True Love

Wayne and Barbara Dye sit together on their couch in their Harvard home. The Dye’s, both retired school teachers, have been married for 42 years and have two children. Barbara suffered a brain aneurysm last year that affected her short-term memory and left her paralyzed. Wayne has been taking care of her and their horse farm, hoping that one day her memory returns. (Photo by Danielle Guerra)

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He noticed her smile first.

They were students at Northern Illinois University nearly 44 years ago and had both gone to the ballroom for a “grubby-clothes dance.”

In other words, Wayne Dye remembers with a laugh, he wore his typical college clothes.

He saw Barbara, all 110 pounds of her at the time, and walked over.

“I asked her to dance, and that was it,” he says.

The two were married two years later.

Now 63, Wayne smiles as he remembers those days long ago when the two had all they needed in a trailer they paid $30 a month to park.

Sitting today in the dream home they built in rural Harvard, Wayne loves his wife as much and more than that day they first danced years ago.

“Barb’s been my one love,” he says, tears in his eyes. “We’ve done everything hand in hand.”

They are both retired teachers, and the couple raised two kids in Woodstock. Along the way, they touched more lives than they know.

Like many this Valentine’s Day, they’ll celebrate their love — a love those around them call inspirational.

As blessed as the Dyes have been, there’s some sadness in their story.

Barb, 62, suffered a brain aneurysm in September 2008. Given a 3-percent chance to live, she’s lucky to be alive. But she now needs the constant care of her husband. Since the aneurysm, friends and even strangers have rallied around the couple, providing rides and meals, cleaning their house, even opening a bank account to help take care of their growing medical expenses. Barb requires weekly therapy.

That is what the Dyes would be doing if it had happened to anyone else, says Jodie Scott of Harvard, Barb’s friend and former colleague. Scott is the library media specialist at Mary Endres Elementary School in Woodstock (where Barb once taught) and has known the Dyes for years.
“It’s just their love for each other that gets them through,” she says. “It’s love, and it just shows through.”

Moment to moment
Barb places her hand on Wayne’s arm as he tells the story about how they met. She looks up, smiles and says, “You’re a good dancer.”

Their marriage has lasted because they “laugh a lot,” she says in one of her sporadic moments of clarity.

“We try to make things funny even if they’re not funny,” she says.

Barb has slowly learned to walk again, with help and a walker, but she has lost much of her short-term memory. She regularly forgets her parents died a few years ago.

“You tell her, and it hurts her feelings every time,” Wayne says.

She still thinks she’s teaching and has to be reminded daily she’s not working that day.

Barb has no concept of time. She’ll wake up in the middle of the night and tell her husband, “Good morning. Let’s go shopping!”

The doctor compared her to a man who has had his leg amputated and forgets in the middle of the night. He goes to get out of bed and falls on the floor.

“Just having her is wonderful,” Wayne says, his voice trailing off. “But it’s not the same . . . She knows she can’t take care of herself and thinks she’s a burden and apologizes for it.”

Wayne has become his wife’s caregiver. She can’t be left alone.

“I’m hoping that maybe someday she’ll be able to walk, to take care of herself again,” he says. “Hopefully she’ll get better some day. She’ll probably never be the same . . . This could be a lifetime thing with us.”

It’s especially tough for the Dyes, who’ve spent their lives outdoors riding horses, skiing and traveling throughout the country in a camper with their kids and later their four grandkids. They’ve been to every state but Alaska, Wayne says, and to Disney World a dozen times.

After retirement, they bought 12 acres in Harvard. They cleared the land themselves by hand, made trails for their two horses, and in 2006, they started building their country home.

“It was her dream,” Wayne says. “We had hoped it would be 10 to 12 years before we got too old, and we’d have something to leave behind to the kids. Our plan was to give our grandkids a college fund.”

The lean years
Barb never asked for much, especially as they struggled to get by as a young couple. For the first 10 or so years of her children’s lives, she made their clothes by hand.

They would be without the money to pay the bills, and something like a refund on their telephone bill would get them through another day, a week, the year.

“I always felt divine intervention came along the way to help keep our heads above water,” Wayne says.

A physical education teacher at Northwood Elementary School for 32 years, Wayne worked two, sometimes three jobs to support his family. Barb stayed home with the kids.

“We never had a lot of money, but we certainly enjoyed ourselves,” remembers the Dye’s oldest daughter, Amy Blalock of Woodstock. The couple also has a son, David.

After the couple’s children grew, Barb went back to college, earned a degree in education and taught at several schools in McHenry County. Even after retiring, Wayne taught driver’s education part time at Woodstock High School, and Barb was a substitute teacher.

That’s what she was doing the morning it happened. She had gotten up to feed the neighbor’s horses and her own about 5 a.m., then headed to Prairiewood Elementary School in Woodstock. About 9:30 a.m., she grabbed her head and collapsed in front of the class. Fellow teachers pulled out a defibrillator. Barb, ironically, had been the one to post the device’s directions next to it.

A Crystal Lake ambulance crew happened to be driving by and heard the call. Within minutes, Barb was in a helicopter on her way to the University of Illinois Medical Center, where she underwent a four-hour surgery.

She was unconscious for 30 days. Either Wayne or one of her two children slept in the room with her every night.

“She never was alone,” Wayne says.

Attitude
While she remained in the coma, a doctor asked about her lifestyle before the aneurysm.

“Well,” Amy remembers the family saying, “she water skied, canoed, rode bikes, went on horse rides, cut down trees, moved rocks, built fences . . .”

A large doctor with a deep voice kept asking Barb to put her thumb up if she could hear him. Eyes closed, she stuck the thumb in his face as if she was annoyed by the demand.

“I thought, ‘She’s in there,’” Wayne remembers.

Sitting next to him as he tells the story, Barb added, “I didn’t mean to be nasty.”

Comments like these and others provide glimpses of the “old Barb,” family and friends say. She hasn’t lost her sense of humor.

Amy remembers the time years ago when her father got in trouble with Barb for buying a chocolate bar the family couldn’t afford.

“When you kissed me,” Barb says, “I could smell the chocolate.”

Barb’s rarely without a smile for visitors, but she has always been that way. Amy pulls out a quotation about “Attitude” that has hung on her parents’ refrigerator since she was a child.

“I am convinced that life is 10 percent what happens to me and 90 percent how I react to it,” the quote reads. “And so it is with you . . . we are in charge of our attitudes.”

She looks over at her parents cuddled on a nearby chair.

“That’s how I’ve been raised,” she says, tears in her eyes.

• A Barb Dye's Healthcare Fund bank account has been set up by friends of the Dyes at Amcore Bank in Woodstock.