The head of California’s 39th largest corporation was in full diabetic shock. His blood sugar was the second highest the doctors at Marin General had ever seen. His kidneys had shut down. He was running a 105-degree fever from a systemic infection. He was in a coma.
Outside the ICU, the corridor was packed with family, friends, managers, reporters. And the Hell’s Angels.
Only the patient’s wife was permitted inside. “His heart stopped,” she would later say. ”He died. The hospital didn’t want anyone to know this, but he died. They had to resuscitate him.”
Even if her husband survived, she’d been told he might be brain-damaged and unable to walk again.
While the doctors administered more Demerol, she watched in horror as his leviathan frame convulsed on the gurney.
“My main experience,” the 44-year-old Jerry Garcia (pictured left in 1988) would later reveal, “was one of furious activity and tremendous struggle in a sort of futuristic spaceship vehicle with insectoid presences … big beetles rushing into tubes.”
At last his eyes opened to see the breathless crowd at his bedside. “Why are you looking at me?” he whispered to his speechless wife, Mountain Girl. “I’m not Beethoven. I’m not dead.”
“He was grateful to be alive,” said David Nelson, his bandmate in the New Riders of the Purple Sage. “For him, it was the second time. The first was the car accident in Palo Alto.”
That tragedy had occurred 25 years before. His best friend, Paul Speegle, the driver, was killed instantly; Jerry, his passenger, had miraculously survived with only a broken collarbone.
“I was a changed person,” he said. “It [the crash] was cosmic … It was where my life began. Before then I was always living at less than capacity. I was idling. That was the slingshot for the rest of my life.”
Several years later, he founded the Grateful Dead. The guitarist was no stranger to the reaper. At the age of five, he had watched his father drown. Not long after the formation of the band, his mother drove off a cliff.
Now, with his miraculous 1986 recovery from the diabetic coma, he was a Lazarus. “The doctors said they’d never seen anybody as sick who wasn’t dead,” he recalled. “I really felt that the fans put life into me.”
He had to learn to walk, talk, and play guitar again.
Five months later, he and the Dead were back on the road. “Garcia’s return was greeted as a veritable Second Coming by his fans,” wrote his biographer, Blair Jackson.
At the group’s debut comeback performance at the Oakland Coliseum, the second song Jerry sang was new to the Dead repertoire – a gospel rendition of Dylan’s “Forever Young,” which was greeted by deafening cheers. Adding levity to the resurrection, the Dead cut a live video featuring life-sized skeleton puppets of each band member, which dissolved into their real selves for the climax.
