JOHN CURTIS HUTCHES
May 27, 1966 – April 18, 2016 
John almost made it to see, from Earth, his beloved Chicago Cubs win the pennant this year. His family and friends believe that he saw it from his resting place, and perhaps had a hand in it.
John Curtis was our family’s middle child, yes, the one who caused rules to be made. A tormenter of his older brother, Lou, and the scourge of his younger sister, Sue, John was quite creative in his jokes and button-pushing.
Making friends was so easy for John. He fit in with just about anyone from the time he was a pudgy toddler until he became a gangly schoolaged fellow. He was gifted athletically, had a tremendous sense of humor, and had just a little too much mischievousness to suit many; i.e., parents and teachers.
From the time he was 10 years old, he wanted to be a police officer. As he grew older, he went from mounted policeman to, by the time he started college, an Illinois State Police officer. Known by teachers and playground supervisors as the one most able to make two feuding classmates make up and renew friendships, I often felt he would end up in police work, but dealing with teenagers and younger children.
When he graduated from Sacred Heart- Griffin High School, he enrolled at Springfield Junior College in pre-law enforcement with the goal of transferring to law enforcement at Western Illinois University. This was not to be.
On Oct. 29, 1986, during his sophomore year at SCI, John suffered a brain aneurysm that necessitated emergency brain surgery and weeks in intensive care. While he gradually improved physically, John remained in a coma until his neurosurgeon, Dr. Macilhaney, urged us to try to get John into a coma stimulation facility, The Greenery, in Boston. Once the way was cleared for that, he was flown to Boston in January of 1987.
By April, John was “awake” and aware of all that was going on around him but he was a quadriplegic and could not speak. After 16 months of rehabilitation at The Greenery followed by a six-month stay at a rehab hospital in the St. Louis area, John had plateaued. After a brief stay at home, he was placed in a skilled nursing facility.
It often crossed my mind and my lips that I don’t believe anyone else in our family or, indeed, whom I knew, would have taken all that had happened to John and all that he had endured in the spirit that he exhibited. He was able to use a communication device that let us program things he might want to say or ask for. He was eventually evaluated for a power wheelchair, and that helped him feel some independence. A visual field cut made it hard for him to be a “good driver,” something that he had taken great pride in as a pre-injury teen.
Most of the things John wanted on his communication device were jokes of some sort. He had the “I’m too cold,” and “Please turn on the TV” types of messages, but jokes were his favorites. The series of buttons he pushed most, though, was “I love you,” and “I’d like a hug, please.” Over and over he used that, both on those he knew well and on those whom he had just met.
His friends would program in dialogue from Monty Python movies, and he had many, many Cubs-related sayings.
I mention his friends. At one of the rehab facilities, a neuropsychologist told me once that it was amazing that John’s friends had stuck by him so loyally and liked to take him places, read to him, watch movies with him and other things they would have done if he had not had the brain injury. He said it was a great tribute to the kind of person John was.
John had many sad times, and especially near the beginning of his ordeals, he would have tears, but he loved God and accepted what had happened as he grew older. My taking him to church at St. Agnes was always the highlight of his week. His friends could not have borne being with him for the 29.5 years he lived after his TBI if he had been feeling sorry for himself all of the time. Feeling sorry for himself was just not John’s way. He was never a loser through it all. He delighted people, loved them and entertained them. Above all, he inspired them and caused them to see their own problems from a different perspective.
His last six months were hard. He was sick most of the time, a great change from most of his post-injury years. Beginning in February, he had a series of five long hospitalizations, amazing his doctors and nurses with how patient with and appreciative of them he was.
During the last few days, John was heavily medicated for pain. On the evening of April 18, his sister, a few of his closest friends and their wives and I watched with him as it became harder and harder for him to breathe. Amazingly, to me, it was the first time in days that his eyes were wide open. We read Scripture to him, sang, prayed and joked. We told funny “John stories” and, of course, talked about how great it was going to be when the Cubs won the World Series in a few months.
Finally, the time between breaths had no beginning or end. John had gone to meet his brother Jesus. After we had all cried ourselves out and made sure he was going to be able to donate his big, brown “cow eyes,” a lifelong wish of his, one of his friend’s wives looked at her phone, smiled through her tears and said, “The Cubs are beating the Cardinals five to zero.” –Rose Hutches, mother
