FORT WAYNE – Climb on a motorcycle and head west down Cook Road and it seems the whole world lies in front of you.
The gray pavement across flat fields of beans draws you farther west toward more empty roads just waiting for you to open the bike up a little, to let the Honda’s V-45 Magna engine sing as you watch fences begin and end, fields roll and houses come and go, houses like the one you left a few minutes ago where your wife and two sons are waiting for you.
You’ll turn around in a few minutes and head back, but for now the road is yours, and on a bike you feel every ripple of the pavement, smell the moist earth in the cornfield after it rains and feel the cool breeze on your skin.
Just a few minutes more, you think. Just another mile.
Ask Sonja Tittman when she met her husband, Dave, and without hesitation she’ll tell you it was Aug. 18, 1984. They were both in their early 20s, both loved old cars, and he had a ’67 Olds Cutlass convertible. Soon they were riding around town in it, just having fun with the top down.
Two years later, they were married, and soon they had sons Sean, then Craig.
Dave had an associate degree in computer programming from IPFW but was a mechanic. His dad had given him an acre of land just off Cook Road, west of Lima’s big-box stores, strip malls and traffic. It was surrounded by trees and looked across the road to farm fields, an oasis a half-mile from everything you need and a million miles from everything you don’t.
“It’s peaceful out there,” Sonja said.
In 2000, they planted a dream there, putting in a basement, then installing a trailer on top. They added the acre next door; the old cars they loved came and went, and the boys turned into young men.
“We had all kinds of adventures,” Sonja said. “We tried to raise ’em the best we could. We gave them a Christian education, and we taught them to be gentlemen. Nowadays it seems like not everybody cares about that.”
They did some traveling, along the East Coast mostly. One time, in South Carolina for a wedding, they spent the day at Myrtle Beach, playing in the ocean, Sean on Dave’s shoulders, spotting jellyfish.
At home, Dave worked on cars for a living. His computer programming degree had only led to jobs where his skills were a dime a dozen and paid more in stress than in dollars. Eventually he went back to school and got an electrical technology degree from Ivy Tech.
In 2005, with his new degree, he became an electrician and gave the profession all he had. Soon he was teaching classes for electrician apprentices at the union local.
“He went all in,” Sonja said. “He was dedicated to his work and his family. He did the best he could.”
Through it all, there was his love of motorcycles, a love he had since riding mini bikes as a kid. Many nights after work, after dinner when things had settled down, he would put on his helmet and ride. He’d ride wherever the road took him, enjoying the feeling of moving across the landscape before turning around and heading home to the trailer tucked into the clearing in the woods.
It’s July 2, 2009, and Sean, then 18, was looking out the window when he saw a swarm of emergency vehicles heading west down Cook Road with full lights and sirens. It was unusual enough that Sonja and the boys got in the car and headed out to see what had happened.
As they approached the scene, Sonja felt a “dark, heavy feeling” that something was wrong, terribly wrong. Then she recognized Dave’s leather jacket in the road. “I said, ‘Please, God, don’t let it be him,’ ” Sonja recalled.
Then she saw Dave’s helmet. And his gloves.
“As they loaded him into the back of the ambulance, it felt like all the blood had drained from me,” she said.
The Parkview Trauma Center was a blur of questions, waiting and prayers.
“I just remember sitting in the waiting room praying, ‘God, make him want to live. Give him your strength,’ ” Sonja said.
His injuries were severe: blunt-force head trauma, a broken collarbone, fractured ribs and a bruised lung. But doctors were optimistic – with a little luck and a lot of time and work, he should make a full recovery.
The next months were a blur of surgeries, intensive care and a move to Riverbend Nursing Home. After spending more than a month in a coma, Dave had to relearn how to talk and move. It was Thanksgiving Day when, for the first time since the accident, he said, “I love you,” struggling for each word.
Four days later, he had a massive seizure.
Over the next year and a half, the setbacks seemed to keep happening, each one exacting a price. There were infections from staph, MRSA and C.Diff., and too many urinary infections to count. In between infections and seizures were muscle therapy to prevent atrophy and botox injections to keep his leg muscles from shaking uncontrollably.
The ’66 Thunderbird convertible and the Triumph TR6 waiting to be restored were sold for scrap.
For Sonja and the boys, it was a life of hospital and nursing home visiting hours, while learning to live without a husband and father at home.
Sundays, after attending Emmanuel Lutheran Church downtown, Sonja, the boys and Dave’s parents would all visit him at the nursing home, where Sonja would read to him – books like “The Heavenly Village,” about heaven, and “The Shack,” about a man’s encounter with God.
In April 2011, Dave developed double pneumonia and spent two weeks in the hospital.
“His body was fighting, but it was taking a toll on him,” Sonja said. “He couldn’t talk. I kept hoping he would heal from this, but it was a struggle.”
He went back to the nursing home, but on June 22, Dave apparently vomited, and with so little muscle control, it went into his lungs. The nurses did CPR until paramedics arrived, and the paramedics did CPR until they got to the hospital.
“Sean and I got there as soon as possible,” Sonja said. “The nurse told us that two minutes after she got off the phone with us he passed away.”
She looks down at the white “Life Is Precious” bracelet on her wrist, just for a moment.
“I felt nothing. I just went completely numb,” she said.
She stayed numb until she went to him and held his hand.
“Then I just completely broke down,” she said.
They would have had their 25th wedding anniversary on Sept. 20. Dave once told her that on their second date, when she greeted him with a hug, he felt an electricity pass through them both and knew then and there that she was the one.
Now, she and the boys are trying to carry on as best they can.
“You try to understand why this would happen,” Sonja said. “Sometimes I look at it like his work on Earth was finished, but I don’t know; … I don’t know.”
Counseling helps, she said, as does the brain injury support group at Parkview. But still, it’s hard not to see those country roads and think about Dave out there on his Honda, cruising into the sunset.
He was found by a passing motorist, with no indication as to why he had crashed. As best they can tell, it appears a car pulled out in front of him as he was heading east on Cook.
When he overcorrected, his foot peg caught on the edge of the pavement, throwing him from the bike on that warm summer night, just a few blocks from his trailer in the woods.
“He was almost home,” Sonja said.
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