| To Stephen With Love
A wife's tribute . . "STEPHEN THOMAS ANDERSON, My Husband, born 4-6-49, died 1-27-96, is with me every day and I am still in love with him. He doesn't have a body anymore. I really miss him. It's been 2 years but I didn't notice those years. I still live in the years he was alive. It doesn't work very well, though, because people and life expect you to go on as if nothing had ever happened. I try to figure out what he wants me to do, and I have goofed most times. I know he wants me to make his web page . . . He died in VietNam and after they put the sheet over him and the nurse was taking out his IV, she noticed that the plasma in the IV was infusing. That doesn't happen when you're dead, but they had pronounced him dead, so she had to yell at the doctors to listen to her and they finally did and they put more IVs in him so he could get better.
He worked on the space shuttle and did a lot of amazing things, then in about 1990 he was going through stuff that a lot of vets go through- with pain killers- because he was still ALWAYS in pain- you could still see the hole in his back above the stitches made of wire on his abdomen- and one day we were driving south toward San Diego and he said to me "If I don't get help now I'm going to die soon" and I knew he meant it, and we put him in a rehab place and he got better. They gave him Torodol, which is an anti-inflammatory, and he injected it himself, but it was too expensive so he got pills after a while. Plus the needles were so big it was heartbreaking to know that he had to do that. The doctors didn't seem to care about helping him much- except to keep him out of pain. That didn't help him in the long run, but after that hospital stay he fought it really hard, and he won. We decided that we wouldn't do anything that we didn't want to do. He said that he had always wanted to make movies, so we dropped everything and enrolled him in a school for cinematographers. He went through that for four years. We learned a lot about the motion picture business during that time, and joined a lot of the clubs, the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, SMPTE, and others, and went to their get together, screenings, talks. He loved his life making movies with his new friends that had his same interests. He had just finished making a VietNam movie with fellow students, had just gotten into Marquis Who's Who in America , and things were finally "Happening" the way he wanted them to, and he got cancer. The government admitted that it was from agent orange(after a lot of testing and everything else). He graduated from college about a month before he died. He is my husband and I am really proud of him." Kim Anderson.
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He
was 18 years old then- just out of VietNam, with a gunshot wound in the
abdomen, and having been gutted and sewn back together in a make-shift
hospital. They re-sected his right ascending colon. They sewed
him up with wire and he still had a big hole in his back where the bullet
came out after it clipped his spinal column. There's a lot of other
stuff but that's for later. He came out of all that ok- using
a wheelchair and being in hospitals for a while. The doctors said
he wouldn't' walk again but he did. He fought so hard and he had
such inner strength. He had God with him even then. He walked
after a couple of years, then taught himself how to write software and
build computers and became a computer design engineer in mid 1970's .
