By Allen G. Breed
Associate Press
updated 11:47 a.m. CT, Sun., Aug. 31, 2008
On an overcast spring morning in southeast Georgia, Sonny Graham drank some coffee and headed out the door for another day in the family landscaping business and to take his 9-year-old stepson to the dentist. But Graham made a detour to the backyard shed that he’d built.
There, the 69-year-old picked up the 12-gauge Remington shotgun he’d taken on so many quail- and dove-hunting trips, pointed the muzzle at the right side of his throat and pulled the trigger.
It was April Fool’s Day, almost exactly 13 years since another man’s suicide gave Graham a second chance at life
That man was Terry Cottle. When he ended his life, Graham got his heart.
But it was not just an organ that connected Graham and the 33-year-old donor. Nearly a decade after the transplant, Graham married Cottle’s young widow.
And now Graham had made her a widow again.
As word of his death spread, the Internet lit up with the story of the heart that had been twice silenced by suicide — and the woman who’d lost the same heart twice. Reporters and bloggers waxed on about “cellular memory” and whether the organ somehow held a “suicide gene.”
Nonsense, thought Cottle’s sister. The brain is where the conscience resides, where love and loss are felt; the heart is just a pump.
As far as she was concerned, Graham’s death was less about her brother’s heart than about Cheryl — the woman with whom both men had chosen to share it.
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