By Doug Brunk, San Diego Bureau
Dr. Marco Coppola was just 33 years old when he lost his wife, Dr. Margaret J. Karnes, to breast cancer on May 4, 1997. The couple had been married almost 7 years.
“I used to think that it would be easier for me to have gone through a divorce, because I would think 'she's alive, and she's well, and she's happy,'” said Dr. Coppola, chair of the department of emergency medicine at Las Colinas Medical Center in Irving, Tex. “But no. Death is the ultimate closure. I don't know why it had to happen, but it did.”
The couple met while attending the College of Osteopathic Medicine at Des Moines University in Iowa, and married in 1990; 5 years later, Margaret was diagnosed with a treatable form of breast cancer. Six months later, however, she faced a diagnosis of inflammatory carcinoma, “which carries a death sentence,” Dr. Coppola said.
At the time of the second diagnosis, Margaret was an attending physician in the emergency medicine department at Scott & White Memorial Hospital in Temple, Tex. Dr. Coppola worked in the emergency medicine department at nearby Darnall Army Community Hospital in Fort Hood. Their main source of support was one another. “That made us grow together at an exponential rate,” he recalled. “We really grew close. We had a dog, and we had our family. Her family was scattered across the country. My family was in New York. And we had our friends. I was in the military at the time,” said Dr. Coppola, and “we military people really relied on the close support of our friends.”
That support came in the form of prayer, visits, greeting cards, telephone calls, and having dinner with friends. “Margaret and I got in touch with God,” he added. “We started improving our spiritual life and asking for strength.”
But while Dr. Coppola was coming to terms with his wife's terminal illness, he was still trying to process the loss of his father, who preceded Margaret in death by 6 months. “After Margaret died, I had to grieve the loss of two people, because I really didn't have time to grieve my father's death,” he said. “I couldn't be bothered with it because I had to take care of Margaret. I had to be there for her.”
When Margaret died at the age of 34, finding support “became even tougher,” he acknowledged. “The support I had was what support I could receive from my family. They were in New York and were dealing with the death of my father. Interestingly enough, [out] of all of the friends Margaret and I had before she died, only a handful are left. It's sort of like when couples divorce,” he said. “The friends that we had together as a couple didn't want anything to do with me now that I was single. They felt uncomfortable. Do I blame them for that? No, but that is the reality of the situation.”
To take his mind off of things, Dr. Coppola took up model railroading, a hobby that he enjoyed as a child.
A year later, he changed jobs and moved into a new house, “which is something you're not supposed to do [soon after a spouse dies], but I had the job offer of a lifetime,” he said. He was given the opportunity to work in the same emergency medicine department at Scott & White Memorial Hospital where Margaret ended her brief career.
He jumped at the chance.
He noted that his grief process may have been easier if he'd devoted more attention to the spiritual side of life after Margaret died. “I fell out of the church, and I wish I hadn't done that,” said Dr. Coppola, who is Roman Catholic. “I started going back to Mass regularly when I served in Iraq this past summer. I just wish I had gone back to Mass sooner, because it probably would have helped me a lot more.”
The Surgeon's Wife
Dr. Frank G. Moody lost his wife of 40 years, Maja, in December 2004. During the last 10 years of her life, she suffered two heart attacks and five strokes, the last of which rendered her paralyzed and unable to speak for 4 years. The Swedish native was 89 years old when she died.
“She was the ideal surgeon's wife because she always was a patient advocate,” Dr. Moody said.
The couple met when he was 36 years old and she was 49. She had never married, and Dr. Moody had three children from a previous marriage. When they wed, his children were aged 9 months, 5 years, and 7 years. Maja was an artist, and primarily painted with oil on canvas.