Janie

Innocence

I had the privilege of being a friend of Janie Hildt for 40 years and being her husband for 34 years. When you’ve been close to someone for that long you cease to be two distinct individuals. You sort of merge into an uber-being wherein you always know what the other is thinking and feeling. When she died I spun out of control because it was like half of me disappeared. I was in therapy for two years and had to give up drinking to save my life.

Janie was a true Southern Californian. Born in Santa Monica, as a child she would play on the construction of the “new” 405 freeway winding its way through Culver City where her family had purchased a larger house to accommodate their now three children. Janie lost the ability to produce insulin when she was only 8 years old. She grew up thinking her expected lifespan would be in her 30s. She bonded very strongly with her mother, probably because her mom had to be both parent and care giver. Janie was determined to lead a ‘normal’ happy life and do all the stuff that normal kids do. She graduated from Culver City High in 1971, was accepted at UCLA and ensconced herself at the Gama Phi Beta Sorority. Four years later she graduated pre-law and then attended West LA Law School to get a State paralegal certification. She promptly landed a high paying job in 1975 as a corporate paralegal at ARCO OIL at the tender age of 22.

ARCO had a big Federal Anti-Trust Law suite where they had to provide the federal government with copies of 10s of thousands of documents that they didn’t want to allow offsite. So they hired Xerox to bring a bunch of high volume copiers into the legal department in the ARCO towers. I was still going to school and hadn’t started my software career yet; I ran the project for Xerox and Janie ran the project for ARCO. Our initial meetings were right out of a Bogart and Bacall movie. The conversation between the two of us was full of snappy double entendres and playful flirting. I think in today’s world one or both of us would have been fired for sexual harassment. Anyway it wasn’t long before we were having lunch together and then sneaking off to local parks to make out like a couple of teen agers. We eventually got married, I became a software developer, we bought a brand new house in Ventura County, and Janie switched jobs to become the head of Human Resources at a firm in Agoura Hills.

By 2004 her Type 1 diabetes had become brittle, and we decided she should stop working. I think the next ten years were really her golden retirement years. No responsibilities and relatively good health with plenty of leisure time. We travelled the world; went to Europe three times, Alaska, Ireland, Canada, all the national parks, New York, Florida, Seattle.

Then coincident with my layoff at Amgen in 2014 her health declined precipitously. She had a heart attack and kidney failure nearly simultaneously, resulting in a quintuple bypass and dialysis. The wait time for a kidney in Southern California was 8 years, so we ventured to the Mayo Clinic in Phoenix where they speculated she could get a kidney in about a year because they could give her the kidney of a donor in their 50’s. We were traveling from California to Phoenix every month to check in with the program, and were told that post-transplant she would have frequent hospital visits to the Mayo. She wanted me to be her care-giver, so I decided not to look for another job and instead we moved to the Phoenix area.

Unfortunately, she kept ‘falling off’ the transplant-ready list because of strokes or concussions due to falls. Then on January 27, 2018 her heart just stopped while she was sitting next to me in the car. I did cpr for 8 minutes until the paramedics arrived. They tried to revive her on site and at the hospital. The doctor at the hospital told me she died instantly of ‘ventricular fibrillation.’ Not a day goes by that I don’t miss her warm, happy, loving personality. Most people that met Janie took a shine to her because she was very gregarious and sweet while at the same expressing a sharp witted humor.