Affair of the Heart
1995, 33-year-old man kills himself. Dead man’s heart goes into 56-year-old man’s chest. Rejuvenated recipient meets, woos, marries donor’s 28-year-old widow. Fast forward to 2008. Transplanted heart recipient kills himself. Heart buried. Foul play not suspected. Weird but reportedly true. Beaufort Gazette:
BLUFFTON — When Terry Cottle killed himself more than 12 years ago, his heart lived on in former Hilton Head Island resident Sonny Graham.
Grateful for the transplant that saved his life, Graham wrote to thank the Cottle family. Through that correspondence, he met Cheryl Cottle, his donor’s widow. Then the unexpected happened — they fell in love and married.
Earlier this week, the unexpected happened again, when Graham’s life ended the same way Terry Cottle’s did.
On Tuesday, Graham took his own life at his home in Vidalia, Ga. He was 69.
Graham was found with a single gunshot wound to the throat, said Greg Harvey, a special agent working the case for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. He was found in a utility building in his backyard and had used a shotgun, Harvey said. A medical examiner in Savannah performed an autopsy Wednesday.
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Posted by Jules Crittenden at 8:12 pm on Sunday, April 6, 2008
3 Responses to “Affair of the Heart”
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April 7th, 2008 at 12:15 pm
You don’t see many suicided with a shot gun do you? It has to be hard to position the barrel at your self and pull the trigger. But I guess it can be done. Perhaps she was the type of women that could drive a man to that? Indeed a very weird story.
April 7th, 2008 at 5:05 pm
I suppose it could just be a very sad coincidence. There’s something else, though… she’s worked at several hospices? You know, where people go to die? Where, although it’s always denied, very sick people are sometimes helped along a bit with pain medication? And why “several” hospices? Why did she switch jobs, apparently fairly often? Hmmmm….
April 8th, 2008 at 9:45 pm
strange things happen when organs are transplanted. There are many stories of recipients who experience a personality changed in a dramatic way as memories stored in the cells or cellular memories are transplanted along with the organ.
I just wrote about the persistence of cellular memories today at Legacy Matters and ask whether that could be a contributing cause in this case.
http://www.estatevaults.com/lm/archives/2008/04/07/was_a_cellular.html