical puff after another.

  I will know that feeling soon.

  But my disease will render me so. Heather Grossman was shot. Four men plotted. One put a bullet in her brain.

  Did they have to go free?

  The top prosecutor’s flak told me, “There’s no story here, Susan.” And, “None of the networks covered it.” And it will only “piss off” the top man.

  As a journalist, you know you are onto something good when people say stuff like that.

  So I researched the case and discovered there had been evidence to charge and prosecute the men. I discovered that the testimony of Roger Runyon, the shooter, did not directly implicate Ron Samuels. Yet he had been given immunity in advance and walked free.

  I tracked down the would-be killers.

  To a life insurance agency in Hollywood, Florida, where one of the conspirators told me the immunity deal was “the best thing I ever did.” To an office in Deerfield Beach. To a flop house in Carol City, north of Miami.

  I flew to Indianapolis and drove to the small town in Indiana where the shooter, Roger Runyon, lived. His house was on a rural highway at the edge of a cornfield.

  I stood at his front door, attempting to interview him. A wild turkey in his yard began chasing me. I heard him inside, but he wouldn’t answer the door.

  I talked to the local police chief and Runyon’s parole officer. He was on probation for traffic violations. Neither knew he had once shot to kill in Florida.

  It felt important to write that story, so that readers would understand the dynamics behind our criminal system. It felt important to let them know how complex justice can be—and how far-reaching the ramifications.

  But it felt personal too.

  I love that story because I loved Heather Grossman. She inspired me with her will to live after the crippling shot. With her tenacity raising her children. With how beautiful and strong she seemed in her wheelchair, even with her body lost.

  She couldn’t breathe on her own. She couldn’t live on her own. But she competed in Mrs. Wheelchair America. I mean, the clams on this girl.

  Write about strength, I told myself, as I sat in my Chickee hut. Don’t write about your disease. Write about joy.

  I was stunned, a few months ago, by a documentary about Heather’s case. Years after the shooting, Heather saw the emergency room surgeon who had operated on her. The doctor told her she had begged him not to save her life.

  Heather had not remembered. She wept as she recounted it more than decade later, her children nearly adults. “I am so glad the doctor didn’t listen to me!” she cried.

  Be honest, I told myself.

  We can despair. Like Heather Grossman. Like me. It’s what we summon after the tragedy—the tenacity—that matters.

  By June, I had lost the ability to use my iPad. The keyboard was too big, and it tired my right hand to move it back and forth.

  I decided to write the book using the “notes” function on my iPhone instead. John or Stephanie, or even Aubrey or Marina if they were around, would slide the phone into my useless left hand, where by serendipity my curled fingers formed a perfect holder. I would type each letter with my right thumb—tap! tap!—the only digit I could control.

  I added “Thank God for Technology” as my e-mail tagline, for I realized that five years ago, before the touchscreen typing pad, this book would have been impossible for me.

  I tapped and tapped away.

  I rose early, willing myself to finish a chapter every day. I wrote through the weekends. I wrote when I was traveling with my loved ones. At one point, knowing how weak I was becoming, I committed to write forty chapters in one month (some were cut or combined by my editor). I accomplished it, though I took two major trips during that time.

  Such is the power of desire.

  When people came over, I asked them to take the phone from my hand (since I could not hand it to them) and read the latest section out loud (since I could no longer read aloud). On the iPhone, I could see only twenty or thirty words at a time. I wanted to hear the cadence and flow.

  I had my favorite sections read over and over to me by different visitors. I could not hug them. I did not go out for meals with them or to the beach. I could not walk the yard or hold a conversation for more than a few minutes.

  These sections, read in the cool shade of the Chickee hut, were my conversations. I was speaking to my family and friends with my written words, and I was reliving the moments.

  Meeting John. My children’s births. The peace I embraced inside.

  Sometimes a word or turn of phrase made me smile.

  Sometimes I would smile with anticipation, knowing a favorite line was coming soon.

  (Like Soulla, when I asked about the man in the photo: “That’s your grandmother!”)

  When I wrote with others present, it frustrated me. Like when I would watch Nancy typing away quickly on her phone, then think about my own slow pace—an effort to push each letter.

  But writing this book was not work. Like each journey I took during the year, it brought me joy. It kept me alive.

  Like every good thing in my life, I didn’t want it to end.

  When I typed the last letter of the first draft in mid-September, three months after beginning in earnest, I couldn’t believe what I had accomplished.

  I felt as if I’d pulled myself up a mountain with nine fingers tied behind my back.

  I let the moment linger, the thrill of a triathlon completed.

  I looked at John, who was sitting across from me in the Chickee hut. I expected to smile. To beam with the dream fulfilled.

  I cried.

  And formed the words as best I could: “What will I do now?”

  Letting Go

  May–June

  Swimming

  Today, June 21, is the summer solstice. Not today in the book. I mean that I am sitting in my Chickee hut right now, writing this sentence with one finger on the longest day of sunlight of the year. One of my favorite days.

  I am a sun baby, born and raised in Florida, where sun chaperones our lives. I brown up like a coffee bean. A Greek gift (thank you, Panos), so I have always enjoyed full sun.

  Take me to a restaurant, and I’ll elect the sunny seat. Take me camping on nearby Peanut Island, and I will while away the entire day standing in waist-deep crystal water, hand-feeding the fish or snorkeling the cove, searching for manatees.

  Did you know small fish will eat dog biscuits straight from your hand?

  I was a sc
uba diver years ago, and one of the highlights for me was looking to the surface of the ocean from sixty feet underneath, seeing the sun’s rays shooting silver through the water. At that depth, on a sunny day, the ocean’s surface looks like mercury.

  I used to float near the shore as the waves rolled in, churning up shells. If you are still and listen underwater, you can hear them tinkling. Delight.

  My friend and I used to stand on one another’s shoulders in the water and front-flip off. I once kneed myself in the eye doing this, leaving a shiner.

  Yes, I could sun and swim all day, every day, my solar chaperone following my every move, toasting my shoulders and back. No sunscreen.

  “I musta been a reptile in another life,” I used to say as I baked.

  I fell for John, a tan collegiate swimmer, in his Speedo. Behind my dark Ray-Bans, I tracked his fluid freestyle strokes. His muscular arms—his “guns,” as he jokingly calls them—zipped him through the water with nary a splash.

  (A typical John crack: “I need to go to the vet.” “Why?” Flexes his arms. “Because these pythons are sick.”)

  I too was a competitive swimmer. Not a great one. A decent one. So John and I would work out in the pool.

  “Okay, sprints,” he’d order.

  I’d buzz fast as I could across the pool, convinced I was windmilling my arms faster than Janet Evans, the tiny woman who Roto-Rootered her way to umpteen gold medals in the late 1980s and early ’90s. And John would say: “No. Let’s sprint.”

  “I am.”

  “Really?”

  I think of that now as I stare at our backyard pool on this sunny summer solstice. Recently, some friends and I were hanging out around that pool, drinking a beer, when I asked to go in. Two people—it now takes two people, if they aren’t experienced like John and Steph—helped me onto the pool steps. I sat there, half submerged, drinking my beer through a straw.

  My back was to the group, so I tried to float onto my stomach and face them.

  As I turned, my head dipped and I inhaled water. Like a child learning to swim, I felt the burn up my nostrils. I was shocked. I opened my mouth and inhaled more.

  Didn’t have the strength to lift my head.

  The folks heard me sputtering. Four hands grabbed me, pulled me up.

  “I’m okay,” I said.

  I returned to sitting on the step with my back to them. I realized I could probably no longer swim.

  This was not something I announced, trying not to trigger the cascade of I’m-sorrys. I struggled with that fact alone.

  Since then, I have not asked anyone to get in the pool with me to test my hypothesis. Truth is, I don’t want to know. If it’s gone, it’s gone. Nothing I can do. Slipped away like a charm off a necklace.

  So how shall I handle it? Pine away for something I can no longer do? Something I adored?

  No.

  For that is the path to the loony bin. To want something you can never have.

  “I am the master of my mind. I have a choice about how to feel,” I tell myself all the time.

  I have practiced this again and again over the last few years: the art of letting go.

  I used to be a regular in the hundred-degree room at a local Bikram yoga studio. The heat of the room helped expand not only my muscles but my mind as well.

  Yoga was my refuge from the Chinese fire drill of modern life. I could walk into a Bikram class hoarding angst, and exit with my muscles stretched and my mind swept clean by ninety minutes of exertion so intense I didn’t have the energy to worry about a thing.

  When I realized I could no longer grip with my left hand, I refused to accept my loss. I put on a weightlifting glove and kept going to yoga. Then I noticed the fingers of my left hand would no longer lie neatly side by side.

  When I lifted my hand above my head, it looked like a star atop a Christmas tree.

  I did yoga for my neurologist, right in his office. Lifted my left leg up, up, up behind me, gripping my ankle in a standing bow, one of Bikram’s most difficult positions. Nailed it. Proof, I insisted, that I didn’t have ALS.

  I lost yoga six months later, with sadness.

  A year after that, I casually mentioned to John, “Did you know I can’t jump anymore?” as if it were an observation about a recent shopping trip.

  When our neighbor told me she no longer wanted me to drive with her children in the car, I fumed. I told John, still angry hours later, and he said, “Susan, I don’t feel that good about our kids riding with you either.”

  Now that hurt.

  Two months later, driving my beloved BMW, I pulled over to the side of the road and told Stephanie, without tears or drama, “I don’t think I should drive anymore. I’m having trouble steering.”

  Acceptance.

  Control.

  Remember child killer Nathaniel Brazill? He was a seventh-grader when he shot his teacher at the classroom door in 2000. The incident took place a few miles from my house. I was the first reporter to view the surveillance tape, one of the biggest scoops of my career.

  A decade later, I interviewed Brazill in prison. “Prison’s not a bad place,” he told me. “It doesn’t really seem like punishment.”

  I wrote the story for the Palm Beach Post, and people were disgusted. They called his attitude “evidence” that he was a cold-blooded criminal.

  I called his attitude “survival.” Nathaniel Brazill had to reinvent his environs to survive. Prison is not a bad place, he convinced himself.

  And not swimming, after a lifetime of doing so, doesn’t have to be so bad either.

  Aubrey’s Birthday

  June 18, 2012, five days ago, was my son’s birthday. A day to stop. To contemplate and be proud. My Aubrey was turning eleven years old.

  What a memory, the day he was born! I was fully preggers. Overdue, in fact. My due date was June 14, but I asked the doctor to wait on the C-section. I wanted June 21, the summer solstice. I envisioned his birthday parties stretching into the eve on the longest day, the sunlight lifting him.

  On June 18, I reported all day from the courthouse. I was lying down afterward, resting, when three-year-old Marina started jumping on the bed.

  “Stop!” barked John. “You may hurt Mommy.”

  I got up, went to the bathroom to pee, and felt a whoosh of water. John and I stood over the toilet examining the liquid. Yes, staring into the toilet bowl, trying to divine our future.

  “You think your water broke?” he asked.

  “No, it can’t be.”

  I had such a plan for how I wanted my baby born, I reinvented what was happening. No, the liquid running down my leg was obviously incontinence. And the viscous spots in the toilet water were, oh, something else.

  I laid back down, still dreaming of my summer solstice baby.

  Then I had a contraction.

  Marina had been born by C-section, after that school bus ride in Bogota. I’d had no labor, no experience with this vise grip on my abdomen.

  If there is one thing in the world that will fast-forward you right into reality, it is said vise grip. And the horrific thought of a breech birth, a foot emerging and the doc tugging out the tangled little soul.

  In no time, we were on our way to the hospital.

  Now, John and I had been disagreeing for months over names. John wanted . . . okay, I can’t remember what John wanted, but he was not keen on the name Aubrey.

  “It sounds like a girl’s name,” John kept saying. “People will think he’s Audrey.”

  After a while, I stopped talking of it. But I never let the name go. It was important to me.

  You see, Aubrey was an older cousin of mine: Aubrey Motz IV, to be exact. That Aubrey was a severe hemophiliac. His blood would not clot properly. Bump him too hard, and he would bleed internally.

  He once went for a boat ride w
ith us and ended up hospitalized with a bleed on his brain. He is the reason, I think, my parents decided not to bear kids of their own.

  Aubrey Motz used blood products all his life to help his body clot its blood. Sometime in the early 1990s, before blood was vetted for HIV, he received an infected batch. He died of AIDS in 1999. He was thirty-nine years old.

  Aubrey was my favorite cousin. He was intelligent, funny, kind, and—the juggernaut for me—he never complained. He had not an angry bone in his frail body.

  Life served him a double whammy, first a chronic illness, then a fatal one. Yet Aubrey lived with joy and no self-pity. He went to college, he traveled, he married. He lived.

  After he died, I thought of him often. I still do. I try every day to emulate him. I didn’t want four generations of his name to die with him. I wanted to honor his memory.

  So I waited until I was on the operating table, ready to be sliced open. After nearly vomiting—an effect of the anesthesia—I brought up the name again.

  “Please, let’s name him Aubrey.”

  What could John say at that moment but yes?

  In exchange, John got to name our third child. He chose Atticus, after Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, his favorite book. We’ve never called Wesley by his first name.

  On my first outing with baby Aubrey to the library, I heard a mother calling, “Aubrey!” and saw her daughter toddle over. Ruh-roh!

  Then Aubrey’s first birthday cake came back from the bakery with big frosted letters: “Happy Birthday, Audrey!”

  Yet I am so glad I named my boy Aubrey, for there is value in a family name. The continuity. The memories. I tell my Aubrey about his namesake. I note how he never complained, because truth be told, my Aubrey’s chief negative trait—and by Jove, we all have ’em—is, he’s a complainer.

  Just the other day, when I told him he wouldn’t get his BIG birthday present until 7:00 p.m., the exact hour he was born, he rolled his eyes. “Oh, gosh!” he said. “I am not even eleven yet.”

  Of my three children, Aubrey is the one I worry for the most.

  His brother Wesley, insulated by Asperger’s, doesn’t crave affection and remains blissfully unaware of my impending death. Wes’s chief concern is that HE be the one to push my wheelchair when we go out.