Heroes, Don’t Stay Anonymous

There are moments when our paths cross unexpectedly, when what we do in those chance encounters can change things in ways both immediate and immeasurable.

Sometimes, those moments can transform us into heroes – the neighbor who charges into a burning home, the passer-by who finds a wallet and returns it, the many Santas who anonymously paid off the Christmas layaway accounts of strangers.

On Dec. 6, two more heroes were born, randomly called upon by a woman suffering a heart attack outside a Northeast Albuquerque restaurant.

As is typical in these chance meetings, no names were exchanged. The couple simply rose to the occasion, then went on with their lives.

Marge Cunningham, the woman having the heart attack, went on with hers, too.

Thanks to those strangers, she will celebrate her 82nd birthday this month.

“I have no idea who they were,” she said.

But maybe you do.

It happened on the last day of a winter storm that shut down schools and roads and sent temperatures plummeting to single-digit lows – dangerous for Cunningham, whose blood turns to jelly and appendages turn purple in the cold.

“But I was OK that day,” she said. “I stayed warm.”

She had stopped for lunch at Paisano’s on Eubank NE, where she is a regular (try the soup of the day, she says), taking precautions against the cold, such as parking close to the entrance and covering her face to avoid breathing the chilly air.

She felt fine up until the moment she walked outside after lunch, and then it was as if ice water had seeped into her veins.

“It was so cold, so bitterly cold,” she said. “I could tell I was having trouble before I got to the car.”

This was not Cunningham’s first heart attack. In August, she was helping a friend in the hospital when she doubled over in similar pain. She ended up staying longer in the hospital than her friend.

Doctors afterward found no sign of clogged arteries or heart disease. Her blood pressure was fine, her cholesterol levels perfect.

“I never smoked,” she said. “I was always a moderate drinker, at the most a glass of wine, if that. I’ve always been fantastically healthy. My body has always done what I’ve asked it to.”

And she has asked much of it. She had been a single mother raising three kids in Hartford, Conn., and growing her own court-reporting business from a kitchen-table operation to a successful company with clients around the globe.

“I remember staying up all night working and then taking kids to school in the morning with no trouble at all,” she said.

She sold the business, now called United Reporters Inc., in 2002 but has stayed on as consultant and head of advertising and proposal writing, working mostly from her home in Albuquerque, with occasional trips to Connecticut.

Cunningham also devotes her time to the Society for the Increase of the Ministry, which raises funds for the education of Episcopal seminarians. In November, she was named the 2011 Seminarian Friend of the Year.

“I keep busy,” she said. “I have too many commitments to contemplate dying.”

Yet there she was, sitting alone in her red Buick Lucerne ( driven, she’s heard, by Tiger Woods during a PGA golf tournament before his “troubles”) and facing some pretty deadly troubles of her own.

She had no cellphone, and in her panic she forgot her car was equipped with OnStar, an emergency contact service.

Ever the independent woman, Cunningham briefly contemplated driving home.

“But then I thought that was a bad idea,” she said. “So I waited for somebody to come out of the restaurant.”

Luckily, that didn’t take long.

Restaurant manager Iggy Counce had seen Cunningham leave, followed shortly afterward by a man and a woman in their mid- to late-30s. The couple, she said, were quiet and unfamiliar to her.

Minutes after they left, the man came running back in and asked her to call 911.

Counce said that by the time she and restaurant staff made it outside, the wail of an ambulance siren could already be heard and the man and the woman were in the car tending to Cunningham.

“It was neat to see strangers helping strangers,” Counce said.

Cunningham spent most of the next three days in the hospital. A month later, she is back to nearly full capacity. She wrote a letter to the Journal asking for help in finding the couple who were in the right place at the right time and did the right thing.

“I really would like to thank them,” she said. “I’ll even buy them dinner at Paisano’s.”

Because what they bought her, a perfect stranger, was more time.

UpFront is a daily front-page news and opinion column. Comment directly to Joline Gutierrez Krueger at 823-3603, jkrueger@abqjournal.com or follow her on Twitter @jolinegkg. Go to www.abqjournal.com/letters/new to submit a letter to the editor.
— This article appeared on page A1 of the Albuquerque Journal