In many ways, this story is about a photograph.
The two women in this particular picture are regarding the lens with smiles and dancing eyes. It’s warm, and hardly feels posed. Look down, though, almost out of the frame, to see the real magic.
Their hands, intertwined.
They may not have realized they were doing it, even, threading their fingers like that.
Family dynamics can make for an interesting dance. Mothers and daughters may love one another, but that doesn’t mean they have to like each other.
This mother and daughter had both, however, in surplus. Say hello to Elizabeth and Claire LaPlante.
At the time of that photograph, Elizabeth was happy Claire was forging her own way, with her freshman college classes (engineering) and first serious boyfriend.
Sure, she’d get a little wistful over the fact her baby girl and only child was growing up, but hey, that’s how it’s supposed to go.
And Claire? Well, she’d gather every moment she could with her mom during this exciting new transition — even if that just meant coffee and a quick chat in the kitchen every other weekend.
Jon LaPlante, Elizabeth’s husband and Claire’s dad, used to shake his head and marvel at the wonder of it all.
“I was the luckiest man in the world,” he said. “And I knew it.”
Just a few months later, after Claire finally gave out in her hospital room, and after Jon and Elizabeth were both hollowed and sandblasted by grief, and after Elizabeth stopped smiling, and after Jon just didn’t know what to do … those thoughts of luck kept circling back, in the way of a taunting bully in the schoolyard.
And it was a wire brush across his raw psyche.
Sam Merandi’s spine went as taut as teakwood that June evening two years ago when the call came in from Jon’s cellphone.
The voice on the other end belonged to a Taylor County sheriff’s deputy.
“Please don’t tell me she killed herself,” the longtime friend of the LaPlante family said to the officer.
Slow-motion agony — at top speed
During Finals Week in December 2019, Claire started complaining of a sore throat. She was tired, too.
Her symptoms worsened. Strep throat was the initial diagnosis. Then, mononucleosis. On the day after Christmas, she went in the hospital, and the doctors said then it was pneumonia.
She ended up in intensive care and her parents could only watch, as their daughter spiraled down.
Jon was a radiologist and Elizabeth was an X-ray technician — that’s how they met at Grafton City Hospital — so they both had medical backgrounds.
Still, neither had seen anything quite like this.
The ventilator didn’t work.
Claire’s lungs were horribly damaged and her other organs began failing.
In desperation, she was life-flighted from Morgantown to Cincinnati Children’s Hospital in neighboring Ohio.
It was slow-motion agony at top speed. Jon and Elizabeth slept two-to-three hours a night, tops, as they kept vigil.
As it turned out, Claire was suffering from an overwhelming adenovirus infection of her respiratory system.
Adenoviruses are an umbrella of common maladies from pink eye to diarrhea, and in her case, it was a clinically, cruelly perfect viral storm that brought her down.
She slipped away Feb. 26, 2020. She was just 18 years old.
Jon, whose dad was renowned Morgantown physician Eugene LaPlante, gamely tried to get back into the arena. He was on-staff at Fairmont-based Radiological Physician Associates, where Merandi was a senior administrator.
He was seeing a psychiatrist, with mixed results. Elizabeth wasn’t seeing anyone. She was snappish and emotionally bowed under by the depression.
Jon and Sam both have slightly different memories of June 19, 2020. Sam thinks Jon got a phone call from Elizabeth — and Jon remembers it as a text: I love you very much.
They lived on 120 acres in north-central West Virginia. Their house was fortified by security cameras.
Jon had been out that day, and when he got that message, a grim intuition set in. They never professed their love via telephone or text. It was just one of those marriage things for them.
He raced back home, but it was too late. He found her. She had stared into a lens one final time.
In full view of one of those security cameras, and so as not to implicate her husband, she picked up the gun.
After that, he just remembers all those people in that house, and he was trying to show them the door.
‘I don’t care’
“My plan was to kill myself after everybody left,” he remembered, “but they wouldn’t leave.”
Merandi, who years before had moved to Columbus, Ohio, where his daughter and grandchildren live, called his friend every day. Hourly, even.
The best friend had some grim intuition, too. He called Jon’s sister, who had flown in from California.
He called Jon’s psychiatrist — “Listen, he’s gonna kill himself.”
An appointment, and a therapy was arranged. Get him here … now.
“Hey, Jon, let’s get in the car and see your doctor,” his sister said. “You want to do that?”
“I don’t care.”
“People want to help you.”
“I don’t care.”
On one level he was appreciative. But he’d run out of fight.
“Suicide is something you arrive at,” he said.
“Everything hurt. I really didn’t care anymore, but I got in that car.”
Then came the ketamine.
Getting to work
Ketamine is a limited, intravenous therapy that was approved by the Food and Drug Administration the year before.
At that appointment, Jon received his first dose. It’s not “happy juice” — but it is a fast-acting anti-depressant.
Treatment-wise, it’s not an end unto itself, but it has been medically proven to put the brakes on racing suicidal thoughts. It buys time.
For Jon, going back and forth to the regimented injections that were just a part of his sanctioned therapy, it was like the mourning shroud was being lifted by degrees.
“I could function again,” he said.
And, he could care again. He could listen to Sam, who had an idea.
“Do you want to see anyone else go through what you’ve been through?”
“No. God, no.”
Merandi proposed a far-reaching foundation, for suicide prevention and adenovirus research. It would also award an engineering scholarship in Claire’s name.
“If you don’t do this,” Merandi said, “that means that two beautiful women died in vain.”
So, the Elizabeth and Claire Foundation was born. Visit https://laplantefoundation.com/ to find out more and to see details on its inaugural 5-K Run, set for April 30.
Luck (and other states of being)
These days, LaPlante spends most of his time in Wyoming, in Centennial, a little town just down the road from Laramie.
He and Elizabeth traveled widely when their daughter was growing up. Wyoming, with its visual contrasts of towering peaks and as-far-as-the-eye-can-see plains, was where they planned on retiring.
Their house in West Virginia, he said, had too many ghosts of memories. He and Elizabeth practically built the place in Wyoming — like her husband, she was a DIY disciple who didn’t mind getting her hands dirty.
They didn’t get to spend that much time there. The memories there, he can live with.
LaPlante has been known to put in 12-hour days working for the fledgling foundation. He’s its medical director.
He plans on working with halfway houses, the corrections system, VA hospitals and everywhere else, where people are in need.
“We’re losing too many people to suicide,” he said. “I know what it’s like to stare over the abyss.”
He also knows what it’s like to love and be loved — and he really knows that “luck” can be a chronic condition, with its own dictionary of definitions. One that warrants its own photo album.
“I was lucky because I had people watching out for me. I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for Sam. I’m not gonna waste that. My mission in life is this foundation.”
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