This story is part of the My Unsung Hero series, from the Hidden Brain team. It features stories of people whose kindness left a lasting impression on someone else.
Around 30 years ago, Eric Johnson met Dennis Hopkins at a mutual acquaintance's birthday party.
"The way we met was really pretty great because we met at the birthday party of a man we had both dated and rejected," Johnson said, chuckling.
It didn't take long for Johnson and Hopkins to fall in love and start building a life together. Both were creatives: Johnson was a dancer and professional organist; Hopkins had once been a professional dancer, but had eventually become a garden designer.
"Though he worked as a gardener, his life was filled with painting, drawing, designing, carving and making beauty," Johnson said. โ"So, our life always circulated around gardens and beauty and home and how connected we were. We were sort of like twins to each other."
In the fall of 2021, Hopkins began to experience sharp pain between his shoulder blades. This was at a time during the COVID-19 pandemic when medical appointments were particularly challenging to schedule. But eventually, in January 2022, tests revealed he had Stage 4 lung cancer.
"I remember him saying to me early on, 'If this is cancer and the treatment is too terrible, I'm going to not want to go on and just let it go.' And I said, 'I absolutely get it,'" Johnson recalled.
Hopkins did decide to pursue treatment, but the side effects were brutal. He lost weight and was in persistent pain, and although the couple worked hard as a team to keep Hopkins well, he eventually was left too weak to sit up by himself. At that point, doctors instructed Johnson to take Hopkins to the hospital.
After Hopkins was admitted, the couple met their unsung hero, a nurse named Sherry.
"She was something wonderful, like out of a movie, this sturdy woman in her blue scrubs with her pigtails," Johnson remembered.
Sherry stood in front of the two men and laid out a roadmap for what was to come. She told them that Hopkins had only a 50% chance of surviving the next round of treatment. Then she looked at Johnson and said something he'll never forget.
"She looked at me and she said, 'He's gonna wanna go before you're ready, but you just have to let him go.' Then she looked at him and said, 'When you are ready to go, it's gonna be really hard on him, so you have to be really sensitive to him.'"
Then, Sherry looked back at Johnson and said, "Everybody in the world dies exactly the way they want. If he goes when you're not in the room, it's because he couldn't bear to have you there. If he goes when you are there, he wouldn't have it any other way."
Sherry's directness helped Johnson and Hopkins navigate the next few days with a sense of peace.
"The day that he left, I had to come and go from the room a number of times. Each time I left the room, I would say, 'I'll be right back.' So, he would hear me and then when I came back, I would say, 'Here I am," Johnson said.
"When I came in one time, I walked over to the window to look out at the beautiful day, and as I turned to look at him, I could see that something was getting very different. I hurried over to him, I put my hand on his chest [and the other] on the back of his head, and I said, 'I'm right here. I love you. I'll always love you. We'll always be together.' And I kept repeating those words until he stopped breathing."
Johnson believes the day Hopkins died would've been much more difficult if Sherry hadn't given them the insight she did.
If Johnson could see Sherry again, he'd take her hands in his, look her in the eye and thank her.
"I can never thank you enough for what you made possible for Dennis and I to have his death go so perfectly. I wanted everybody in the world to hear what you taught us because everybody in the world can learn a wonderful lesson from [it]. Thank you so very much."
My Unsung Hero is also a podcast โ new episodes are released every Tuesday. To share the story of your unsung hero with the Hidden Brain team, record a voice memo on your phone and send it to myunsunghero@hiddenbrain.org.
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