One minute, Horace Lewis was closing the gate on his truck at the Akron-Canton Regional Foodbank loading dock, where he’d picked up food for a ministry that helps families in need.
The next minute, he was lying flat on his back, struggling with a stranger who seemed to be intent on holding him down.
Lewis, 87, has no idea how much time passed.
“It could have been a couple of days or a couple of weeks,” Lewis said.
Only after he realized that the stranger he was fighting was a medical professional and that he was lying in a hospital bed did he calm down enough to hear the story of his death and revival.
Now back at home in his Cuyahoga Falls apartment after being released from hospice care, Lewis said he doesn’t dwell much on why the good lord didn’t take him.
“People visiting me at the hospital kept saying, ‘You died and came back,’ ” Lewis said, to which the restless senior would quip: “Whatever. When can I get out of here?”
But his appreciation is deep for the employees and volunteers at the food bank, who moved swiftly after his collapse to apply the CPR training they had only ever used on mannequins.
“As far as I’m concerned, I should be going down there every day to thank them,” Lewis said.
Three months ago, Lewis was at the food bank filling an order for Bridging the Gap Ministries. The church mostly works with refugees and immigrants in Akron’s international North Hill neighborhood.
He knows what it’s like to need a helping hand. He was born in Cleveland and grew up on the streets, he said, a life filled with drug addiction, jail time, poverty and homelessness.
About six or seven years ago, long after he’d become sober, retired from truck driving and settled into a Cuyahoga Falls neighborhood, his brother James asked him to help out at Bridging the Gap.
Lewis, already past his 80th birthday, was a reluctant volunteer.
“I did it for my brother, and because the church was giving us food. And I needed something to do. I was too old to work,” Lewis said.
“Before I knew it, I was going twice a week,” he said. “I’m not a church person, but I kept doing it because there was no one else to do it and it needed to be done.”
Mary Michel, executive pastor of Bridging the Gap, still chuckles when she recalls the day she mentioned needing more men volunteers, and Jim Lewis said he’d start bringing his older brother to help out.
“Jim was in his 70s. When he said ‘older brother,’ I thought, ‘Oh boy,’ ” Michel said.
But Horace was a fit octogenarian who rode his bike all over town, and he soon became almost indispensable, taking it upon himself to learn the ordering system at the food bank and making sure the ministry received exactly what it needed to keep 200 people in groceries each week.
Lewis became a familiar face at the food bank. The employees already new him well when he arrived for a pickup just after 10 a.m. Feb. 1.
After the last food box was loaded onto his truck, Lewis closed the gate.
That’s where his memory of that day ends.
For others, that’s where their memory begins.
The staff saw Lewis fall and ran to him. One worker shouted “Code Blue!” — an order that echoed through offices and down hallways and filled the cafeteria and lobby. Food bank President Dan Flowers pulled the automated external defibrillator from the conference room wall and raced to the scene at the dock.
It was the first time anyone at the food bank had used the machine, but when no one could find a pulse on Lewis, the decision to use it came easy.
One employee exposed Lewis’ torso while office manager Karen Sheppard prepared the defibrillator. She attached the leads from the machine, which gave the order “Clear!” Then Sheppard applied the electric charge.
Two other people took turns compressing Lewis’ chest and breathing into his mouth, just as they had once practiced with a mannequin.
They continued the procedure until paramedics arrived and took Lewis away.
At Cleveland Clinic Akron General, doctors inserted stents in the arteries that lead to Lewis’ heart, then placed him in a medically induced coma while his body tried to repair the damage.
Still, restarting someone’s heart was one thing. Keeping an 87-year-old heart going was another matter entirely.
Church members sat with Lewis almost around the clock while he was unconscious in the intensive care unit. After he was brought out of his coma and moved to the Hospice Care Center in Copley, they followed him there, visiting daily.
Lewis knew about hospice. It’s where his mother died 17 years ago. But not once did he expect that to be his fate.
“Nobody said I was there to die, and I didn’t think I was. It never occurred to me. Every morning when I woke up, I said I wanted to go home,” Lewis said.
Then one day, they said OK.
He’d lost 35 pounds off his already thin, tall frame, but “I was walking around as good as anyone else. They’d take me to therapy, and they would have to catch up to me in the hall,” Lewis said.
Sitting on his living room sofa, Lewis talked about the future. He can’t wait to get back to volunteering. He can’t wait to ride his bike again. He can’t wait to tell his doctor he’s put on 3 pounds this week.
Meanwhile, Michel said she continues to marvel at Lewis, not only at his medical recovery, but also at his spiritual evolution.
“He came to us from a different world and a different belief system. Sometimes we wouldn’t have enough of something and I’d say, ‘God’s going to provide.’ And Horace would say: ‘Ooooookay,’ ” Michel said, mimicking Lewis’ skeptical tone.
“Then one day, he started saying ‘God would provide,’ ” Michel said. “I told him, ‘Horace, God’s opened up a part of your heart that you’ve never used before.’ ”
A heart, as it turns out, that is still beating strong.
Paula Schleis can be reached at 330-996-3741 or pschleis@thebeaconjournal.com. Follow her on Twitter at http://twitter.com/paulaschleis.