Take off your hat, I want to stand up.

Chapter 38: Jane Called.

Chapter 38: Jane called.

Sister Janie called.

Jack, mom's dead.

What? I could not focus, as I sat at my desk my legs went weak, my hand travelled through my hair, stop and think. I said to Janie, what happened?

Mom was in Maui. She and her boy friend Bill had played golf at the Kapiolani golf and country club. Ev was a pretty fair golfer in the early eighties. Kelly had worked with her at the beach. She worked at the game, and was a veteran golf enthusiast. Everyday is a good day for golf. She really enjoyed making a well shaped shot, seeing the tiny white ball spin towards the horizon and land in a nice spot. This always brought a smiley faced grin to her lovely face. Maui was a golfer's heaven. The ocean in the backdrop of every shot, tender, forgiving greens and a sweet club house filled with happy people. You could not ask for a better holiday.

Burt Lancaster and Vivian Leigh held a secret for our mom. She adored the beach scene with the two actors sprawled on the sand, beaten by the surf in a passionate embrace of need and desire. I never asked, she never told, but I know it was there.

After the eighteen holes were played out they repaired to the bar. Ev had a club soda, Bill a double whiskey. They walked to the rental car and started to drive back to the ocean front condo. As they passed a stretch of beach with a nice rise and fall of the surf, Ev had Bill pull over and drive into the parking area.

On the way to the Kaniopali, Ev had spotted this area and remarked they should make a visit on the way back. Now they pulled to a stop, got out and made their way to the fine white beach. Ev stretched out the bamboo beach mat and said she was going to go and play in the surf at the beach tidal mark. She pulled out her $2.99 lime green beach raft floaty and half blew it up on the beach.

When I was a lifeguard at Regina Beach she made me keep all float devices out of the water. She feared some life would be lost if they were allowed. Scott and I kept out all beach floats for two summers. It was not easy as people were used to playing on the devices, but we were consistent and no one drowned while under our watch.

It is ironic what happened next. Ev climbed on the floating, she wanted to drift and float in the waves while she dreamed of Burt and Vivian pulling each other down into the sand in a hard embrace. After all she was such a romantic. The floating raft was not firm enough to allow her to free float. In a series of unfortunate events, she climbed off, and stepped into calf deep water at the shore break. There she tried to blow more air into the $2.99 lime green floaty, she bent down, found the air exchanger and focused on the task at hand.

Right at the critical point of attention, when she needed to be one with the water her locus of concentration swayed to the lime green float. Abruptly a wave of greater measure crashed over her. Startled she reacted. Ev, a practised diver, raised her hands over her head and dove in the direction of the wave. Instinct driven she dove head first into the beach. Sadness followed.

Maui has a tough beach front that rises rapidly due to the direction of the pounding of the waves. Ev's head and forehead hit first. Rapidly the power of the surf flipped her body over her head and her neck snapped like a pea pod, crack. She said she heard it crank in a lonely sea. This one instant she broke her connection to her spinal cord. She was paralyzed quicker than it takes a bees wing to swoop one time, instantly.

She lay in the water awake, conscious, her brain screamed to move to rise up, to get her face out of the water. She could feel her arms waving good- bye over her head. Nothing happened, instead she floundered. Her rag doll body bobbed up and down pushing her into the beach and the rip tide pulled he out to sea. Her arms were suspended over her head in a cruel mimic of her fateful dive to safe water. The lime green floaty travelled in sync begging her to grab a hold of the safety raft.

How long could she hold her breath? At a later time she said, she had held her breath with all of her might. In her mind eye she beseeched God for intervention. She thought of her home and family, then she passed out. Before the blackness of unconsciousness she remembered viewing a strong call to a white light in the distance. She said, she was not afraid and did not feel fear.

A gentleman beach goer witnessed the splash. He saw her laying out in the dead mans's float. In short order he ran into the water flipped her over and started CPR. The waves riddled her body with movement and the last connections she may have had from her broken neck were now gone, she died.

The rescue breathing brought her back. A stranger in a brave act of kindness and action saved her life. If it had been another minute she would have not survived.

Bill was not a swimmer and when he saw Ev face down in the water he felt she was just fooling around and stared off into the distance. A Japanese freighter was chugging to port.

Years later I thought perhaps the freighter created super-sized waves as it passed by the island. But no, waves form from the shallow water reef and crash on the beach in a fairly rhythmic pattern. We all love to watch the waves coming into the shore line, some are just larger than others. Ev got caught, by an extra large wave and paid a bitter price.

She was in calf deep water, some would say fate brought her to the beach, into the water and final crash on the shore. Perhaps it was one of those things. We see it for what it was with some speculative distance between ourselves and the tragic episode.

Time would tell. We all played the, what if, game. What if she did not stop. What if the air mattress had been kept in the beach bag, a thousand what if's still did not change the facts. Ev drowned, died, was reborn a paralyzed person. An ambulance was summoned, she fought for her life while on her way to the hospital. She was awake and frightened beyond belief, she could not feel her legs. She thought it was from the cold water, she remembered everything. She recalled all of her actions. People say they can reconstruct the scene of an accident in close, minute detail, in super slow motion, a study in a horror story.

Evelyn Dorthy Fulton was a kind, selfless, generous, thoughtful person, who touched everyone with enthusiasm, warmth and acceptance. She was fighting the fight of her life. She was too young to die. She had just started to live again following the passing of her friend, her husband, the love of her life, Jack. She had beaten alcoholism. She had made a come back from a loveless marriage to the gay, gentleman David. She was her own person. Now she was struggling to breath, it was hard, and grew more difficult with each breath.

Once at the hospital she could not breath. The spinal injury had cut the signals for her lungs, they would not work. She died for the second time this same day.

The hospital red team shocked her heart back from the brink of death. They manoeuvred a breathing tube down her trachea, she was living once more.

Later they moved her to an iron lung.