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January 9, 2009

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Clint Stueve

Clint Stueve didn’t let much interrupt his flow. Whether it was casual conversation or a life-threatening injury, he seemed to simply deal with it and go on. His death on Nov. 15 hasn’t interrupted his essence and what he left behind for family and friends.

His wife of 24 years, Cindy Stueve, talked the day after his funeral about his zest for living. Stueve was critically injured while he was team roping during a Beef Fest rodeo in August 1995. He suffered brain damage and was not expected to live 24 hours; if he lived, doctors expected him to do so in a vegetative state.

He surprised everyone by surviving another 12 years, with his body intact and functioning without a ventilator, tubes and catheters.

“He sustained himself after the head injury,” she said. “He survived it. He just never came out of it.”

Clint needed to be hospitalized for treatment of pneumonia three times, the third being the hospitalization this month, and vitamins were usually the only medications given to him.

“He still had good muscle tone,” Cindy Stueve said. “He never looked sick.”

The muscle tone from his active life was perpetuated by care from the immediate family, as well as the siblings and friends who volunteered to help. All were essential to Clint’s care because, with no medical-needs diagnosis, he was not eligible to receive home help from outside entities and medical professionals.

It seemed an extension of the care and concern that the Stueves experienced even in the intensive care unit at the hospital, when Clint first was injured. It was not unusual for 100 to 150 people to be at the hospital, waiting to take a few seconds to visit him during the 15 minutes he was allowed visitors each hour. The few who were allowed in his room that hour would leave, and those who did not make it during that time period stayed another hour to get their turns.

An ICU nurse asked Cindy Stueve about the large crowd that gathered.

“The nurse said, ‘Well, we thought we were invaded by the cowboy mafia,’” Cindy Stueve recalled.

The concern continued when they came home.

Before the family was able to purchase a bed that turned Clint automatically, Cindy Stueve and whatever help was available turned him manually at regular intervals, both day and night. Where she previously had needed to “clap” his chest and back, the bed could do the back-clapping for her while she did the front. They got him up to exercise in a walking stand that could be cranked from a sitting position to a standing position.

“We didn’t have the advantage of having any outside help. It was the family. ...His brothers would come help stand him up, help take care of him,” Cindy Stueve said. “They loved Clint, too. Everybody did. ... He was that kind of person who just drew a lot of friends.”

The help the family received throughout the 12 years was a bit amazing to her; not only did people come in to physically help, they held fundraising events in his honor and made sure that holidays were taken care of throughout Clint’s incapacitation.

“To us, that was overwhelming. They did it every year, year after year,” she said. “The full 12 years, the whole time.”

Doctors and nurses in Emporia and Wichita, equipment suppliers, and other involved in the medical field were almost equally dedicated to her husband, she said.

It was perhaps not an easy time for anyone, but taking care of Clint was not something Cindy Stueve was ready to give up. She got by through “faith and faith alone. There’s really no other way to explain it.”

Being responsible for her husband’s existence didn’t feel like work. She looked at life with Clint as a series of blessings for the full 24 years of marriage.

“I never felt like it was a burden,” she said of the care she gave him. “It always felt like an honor.”

She had expected him to live on and prayed that at some point, his brain might heal itself.

“My plan was for him to wake up,” she said.

In the alternative, she had made plans for him to be taken care of, if something happened to her.

“I didn’t have this plan made,” she said of his passing.

She enjoyed the subtle communications between her and her husband. Though brain damage prevented him from standing and walking on his own and carrying on conversations, his personality came through continually.

“Like when I’d stand him up, he would help me; he’d pat my back like, ‘I know you can do this.’ He trusted me,” Cindy Stueve said.

He had difficulty responding to questions because “by the time it took his brain to process it, he had such a short-term memory he had forgotten the question,” she said. “He seemed to respond to children at a higher level.”

The grandchildren, who all were born after his injury, seemed to bring him special joy. One of their grandsons had a habit of crawling up on the bed with Clint and carrying on conversations.

Cindy Stueve recalled him asking her, “‘Did you hear what Papaw said?... Aren’t you listening?’ It was like a communication they had by themselves. They talked to him like he was totally there. He would rub them or he would pinch them.

“He had a real childlike demeanor and enjoyed children and sounds and laughter. He would shake the rail (of his bed) if it was too quiet,” she said.

That situation seldom happened.

Sometimes his brothers would take him for a ride in the country and let him pet the horses and get a taste of the life he had so enjoyed as a hobby. His day job was as a gas worker for Westar Energy. After his death last week, a Westar employee told Clint’s niece, Lea Stueve, that they would clean out his locker; his boots and other clothing and equipment had been left there for 12 years, just in case.

Cindy Stueve initially wasn’t sure she would be able to talk about Clint’s life, until she started recounting stories about him and the joy he had spread to friends and family.

Those memories brought smiles and, occasionally, laughter. She laughed when she talked about Clint and a mouse that perched on his boot as he was reading to a children’s Sunday school class at church. The children pointed out the mouse, he looked down, chose to ignore it, and went on.

“He said, like, ‘Well, it’s OK. He’s listening, too,’” Cindy Stueve said, paraphrasing what one of the children had told her. “He was so good at talking...

“That’s just what Clint was about,” she said. “Clint had a lot of stories, but everybody had a story about him, too.”

Some of them told those stories during the funeral service and at gatherings before and after. She’d put photographs on display, and a poem written by Clint’s favorite team-roping partner, Randy Fisher.

Fisher wrote the poem soon the accident, when Clint remained in a coma. Its theme was “Wake up, Clint,” but there was teasing within the stanzas.

“I sure miss your cheesy smile,

your eyes, forced to always kinda squint,

let’s see you show those baby-blues,

come on, it’s time to wake-up Clint.”

Another stanza, to an outsider, read innocuously enough:

“If both our names are on His list

won’t matter who’s called up first,

we’ll have plenty time to head-n’-heel

all those bucket calves you nursed.”

The true meaning was a gentle ribbing of his friend and the problems he had trying to raise motherless calves.

“In other words, that meant he had bucket calves and they always died,” Cindy Stueve explained, chuckling at the memory of her husband trying hard to raise them into full-grown cattle. The calf supply created by Clint would precede both of the men into Heaven.

It took 12 years for Clint Stueve to make that transition and, while he could not speak to his children during that time — they were 17, 9, and 7 when the accident happened — he managed to impact their lives through the responses of family and others.

Their son, Colton, who inherited his father’s rodeo gene, continually meets people who ask if he knows Clint Stueve.

“No matter where he goes, people will ask, ‘Do you know Clint Stueve? He was my best friend,’” Cindy Stueve said. “That’s just how he was, you met him and talked to him an hour and you felt like he was your best friend. It’s why you can sit here and laugh and feel so good about knowing a man who touched so many lives. ...

“One of my daughters told me she doesn’t think she would be the person she is without the experience of helping take care of her father. She feels like she’s strong, has a lot of strength and her faith.”

Lea Stueve agreed.

“I think everybody was tested,” she said. “... That’s how you find out if your faith is real, if it’s tested.

“He was such a good Christian man and I think that carried on in his children.”

Lea Stueve also sees her aunt Cindy Stueve as an example to others.

“She has really showed what honoring your marriage vows is — in sickness and in health part,” she said. “She’s such an inspiration for many of us.”

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