Legacy Matters

Was a cellular memory the cause?

The persistence of cellular memory after an organ has been transplanted from one donor to another has never been explained.

There's the woman whose personality changed after receiving a kidney transplant;  she started to read Jane Austen and Dostoevsky instead of celebrity trash.  The woman who was terrified of heights who became a climber.  The lumberjack who received a female kidney and developed a passion for housework and knitting.    The very health conscious dancer who received a heart and lung transplant and became aggressive and impetuous with a passion for Kentucky fried chicken.  Or the little 8 year old girl who received a heart transplant from a murdered 10-year-old girl.   The recipient's dreams of being murdered were so traumatic she was sent to a psychiatrist who became convinced she was describing the actual circumstances of the murder.  When the details were given to the police, the killer was easily identified and arrested,

Is this another case of the persistence of cellular memory?

A man who received a heart transplant 12 years ago and later married the donor's widow died the same way the donor did, authorities said: of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Graham, who was director of the Heritage golf tournament at Sea Pines from 1979 to 1983, was on the verge of congestive heart failure in 1995 when he got a call that a heart was available in Charleston.

That heart was from Terry Cottle, 33, who had shot himself, Berkeley County Coroner Glenn Rhoad said.

Grateful for his new heart, Graham began writing letters to the donor's family to thank them. In January 1997, Graham met his donor's widow, Cheryl Cottle, then 28, in Charleston.

"I felt like I had known her for years," Graham told The (Hilton Head) Island Packet for a story in 2006. "I couldn't keep my eyes off her. I just stared."

In 2001, Graham bought a home for Cottle and her four children in Vidalia. Three years later, they were married after Graham retired from his job as a plant manager for Hargray Communications in Hilton Head.

From their previous marriages, the couple had six children and six grandchildren scattered across South Carolina and Georgia.