'I am awed that people can be so good'

By Bob Greene

There is probably no good way for a husband and wife to end a life together, but this was particularly awful.

Raymond Walmoth, 65, had spent his career as a teacher at Culver Military Academy in Culver, Ind. About five years ago, he and his wife Georgia — she is 57 — moved to Chicago, where they lived on the Northwest Side. On a windy Saturday morning this year they were scheduled to fly to New York for the wedding of a niece.

It was going to be a one-day trip. They packed a garment bag and a carry-on bag. Mr. and Mrs. Walmoth were going to ride the elevated train out to O’Hare International Airport. They went to the Irving Park elevated stop, went up to the platform with their bags, and waited for the train to arrive for the quick trip to O’Hare International Airport.

They were talking with each other, and Mr. Walmoth suddenly bent over. His wife remembers thinking that he must have been experiencing a pain in his side. Then he fell to the platform.

"You have no preparation for a moment like that," Mrs. Walmoth said the other day. "My first thought — I don’t know why I was thinking this — was that he had had a stroke, and how upset he was going to be about being ill like that."

It was no stroke, as devastating as that might have been. Her husband was dying on that elevated-train platform. Mrs. Walmoth didn’t know it yet, but he had suffered a severe heart attack. He wasn’t speaking; he was hardly breathing.

And what Mrs. Walmoth recalls about those terrifying minutes is not only that they were her husband’s last minutes alive. She recalls what six people on the platform — she never saw them before, she has not seen them since — did.

"They rushed up to us to help us," she said. "There were three men and three women, the best as I can remember, some in their 20s, some in their 40s or older. "They were on their hands and knees, trying to help my husband. One of them went to call an ambulance; one woman held his hand. Because it was chilly out, one of the men was worried that my husband needed to be kept warm; there were no blankets or anything, so this man said, ‘Let’s put the garment bag over him, to give him some warmth.’

"I kept talking to my husband. I didn’t think he could hear me — I still don’t think he could. But I didn’t know, so I said quietly to him, ‘We’re going to turn you on your side now,’ and ‘We’re going to take your glasses off.’ "

She remembers several trains came and went; the people with her husband on the platform obviously had come to the elevated stop to catch trains, but they didn’t leave. They didn’t get on the trains.

"Thinking about that now, it’s difficult for me to describe how much that meant to me," Mrs. Walmoth said. "This is the city — the place that is supposed to be so uncaring. And to think of those people who were putting everything else aside to help a man they didn’t know. And to help me ..."

When the ambulance arrived and the paramedics began to work on her husband, Mrs. Walmoth said, the six men and women still stayed with her. She followed her husband on the stretcher on his way to the ambulance.

One of the men on the platform said to her: "Do you need anything?" Mrs. Walmoth said to the man, "I’m sure I do, but I don’t know what." The man said, "Do you want me to call anyone? Do you need money?" Mrs. Walmoth remembers just looking at the man. "If you need money, I can give you some money," the man said. She didn’t; she hurried after her husband on the stretcher.

"I knew that he was dead," she said the other day. And she was right. The heart attack killed her husband. The last she ever saw him alive, the last she ever spoke to him, was on that elevated-train platform, getting ready to go to the wedding.

She has no way to thank the people who stayed with her and tried to help. She has no idea who they were. But on one of the worst days a person can ever imagine, she found a pocket of warmth, a haven filled with grace.

"I am just awed by this," she said. "I am awed that people can be so good."

Chicago Tribune