The Heart Wants What The Heart Wants
"It was April Fools Day in 2008 when Sonny Graham disappeared into the shed and locked the door..."
Hi,
You might not know this about me, but I’m partial to a good romance story. Boot up Netflix and throw me some rom-coms: I won’t say no. You’ve Got Mail is a favourite. So is Love, Actually.
Both those films have this added level where if you watch them today, you realise they contain utterly deranged male characters who absolutely are stalkers. Horrific.
I also like films that are dark and warped. I’m partial to horror (Malignant and Barbarian are recent delights) and documentaries at the bleaker end of the spectrum (Dear Zachary, Capturing the Friedmans and The Staircase are tops).
With all that in mind, I wanted to tell you a story. It’s a bit like when I retold that story of the pilot who got sucked out of the cockpit.
This love story is 100% true. It’s a story that does contain talk of suicide, so read with care.
I’ve told it the clearest way I know how — a bit like a children’s story. It’s just how it came out.
David.
The Heart Wants What The Heart Wants
Cheryl Sweat had been unlucky in love. But she was about to get lucky.
She’d been happily married for three years. Unfortunately, her husband was also married to someone else.
When Cheryl found out about her husband’s second life, she was no longer happy. She asked for a divorce. Her husband agreed — and they divorced. She was free.
Free to meet the real love of her life.
The real love of her life ended up being Terry Cottle. Terry loved Cheryl back, and they were married in May of 1989. Cheryl was delighted to find that Terry happily accepted her two sons, Chris and Timmy. They decided to have a third child, and Jessica was born.
It was heaven. Until it wasn’t.
Cheryl’s mother moved in, and around this time Terry started becoming more distant. He started calling his ex. They’d have long conversations on the phone, late into the night.
Things escalated and there was a big fight. At one point, Terry ran into the bathroom and locked the door. There was a gunshot.
It was a revolver. One shot to the head.
According to the coroner’s report, Cheryl was eating oatmeal in the kitchen at the time.
Terry wasn’t quite dead, and was raced to the hospital.
But less than a week later Terry was taken off life support. It was the end of the road for Terry.
Terry was dead, but his heart was alive. It was removed from Terry’s body, and put into the body of Sonny Graham.
Sonny was 57-years-old, and he’d been waiting for a heart in need of a new home. He’d been a wreck since his own heart had been ravaged by a virus, leaving him bedridden and pathetic.
Sonny was over the moon with his new heart. He got to hunt and fish again, blood coursing through his veins anew.
Terry was dead, but Sonny got to live.
The heart beat on.
Sonny wanted to thank someone for his new heart. The heart’s owner was dead, so Sonny chose the second best thing: The heart’s love, Cheryl.
He agonised over what to write, but finally settled on the right words in the right order. He sent his letter to the South Carolina Organ Procurement Agency, and got them to pass the message onto Cheryl.
Cheryl got the letter, and she agreed to meet him.
Cheryl and Sonny fell in love. Cheryl, Sonny and Terry’s old heart moved in together a month before 9/11.
The heart wants what the heart wants — and this particular heart wanted Cheryl Sweat.
The heart’s original vessel was long rotted in the ground. But now it had a new body called Sonny. Sonny would have to do.
The heart sensed something was wrong.
For a while, things had been so right: Surgeons had correctly attached the aorta and superior and inferior vena cava into Sonny’s body. Oxygen was flowing in and out just like it had in Terry’s body. Maybe even better.
The heart was fine, but something else was up.
Maybe the heart was paranoid: Its last host had shot himself in the head.
Something was off.
Something was up.
It was April Fools day in 2008 when Sonny Graham disappeared into the shed and locked the door.
The heart began beating faster. Last time it had been a bathroom. This time it was a shed.
Different location; same outcome.
Sonny picked up a gun, pointed it at his head, and pulled the trigger.
The heart wants what the heart wants. But unlike last time, the jig was up.
The heart had loved Cheryl Sweat for nearly two decades, from two different bodies.
But like any idiot can tell you, you need more than a heart to love somebody.
The heart beat a few last times, and then it stopped forever.
That’s the story. A few different outlets covered it at the time — CBS is the best I’ve found, and I referenced it a lot in the story I just told.
You could read this as evidence of cellular memory: the concept that cells in the body can hold memories, just like the brain can.
There are plenty of stories — including this one — that contain reports of people’s personalities and thoughts changing drastically after receiving an important new organ. Suddenly, someone who’s received a new body part starts liking the same beer that the donor did.
All woo, of course — but it’s fun to think about.
What’s the craziest story you’ve ever heard? There’s another mad true story I’ll tell you sometime about a child being born, twice. The first time was bad, the second time was worse.
David.
My favourite WTF story is a cautionary tale about DNA.
A woman and her husband had two children, and she was pregnant with their third, but the marriage had ended and they were going through the court system to determine custody of the kids. As part of this, a paternity test was done, but while it showed the children were in fact their father’s, the test said their mother was not the woman he was divorcing. This was a shock to everyone; the children hadn’t been conceived via IVF, and a hospital mix-up which swapped both children with ones the husband had *also* fathered seemed astronomically unlikely.
The Court assigned an officer to stay with the ex-wife as her pregnancy progressed, and attend the birth. The officer did so, and took a DNA sample from the baby and mother moments after delivery.
Same result. The child which the officer had watched being born was not the child of the woman they had watched it be born from.
Turns out the mother of these three children had medical chimerism. When she was in the womb, she had a twin who did not survive, and who she absorbed during development, meaning that some of her cells had her own DNA, and some (including the cells collected for her DNA tests) had her twin’s DNA.
Can't beat that but i have funny little ghost story. Saw Peter Cushing's Frankenstein when i was about 13...ran home down the middle of the road (Hastings) arrived at the front gate in a bit of a lather...turned up the path...and saw, hanging right in front of me, a classic 'ghost in a shimmering sheet' image...like Munch's 'Scream' through a diffuse lens. I screamed and threw my hands up in front of my face. Took my hands down and it was gone. Then i saw another, weaker one, and realised that it was a sweat drop on an eyelash refracting the porch light. Bloody hell...those Hammer films!