Christmas Miracle Allows Family to Reclaim Its Past

The call came Christmas night--one final gift for Cindy Boyer on a day that celebrates a miracle. “I’ve got something to tell you,” her grandma said.

Cindy knew it had to be about her mother. She’d been preparing for this for years, even thinking of signing a do-not-resuscitate order in case something happened. Now, something had.

The memories flashed before her like snapshots in a photo album: A girl sleeping in a hospital bathroom as her mother lay motionless, eyes open but unseeing. A brother and sister embracing a limp body, their hugs unreturned. A father numbing his grief with booze.

Cindy hung up the phone and turned to her husband. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

But for the first time in 16 years, everything was right.

“My mom’s awake,” she said, and the tears began falling.

‘I Was Stuck to Her All the Time’

She was 9 when it happened, a tomboy who hated the Brownies and ballet but participated because that’s what her mother wanted. Cindy White Bull obeyed her mother. She respected her mother. Most of all, she adored her.

“I was stuck to her all the time,” she recalls, “like a piece of gum on her shoe.”

They lived in a trailer in Edgewood, N.M., on five acres of open prairie near Tijeras Canyon.

Her dad, Mark White Bull, was a computer operator for the city of Albuquerque, 35 miles west. Her mom, a member of the Cochiti Indian Pueblo, was an activist with the group Indian Opportunity but gave it up after she had Jesse, Cindy’s 3-year-old brother, and Floris, her baby sister.

Her mother’s name was Patricia, but everyone called her Happi because of her cheerful demeanor.

A natural beauty, with a mane of ebony hair that cascaded over her shoulders and a smile that illuminated her tanned face, Happi once modeled jewelry for the Indian Cultural Center in Albuquerque. Her face filled a billboard on the highway to Santa Fe. Her friends loved to tease her about it.

Ominous Note on the Door

After she had children, though, Happi spent her time making earrings, belt buckles and hatbands. Everywhere she went, her kids went with her--and Cindy was always right by her side.

When Happi visited friends to teach them yoga, Cindy was there. When she came home from a night of two-stepping and wanted to keep dancing in the living room, Cindy was there--following along on her daddy’s feet.

She was there, too, that warm June day when her mother left for the hospital to give birth to her fourth child. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” her mom had said. “I love you.”

That night, Cindy, Jesse and Floris went to work with their dad on the graveyard shift. The family planned to go to the hospital the next day, when Happi’s caesarean was scheduled.

That morning of June 13, 1983, Cindy and her family stopped by home on the way to the hospital. A note was stuck to the door. Something had gone wrong.

It was several days before Cindy saw her mother again, in a hospital bed with tubes strung through her body. Her eyes were wide open, but she wouldn’t blink. She wouldn’t move. She was living but not alive.

Her mother had given birth to a healthy boy, but in recovery a blood clot lodged in her lung. She went into cardiopulmonary arrest, and the oxygen to her brain was cut off for several minutes. The doctors brought her back to life, but she had brain damage.

At just 27 years old, Happi White Bull--wife, friend, mother--had lapsed into a coma. No one could know if she would ever return.

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Three months ago, a cold was working its way through the Las Palomas Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Albuquerque. Dr. Elliot Marcus prescribed amantadine, a flu drug sometimes used to stimulate people with Parkinson’s disease or brain injuries, for those affected.

Several days later a nurse’s aide was straightening the sheets for one of those patients when the woman sat up and exclaimed, “Don’t do that!”

It was Dec. 21, 1999, and Happi White Bull had come back to the world.

Cindy was on vacation, so it took a couple of days for word to reach her. As soon as the call came, she flew from her home in Jacksonville, N.C., to Albuquerque with her husband of 5 1/2 years. Jesse, Floris and Mark Jr., now teenagers, drove from their home in South Dakota with their father.

Cindy arrived first and waited in the nursing home lobby until her mother was wheeled in.

“You could just instantly tell there was a difference,” she says. “Her face was lit up.”

Happi lifted her arms for a hug. When the nurses asked if she knew her visitor, she nodded and said, “Cindy.”

Jesse couldn’t imagine what it was like for his mother to see her children again after so many years. “It’s like she went to sleep and woke up, and 16 years later your kids are grown up,” he says. To her, he said simply, “It’s me--Jess. I’m not a little kid no more.”

Their father couldn’t take his eyes off the mother of his children, but perhaps the most poignant reunion was actually something else--an introduction to Mark Jr., the son Happi had never known.

“This is your baby,” a nurse told her.

“Junior?” she murmured.

“My God,” Mark thought. “That was my mom’s voice.”

It was the first time he’d heard it.

While his mother lay in darkness, the new baby was sent to live with his father’s mom in South Dakota. The rest of the family stayed in New Mexico, by Happi’s side.

She remained on a respirator for the first month. Some nights, Cindy and her family slept in the bathroom of her mother’s room, “just waiting for her to wake up.” Others were spent huddled in their car in the hospital parking lot.

“Come back to us,” they implored, as they showed her old photographs.

Once she was breathing on her own, Happi was moved to another hospital to begin rehabilitation. She came out of her coma but remained in a semi-vegetative state, with her eyes open but unable to regard anything around her. Eventually she was transferred to Las Palomas nursing home.

Over the next decade and a half she would languish in limbo as the world moved on, through the collapse of communism, the Gulf War, the rise of the Internet and the transformation of her children from toddlers to teens.

For two years her husband visited almost daily.

“Sometimes,” he recalls, “I would try to talk her into waking up. I’d say, ‘You’re by a stream now. We’re sitting together. You’re really tired, but you need to wake up now.

‘The kids need you. I need you. . . . ‘ “

At home, Mark began drinking heavily. Sometimes Cindy found him weeping, and she’d leave the room feeling angry and uncomfortable.

Jesse remembers seeing his dad sitting alone at a table. “What’s wrong?” he asked. His dad began to explain, but the boy didn’t understand.

In 1985, when there was still no change in Happi’s condition, Mark packed up the family and moved to the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in South Dakota, close to his mother and Mark Jr.

He knew the only way to get on with their lives was to leave Happi and the pain behind.

Mark received alcohol counseling, went back to college and earned a degree in geography. Eventually, he went to work for the tribe doing computer work and public relations.

A Divorce Fails to End the Pain

In 1988, he divorced Happi and embarked on a series of failed marriages.

“It was just part of my grieving process,” he explains, “and accepting that I had to go on.”

But the decision destroyed his relationship with his in-laws in New Mexico. Happi’s brother became her conservator and refused to allow Mark to see her.

For the children, growing up without a mom--trying to explain to the other kids that she wasn’t dead but wasn’t exactly alive--was difficult.

The children didn’t see their mom again for years. In 1989, when Cindy was 16, she demanded that her father take her to New Mexico to live with her maternal grandmother. He drove the family down, and they saw Happi. She was the same, though older and more pale.

A week later, Cindy called her dad and asked to come home.

At 18, she left home for good and joined the Marines. After a while, she married and had children. The rest of the family remained in South Dakota, her dad working for the tribe, Mark Jr. and Floris going to high school. Jesse got a job at a nearby casino and moved out.

Their mom became a cherished memory. Like their father years before, the children--especially Cindy--believed they probably would never have her back.

“It’s too much emotional baggage to hold onto,” says Cindy. “I had to go on.”

Cindy is 26 now, only a year younger than her mother was when she slipped away from the world. She is at a hospital once again, and once again there are tears and confusion. But now there is hope.

Cindy and her siblings have come to visit their mom at the Rancho Los Amigos National Rehabilitation Center in Downey, Calif. Happi arrived Jan. 18, a month after she sat up in bed and began talking.

For at least three hours a day, Happi receives therapy to teach her how to walk again, to talk, to brush her hair, to wash her hands. Her doctors say she had regressed somewhat by the time she arrived at Rancho--talking less, nodding and pointing instead.

Her condition stems both from the brain damage she suffered and the 16 years she spent lying still. She needs help with everything, from lifting herself out of her wheelchair to tuning a radio.

Happi has made some improvements over the last two months, though. When her therapists ask her simple questions, she answers correctly 85% of the time.

Doctors don’t know what she recalls of the past 16 years or her life before. They know she remembers her children, except for Mark Jr.

Her future is just as cloudy. She continues to receive 100 milligrams of amantadine daily, because doctors worry she could return to her vegetative state without it.

“We predict that she will always need total assistance. That’s what they need to plan for,” speech therapist Wendy Perez says. “Nobody would have predicted that she would even be as responsive as she is right now.”

Is the drug responsible? Doctors suspect it is, but can’t be sure. When used to stimulate brain-injured patients, it’s usually given soon after the injury occurs--not years later. And any return to awareness after such a long time is extremely rare, experts say.

Others see more at work than medicine or dumb luck.

“I’m inclined to believe that we are talking about something quite miraculous,” said Michael J. Sheehan, archbishop of Santa Fe. He credits prayers to the Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha, a Mohawk Indian who was beatified by the Catholic Church in 1980. Happi’s former mother-in-law, Gloria Fiddler, had prayed to her for years for Happi.

For Cindy and her siblings, what brought their mother back is less important than the fact that she returned. During their visit in February, Happi and her children caught up on 16 years of lost memories. They talked, she listened. They laughed, she smiled.

“Every moment with her is a special moment for me and my brother and sisters,” Jesse says. “It’s something we never had. When you find it, you want to hold it as long as you can.”

Happi is expected to remain in rehabilitation until May, when Cindy graduates from college. Then Cindy wants her to move into her home.

The daughter who overcame the loss of a mother to become a wife and mother herself has made the only decision she could: to set her needs aside and help her mother reclaim life--and learn how to live it again.