Tragedies Overcame Triumph With Car Accident, Diagnosis

Pat Brooks did not kill herself because she had just lost her husband. She killed herself because she had lost everything.

The suicide notes and journal she left behind reveal that tragedy was already enveloping her life before a 1980 Buick skidded through a stop sign on a county road Jan. 9, slammed into Tom Spurgeon’s car and killed him.

Thirteen hours later, Pat Brooks held a gun to her head and fired.

Weeks earlier, a specialist had told Brooks that the numbness in her leg was caused by multiple sclerosis, a slowly progressive neurological disease that is crippling.

For Brooks, 39, who was trained as a veterinary surgeon and pathologist, the diagnosis meant an end to her career, her brother Greg Brooks said.

The timing of the diagnosis was even more cruel.

Pat Brooks spent 22 years working toward a PhD in pathology. Graduation day was Dec. 20. Less than a month earlier, she learned she had the disease.

Greg Brooks recalls his sister’s graduation. Though there was sadness that their father wasn’t there--he had died in February--there was great joy. Spurgeon, 46, a professor of anatomy and neurobiology at CSU, was so proud of his wife. Beaming.

He took picture after picture, and everything seemed perfect.

Only one person knew the truth of how very imperfect it was, and that was Spurgeon.

On Nov. 28 Pat Brooks wrote in her journal:

“Well, I wasn’t sure how to tell Tom other than to just blurt it out. I know he’s scared too. I thought that . . . Tom and I would be able to settle down and get back to some semblance of a normal life, actually seriously plan to start a family, instead of always putting it off to the nebulous future. . . . It’s simply the course of nature that things break down. I just find the timing ironic.”

Her brother said the only thing that kept her going was her husband.

“With Tom around, she could face anything,” Greg Brooks said. “Despite all she was facing, loss of career and the loss of the father she adored, it was OK because she was with Tom, and Tom was going to take care of her. But without Tom, life was not worth living.”

She was not a religious person, but she was spiritual, he said. “There was no doubt in her mind that there was a life after death and she would be with Tom.”

Her strengths were his weaknesses, and vice versa. Pat was the quiet one who kept to herself; Tom was the extrovert. Brooks describes them as two inseparable halves of a whole. No one could imagine them apart.

“They will remain my definition of a perfect couple,” said friend Jennifer Nyborg, a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology who worked closely with Brooks. “They meshed so well together. It is inconceivable to think of one without the other. They were that much a part of each others’ lives.”

They married Sept. 7, 1991, on her parents’ 45th wedding anniversary. They acted like a couple who had been together for a lifetime, finishing each other’s sentences, having entire discussions with just a glance.

It was the second marriage for both. She’d been married briefly in her early 20s, and he’d had a 15-year marriage and two sons.

Physiology professor Lee Wilke, one of their best friends, described how the couple went out of their way to do things that would mean something to those they loved.

“They were on a car trip in the Midwest and they went out of their way to go to this little Midwestern town that was my hometown,” he remembered, crying. “They drove all the way out there, to Metropolis, Ill., just to send me a postcard from my hometown.”

He tells of how Pat tried to relearn how to ride a bicycle so she could bike with Tom’s sons.

“Pat was not an athlete,” he said. “She wound up with skinned knees and bruises. She didn’t give up. She did it, but she didn’t do it very well.”

Pat Brooks worried that, upon graduation, she would have to leave Fort Collins. Universities traditionally want outsiders for teaching jobs, saying they provide a fresh source of ideas. She got her bachelor’s and master’s degrees, doctor of veterinary medicine and doctorate on the Fort Collins campus.

But CSU wanted her, and this spring semester would have been her first on the faculty. Veterinary college dean Jim Voss said Spurgeon was too valuable to lose, and Brooks had too much potential to send elsewhere.

Another dream realized and lost. They moved into their new home on 10 acres with a view of the city and the mountains one week before they died.

Family and friends continue to unravel the details of what happened in the hours after Spurgeon was killed. Greg Brooks, who lives in Centreville, Va., was on the phone that night when an operator broke in with Pat’s news of her husband’s death.

“She was very calm,” he remembered. “Pat is always very calm under fire. She told me Tom had been killed. I could tell she was upset. I told her I’d catch the first flight out, which happened to be the next day. She kept saying, ‘I’m going to be OK; I just need some time to be alone.’ ”

The couple’s friend Wilke was with her that night, and she insisted he leave. He will not discuss it.

About 1 a.m., Pat Brooks left this life behind. Wilke found her the next morning.

Greg Brooks, and their mother who was visiting him, arrived in Fort Collins about noon. Two sheriff’s cars were parked in front of her house. They thought it might have something to do with the investigation of Tom’s death. But Greg Brooks worried that there might be “something more.”

Brooks said his sister had no history of clinical depression. But was there something she said that he should have noticed? The question dogs him and everyone else she called that night.

“You’ll have to take care of things for me; I won’t be able to handle them,” he remembers her saying.

“In contrast to my dad’s death, where she handled the paperwork, money and administrative details, it meant to me that of course she was not going to feel up to doing it because she would be grieving.

“But in hindsight, was she saying, ‘You’re going to have to handle it because I’m not going to be here at all?’ ”