Jess Khul (left) chats with Rotarian Jack Bailey who introduced the speaker.

March 30, 2010

In the fall of 2003, Jess and Mary Kuhl had a perfect life -- "the perfect family, in the perfect time, in the perfect way," Jess told Putnam Rotarians today.

But in one tragic moment, it was all gone.

They had just returned to their Winfield home with their new daughter, three-day-old Maura Rae Kuhl. Jess rocked the infant to sleep and placed her in a crib beside the bed.

In the middle of the night, Mary checked on the infant.

The child was not breathing. Mary screamed. Jess immediately began CPR, but all efforts were futile.

"You don't think about your failures," said Kuhl. "it's not a part of who you are.

"If you played football for Winfield High School, you didn't know that word. All you thought about was your successes.

"Everything happens for a reason," he said, "but I didn't believe it. That's the last thing I wanted to hear.

"As men, we're supposed to be husband, father, provider, protector. We had a nice home. I could make money. But that night I couldn't protect my family, one of the basic things I had to do as a man. I had failed."

"At that point, we had to make some decisions, and they were hard deciisions. Where do you go from here?"

And the family had to face the reality of the moment. In spite of careful planning amd good intentions, tragedy strikes and nothing will ever be the same again.

"Imagine a sculptor who sees a big piece of granite. To the normal eye, we see a big raw rock. But to the sculptor, they see a masterpiece inside. [Like the sculptor] sometimes we go through a lot of stuff to have that chipping start. Sometimes they are small chips. Sometimes they are big chunks. And we had a big chunk hit us right in the face."

And that thought gave Jess Kuhl the inspiration to write a book to help others deal with tragedy and loss.

He started to make choices. "I had to choose to stay in our marriage. It's hard to do. I wanted to get in the car and leave.

"I had to choose to continue to be a good father. We had a two-year-old who needed a daddy.

"Six years later, I know that we've been given this path that we're on."

Jess and Mary have been together twenty years now. And they now have a second son in the family -- a child they otherwise might never have known.

They have set up a charitable foundation, the Maura Rae Kuhl AED Foundation. Part of the income goes to the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, and part goes to place automated external defibrillators (AEDs) in schools.

The devices already have been placed in two Putnam schools. In case of a heart stoppage, said Kuhl, "they'll receive the shock they need within the five-minute time frame that it has to happen.

"We hope we never have to use them," he said. "We hope they will be $2,000 paperweights."

But, he said, there may be more than 100 children in local schools who unknowingly have the same potentially fatal heart condition that took the life of their infant daughter six years ago. And perhaps other children will live because of the response of a Winfield couple to that loss.