Michael's Story

It had to be another mistake. Michael couldn't be shot. That thought ricocheted through Dorothy "Dot" Dixon's mind throughout the two-hour trip from Perry County to Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

It had to be another mistake.

Two months earlier she had prepared to make this same midnight journey. On a night in May 1993, a man named Michael Dixon was killed in a traffic accident and it was an item on the local 10 o'clock news. Two of Dot's daughters, Shirley and Marilyn, nicknamed "Shirl" and "Mert," assumed the worst for their youngest brother.

They tried calling Michael's apartment but got no answer. Shirl said she'd call Michael's employer, just in case he was working late.

Mert alerted their mother.

For an anxious hour, Dot walked the floor. "I prayed to the Lord that it wasn't true," she remembered.

The phone rang in her little blue house and Dot clutched it on the first ring. Michael was OK, Mert said. He was at work. It was just a weird coincidence that the man in the auto crash had the same name and was of the same age.

Before Dot went to bed, she bowed her head, thankful her Michael, sweet boy, obedient son, was well and safe. She easily surrendered to sleep.

But now on this July night, as the dark, rural countryside gave way to shuttered suburbs and finally to amber-lit Nashville streets, Dot sensed a weight of imponderable immensity settling over her and hers. In the two-hour drive, it seemed she aged 10 years.

Dot hardly recognized the form on the hospital bed as her "baby." Michael's face was puffy, his eyes closed in a coma. His long, lean arms lay at his side, positioned unnaturally parallel to the rest of his body, like he was at attention even though he was lying down.

A machine monitored his heart rate and every few seconds a ventilator breathed for him. Bags of liquids, clear and dark, dripped into tubes that led to IV needles that pricked his skin. Hanging by the bed another bag collected urine from a catheter.

If he lived, the doctor cautioned, Michael would likely be a vegetable. The damage caused by the three bullets that pierced his neck had done irreparable harm to the spinal column, and brain damage was probable.

"Just a vegetable," she repeated to herself again and again.

For almost two days, there was no improvement. Michael remained in a deep sleep, and Dot stood by his bedside as long as the nurses would allow. She wouldn't leave the hospital, despite pleas from her family to take a break.

She would not desert him, was her constant reply. Dot spread her love equally among her four girls and five boys, but this child was the youngest of her brood and she had taken a special joy in raising him because she knew he was the last: her last baby, her last kindergartner, her last Perry County High basketball player.

She talked to her comatose son, told him what was happening at home, how everybody there was praying he would recover, how people from Michigan and Ohio, where several of his older siblings lived, were praying for him. When she wasn't talking to Michael, her mind was preoccupied with thoughts of him, of things he had told her.

They were in the kitchen in that little blue house near the Tennessee River.

Michael had just informed her he wanted to go to college in Atlanta and her heart was breaking.

Atlanta was seven hours distant from the oak hills of Perry County. Atlanta was a big city of skyscrapers and urban sprawl and muggings, murder and mayhem. She worried that he wouldn't be able to live in a nice neighborhood or make tuition payments.

Dot succumbed to empty nest blues. She cried, always out of Michael's sight, always careful not to let her sadness cause her son to alter his plans. One day she gathered her strength and told him, "Son, I'm behind you and whatever we have to do to get you to Atlanta, we'll do it."

Relieved to have his mother's blessing, Michael sat beside her at the kitchen table and revealed his grand plan. One day, after he graduated from college, when he got a job, Michael was going to buy a house and move her in with him.

That's not all. He wanted to open a crafts shop for her, let her sell ceramic figures lions, puppy dogs and praying angels. Maybe used clothing, too.

"Dot's Place" it could be called; payback for all the sacrifices she made in raising nine kids. Michael had seen how she rarely bought a new dress and her shoes had holes in them, yet in his closet hung new clothes and the latest sneakers. He remembered when all five of the boys were still living at home, how Dot would raise a fuss about how they looked in public, how she would scrub their jeans on an old-timey wash board to remove grass stains.

"If a mama is a mama, she wants her kids to look better than she does," she would say.

"You work too much," her youngest son told her often. All of her kids did.

And it was true. A single parent since Michael was 3, Dot worked as many as five jobs at a time and still managed to keep house.

Sometimes she would enter her home past midnight, at the end of her second-shift factory job and collapse into bed. But by the next morning she was rejuvenated, attacking the day with vigor.

"I know what I have to do and I don't expect nobody to pay my bills," she told her kids again and again.

Resolve and faith and plenty of brow sweat got her through some hard times, she reminded herself and her family as they sat in the waiting room between visits to see Michael.

"This too shall pass," she said.

On the second day of Michael's coma, Dot and Mert retreated to the hospital chapel to pray. Dot knelt before a cross, holding her hands out as if to embrace God as words of supplication poured from her broken heart like water spilling from a dam.

Suddenly, she sensed a glow, a radiant light beaming on her face.

Dot opened her eyes, but saw only the lights in the chapel. She closed them again and the bright light returned.

"Mert," she said, gripping her daughter's arm excitedly. "He's gonna be all right. He's gonna make it."

Five days. Wait five days, the doctors said, and if he did not come out of the coma, then the family should consider removing the ventilator, letting him die.

Later on the second day, Michael opened his weak eyes.

No one was surprised when the first word he mouthed was "Mama."