13 1/2-Year Coma Ends With a Tear as Family Finally Says Goodbye

A long time ago, Mary made a promise to Bill.

She knelt at the altar, a wide-eyed bride, and pledged to love and care for her sturdy groom in sickness and in health.

Their good fortune lasted for three decades--until her fireman husband was critically injured battling a blaze. He suffered permanent brain damage and lapsed into a coma.

But Mary kept her vows. For 13 1/2 years, she waited and prayed for him to wake. Every day, she helped dress and feed him. Every year, she baked him birthday cakes. She kissed him, talked to him, and longed for him to say her name--just once.

In the end, there were no words. But there were no regrets, either. Mary loved Bill, and she stayed by his side until the day he died. And though some people couldn’t have done what she did, she felt no burden.

“You get married, you love the person, what’s so hard?” she said. “What have I missed? I haven’t missed anything. He was who I wanted to be with.”

*

After nearly 30 years together, Bill and Mary Zokan were sending the youngest of their five children off to college and looking forward to being alone.

Then, about 4 a.m. on Labor Day, Sept. 6, 1982, Mary answered the doorbell.

There had been an accident.

While fighting a fire at a wastepaper factory, Bill stood on a loading dock that collapsed. Hundreds and hundreds of pounds of wet paper fell on him, breaking his ribs, crushing his chest and cutting the flow of oxygen to his brain for several minutes.

Though Bill initially needed a respirator, no one asked Mary whether she wanted extraordinary measures taken to keep her 53-year-old husband alive.

“Nowadays, it would never happen that way,” she said. “I’m sure they would say, ‘Do you want to work on him?’ But nobody ever said that.”

It would have been better if Bill had died then, she said, knowing how the rugged athlete who loved to run, swim and play racquetball would have hated being trapped in a body he couldn’t move or control.

“Knowing what I know now, I wouldn’t have done anything,” Mary said. “But would I have said that back then? I don’t know, because you’re always hoping, and I don’t know if I realized how bad it was.”

Mary kept a vigil at his hospital bed, waiting for any sign of recognition from the wide-jawed, blue-eyed soldier she fell in love with, the romantic who wrote her daily love letters while they courted, phoned twice a day from his fire station and called her by her nickname, Mickey.

Instead, there was bleak news: A brain scan showed Bill couldn’t possibly come out of his coma.

“I can cry thinking about it right now,” Mary said.

After eight months, Mary took Bill home; she never considered a nursing home. Determined to defy the doctors’ predictions, she tried to stir her husband from his torpor.

She dabbed vanilla on his tongue, baked his favorite coffeecake, played a tape of his favorite song (“I Left My Heart in San Francisco”), tried to show him family photos.

“If you just say, ‘This is it. I’m not going to do anything with you,’ you’re giving in,” Mary said. “I never give in.”

So she prayed. And prayed. And prayed some more.

“You promise everything,” Mary said, smiling sheepishly at how she pledged to give up desserts if Bill recovered. “You’re bargaining with God. And it just doesn’t do any good.”

A devout Catholic who once planned to be a nun--she lived in a convent for a year--Mary says she gradually realized Bill’s fate was not in her hands.

She became more mellow.

And life fell into a routine.

Nurses arrived for shifts at 9 a.m., 4:30 p.m. and 11 p.m. Some became extended members of the family. Mary pitched in, too: She swabbed Bill’s throat, and fed him a liquid diet through a stomach tube. A few times, when she asked him to lift his leg, he did--but doctors suspected it was a reflex. That was the only response she ever got.

The nurses or Mary turned Bill every two hours to avoid bedsores. He could breathe on his own, but they suctioned his lungs three times a day from tubes in his nose. They fed him five times a day. They exercised his arms and legs to avoid atrophy.

Every day, they dressed him (he often received shirts and sneakers as birthday gifts). They lifted him into a wheelchair, where he could sit four hours at a time in other rooms of the house, the backyard or near the family when they gathered.

Mary chattered on about everything, from the mundane to the momentous, in a tireless monologue that spanned nearly 5,000 days.

The world outside changed, and so, too, did the Zokans: Their youngest daughter married, two sons moved to South Carolina, and nine grandchildren were born. But Bill was frozen in the past.

Though it sounds strange, Mary said, she never thought long term, never wondered how many years she could endure, even if friends, family and doctors did.

“I was kind of naive about the whole thing,” she said. “You just go on day after day. . . . You can’t say you’re unhappy, because you’re taking care of someone you love. I just felt, this is our life.”

Through the years, Bill was hospitalized about six times, including one bout with pneumonia. But Mary didn’t think he’d die. Others had come out of comas; Bill could be one of those amazing stories.

“Someone said to me, ‘If you’re going to pray, pray for something big,’ so I’d always ask for a miracle,” she said. “I don’t think it would have been good if Bill came out of it just enough to talk and he knew what was happening. A person that active might have been pretty hard to live with . . . so, you see, there were some compensations.”

But sometimes, when Mary sat alone with Bill, breaking the silence would have been magic in itself.

“I kept thinking, Bill, I would love to hear your voice. If you could just say one word, ‘Mickey,’ it would have been so nice. But I never got to hear it.”

*

Mary went on with life. She taught a religion class for first-graders at her church, went to the movies, visited her sons in South Carolina and traveled to Europe.

But she always was eager to come home.

“People say, ‘I have to get away.’ I can’t tell you I felt that way,” she said. “I liked my time alone with him.”

Maryann Zaffino, the Zokans’ night nurse for 11 years, sensed that Bill’s health declined when Mary left town.

“For the first three or four years . . . every time Mary went away, Bill would get sick, like clockwork,” she said. “I think after awhile . . . he got that reassurance--she always came back--he didn’t get sick anymore.”

Zaffino also marvels at Mary’s attitude.

“I never got the sense of hopeless despair,” she said. “It’s mind-boggling. You’d say, ‘Nobody can do this. . . . My gosh, when is this woman going to blow or crack?’ ”

Mary says she was content, even though family and friends urged her to get out more.

“There were times I questioned her giving up her life,” said her oldest child, 41-year-old Cath DePalma. “But he really was her life.”

It had been that way since they married in 1953. Mary Crowley met Bill in her hometown of St. Louis while volunteering at a religious club that served breakfast to GIs. Bill was stationed at Ft. Leonard Wood.

They shared their Catholic faith, sometimes attending church daily. And they were an active couple--bicycling, skiing and dancing at the annual St. Jude’s ball, though Bill didn’t like to be first out on the floor.

Bill was a jack-of-all-trades, tinkering with cars, painting the house, giving haircuts to other firefighters. Mary was a do-it-all homemaker, ferrying the kids to Catholic school, sewing her own dresses, preparing dinner each night.

If they bickered, it usually was about the children: Bill was strict, and he’d say Mary was too easy on them.

Today, at 65, with her short, softly curled chestnut hair, hazel eyes and tiny pearl earrings, Mary looks more like a 50ish suburban homemaker ready to go shopping than a grandmother of 14 who has survived a heartbreaking ordeal.

Sitting in her sunny home, decorated with Oriental rugs, needlepoint, porcelain teapots, china plates and family photos, she smiled as she thumbed through the wedding album filled with black-and-white photos of their two eager faces and snapshots from a Hawaiian vacation.

Only when pressed does Mary concede the slightest emotional strain: She admits she was a bit envious watching couples at church who had been married 40 or 50 years. She wasn’t a widow, but it didn’t seem she was a wife either.

And only rarely does she seem to seek reassurance that her unflagging devotion was worthwhile.

“Bill was lucky, don’t you think?” she asked. “I hope he knew it. The nurses say he did.”

Mary credits her Catholic upbringing for her acceptance; she never adopted a “why-him, why-me” attitude, understanding that bad things can happen to good people. Bill was one of them, that was that, and being depressed would do no good.

“I always said every night, ‘Bill, you and I are in God’s hands.’ When you actually feel that way inside, it really helps you,” she said. Still, she had a lawyer draw up a living will asking that no extraordinary measures be taken to prolong her own life in case of catastrophe.

She knows some people suggested Bill should have been allowed to die.

They would ask, “ ‘Do you really think it’s fair keeping him the way he is?’ And I thought, there’s nothing I can do about it. I couldn’t take the food away. . . . Starve a person? I wouldn’t be able to do that.”

She is aware, too, that some questioned the expense. Bill’s nursing care and medical bills were covered by workmen’s compensation and part of a settlement of a private lawsuit.

“People will say, ‘Look at the money she has spent,’ or, ‘Look at the time she gave.’ People will criticize it,” she said. “They don’t know me. They don’t know how we felt about one another.”

*

Around Christmas, Bill took a turn for the worse. His legs swelled, he had blood in his stools, his stomach became distended. Mary decided against aggressive medical treatment.

“I said, ‘Bill, if you really want to go, you have my permission.’ Maybe he is hanging on for me.”

When her daughter Cath visited from Florida and relayed a similar message, a single tear rolled down his cheek.

In the past year, Cath had sensed a restlessness in her mother as Mary talked about traveling more and wondered if the house was too big for her. In a sense, she said, her father’s presence had provided her mother with security.

“He needed to be there until she could release him,” Cath said. “She had to get to a point--she won’t admit this--where she could say, ‘This is getting old. He really needs to go on, and I really need to go on.’ ”

On Jan. 13--13 years, four months and one week after his accident--Bill Zokan died peacefully in his bed. He was 66.

Five days later, he was buried with a firefighter’s guard of honor, eulogized by his daughter, a nondenominational minister.

“He stuck around long enough for us to grow up, get our lives in order and evolve to a point . . . where we could pray not for our needs, but [for] what was in his best interests,” Cath told the mourners.

That night, Mary’s 8-year-old granddaughter said to her: “Grandma, you didn’t even cry at the funeral.”

“I didn’t,” Mary said. “I was telling myself he’s better off.”

“Maybe the miracle is his dying, you know? Maybe that’s the answer to the prayer. Maybe God said, ‘She’s had enough.’ I don’t know. I really don’t know.”

*

And so, Mary Zokan is alone.

In the days after Bill’s death, she had trouble sleeping. Weeks have passed, the nurses have gone, the suction machine and wheelchair have been packed up. The house is silent.

Mary is relieved.

“I just can’t tell you I feel bad being alone,” she said. “It’s not so bad.”

She now bakes and helps serve meals for the needy, but says she’ll make no big decisions for a year.

Some days, when Mary thinks of Bill, she tries to put aside the painful memories of him lying helpless, his blue eyes locked in a distant gaze.

Instead, she remembers moments from their good life, so long ago. She remembers the summer days, when her strong, virile husband would plunge in the family pool before going to work.

Then Bill would run to her side, and put his icy, wet hand on her face.

“This,” he’d cry, “is living!”