By Kathleen Powers Good Housekeeping 5/2000 - Photograph by Jeff Scourtino

Healing Hearts
Victoria Hall and Carl Brahe
WHEN JOHN ANDREWS, A POPULAR REAL ESTATE DEVELOPER in Denver, fell ill in February 1993, there were dozens of well-wishers at his home every time his buddy Carl Brahe came to visit. "John was such a warm, charming person," says Brahe, 48, "that when you met him, you were pretty much his friend for life."

In the months that followed, however, those friends fell away, as Andrews's condition worsened. He’d been diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, a fatal neurological disorder that robs its victims of the use of every muscle in their body, while their minds remain intact. By November, Andrews was a quadriplegic; his wife was too emotionally devastated to care for him, and Brahe was one of the few friends still visiting him in the hospital.

There, in March, Brahe met Victoria Hall, 44, an attractive intensive-care nurse who had taken an interest in the friendly patient with the fighting spirit. Eventually, Andrews asked his nurse if she would consider quitting her job and caring for him at his home. "John," says Brahe, "could charm anyone into anything!"

Soon, the patient, his friend, and his full-time nurse were spending long hours together at Andrews's home. Brahe, a psychotherapist, spent much of the time counseling the terminally ill man. But after a while, Brahe had to admit that he wasn't driving 60 miles several times a week just to see his friend. "I noticed," Brahe says, "that when I didn't see Victoria, I was miserable."

But it would be a year and a half before Brahe, while comforting an exhausted Hall, blurted out that he loved her. Hall was shocked: "Though her patient had warned her that his friend was falling for her, she hadn't taken him seriously. But as the months passed, Brahe's "heartfulness," she says, made her want to give the man a chance. "I realized I'd never met anyone like Carl," she says. "I mean, what other man would do what he did for a friend?"

As Brahe and Hall's relationship deepened over the next few years, so did their commitment to Andrews, who by 1995 had lost the ability to talk or even breathe on his own. In 1996, after Andrews's wife had moved out and his financial resources were nearly depleted, the couple bought a home in Bailey, Colorado, outside Denver. Brahe renovated the ground floor so that Andrews could live with them. Before closing on the house, Hall loaded her patient into a wheelchair and took him to the two story home that overlooked the mountains. "He couldn't open his eyes anymore," says Hall. "But I wanted him to feel the presence of the place before we bought it."

It was there, surrounded by the majestic beauty of snow-crested mountains, that Andrews died three days before Thanksgiving Day, 1999. By his side were his two closest friends, as well as his mother and sister, who arrived from West Virginia and North Carolina just in time to say good-bye.

Brahe and Hall, who worked during the final years of Andrews's life to find ways for him to communicate, are now trying to bring a high-tech communication device to others with paralyzing diseases. But their thoughts are still very much with their friend. "I believe the best part of him lives on," says Hall.

"John taught us a lot about living as he died," Brahe adds. "We took care of him. But in some ways ... he took care of us.

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