Love dies twice

Though in reality love exists only in the mind, the product of carnal desire and a need for the puny to find misleading affirmation of their worth, Cheryl Graham, formerly Cheryl Cottle, might seem to have lived every girl’s dream in having captured a single heart’s desire for so many years. Less romantic, however, is that the heart beat in two independent bodies, and both bodies chose suicide.

The heart Cheryl had captured once belonged to Terry Cottle, Cheryl’s then-husband, who took his own life at the age of 33. As Cottle lay dying in Summerville, South Carolina, the next state over Sonny Graham waited in desperate need of a new heart. Cottle became Graham’s donor. Recovered and delighted, Graham wrote a letter of gratitude to Cheryl. The two began corresponding, fell in love and were married. Were the story to end there, it might be a thing of beauty and thus of no use to this newspaper. But it doesn’t. It ends with a neck full of buckshot as, 12 years after his own life was saved by the heart of Cheryl’s late husband, and 11 years after he became Cheryl’s next husband, Sonny Graham re-widowed her in the tool shed in his backyard.

by Scott Saxon