A Very Sad Organ Donation & Love Story

     

As I peruse stories often, this headlines for this one have been particularly good. How do you sum up the story, respectfully and succinctly? As the wife of both men in question, or the wife of one heart, works in hospice care, perhaps she’s better equipped in some way to deal with death. Hmmm. Uhhhhh. Weird.

S.C., Ga. men shared heart, wife, manner of death
Monday, April 7, 2008 | www.charleston.net

HILTON HEAD ISLAND — Terry Cottle and Sonny Graham never met, but the two men shared two very important things — a heart and a wife.

They also died the same way: Cottle, 12 years ago from a self-inflicted gunshot at the Summerville home he shared with his wife, Cheryl; Graham, 69, died the same way last week outside the Vidalia, Ga., home that he shared with his wife, Cheryl.

When Cottle died at age 33, his organs were donated. Graham got Cottle’s heart, and nine years later he married Cottle’s widow.

Georgia Bureau of Investigation special agent Greg Harvey told The (Hilton Head) Island Packet that Graham was found Tuesday in a utility building in his backyard with a single gunshot wound to the throat. No foul play was suspected in the former golf tournament director’s death, Harvey said.

Graham, director of the Heritage Golf Tournament at Sea Pines Resort from 1979 to 1983, was on the verge of congestive heart failure in 1995 when he got a call that a heart was available in Charleston.

That heart was from Terry Cottle, who, after shooting himself, had been put on life support so his organs could be donated, Berkeley County Coroner Glenn Rhoad said.

Grateful for his new heart, Graham began writing letters to the donor’s family to thank them. In January 1997, Graham and Cheryl Cottle, then 28, met in Charleston.

‘I felt like I had known her for years,’ Graham told The Island Packet in 2006. ‘I couldn’t keep my eyes off her. I just stared.’

In 2001, Graham bought a home for Cottle and her four children in Vidalia. Three years later, they were married after Graham retired from his job as a plant manager for Hargray Communications on Hilton Head.

From their previous marriages, the couple had six children and six grandchildren scattered across South Carolina and Georgia.

Cheryl Graham, now 39, has worked at several hospices in Vidalia. A telephone message left Sunday at a listing for Cheryl and Sonny Graham in Vidalia was not immediately returned.

A Georgia native, Graham moved to Hilton Head Island in the mid-1960s. He helped raise money for the local high school, and its football field is named for him.