Townes tried to put off the hospital trip until morning, but Jeanene was insistent, asking him, “Do you want to be wheeled out on stage the rest of your life?” He finally relented, and Jeanene once again called the Calvins and asked them to stay with Will and Katie Belle and to help get Townes into the car.
It was just before nine o’clock when they reached the Summit Medical Center in Hermitage, just north of Mt. Juliet. Townes had been drinking all the way over and was in fairly good spirits when they arrived, but he was anxious. He was taken in for x-rays. When the doctor emerged he told Jeanene that Townes had an impacted left femoral neck fracture—a common variety of hip fracture—and that he would need surgery right away.
Jeanene was stunned. How could he have a broken hip for nearly two weeks and not know it?
Townes had always hated hospitals—and according to Jeanene he had come close to dying while undergoing detox at Vanderbilt just a couple of years earlier—and now he was afraid.
He made Jeanene promise that she would take him home right after the surgery. He looked helpless as they wheeled him into the operating room, turning to Jeanene and saying “Well, babe
… looks like this is it.” Jeanene went home to wait. She got a call at around two-thirty in the morning from the doctor saying that the operation had gone well and that Townes was resting.
But when she arrived with Will and Katie Belle later in the morning, Townes was suffering delirium tremens, sweating, convulsing, and hallucinating. Jeanene spoke to a doctor, who insisted that Townes be put into alcohol detoxification and rehabilitation, saying it was the only way to save him, but she believed that Townes was too weak for that now. Even though, just the day before, Townes had himself expressed the desire to enter detox, Jeanene had come to believe that detox would kill him. Plus, she said, she had promised Townes that she would The Blue March
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take him home. She was insistent. The doctor was equally insistent in his response, advising her against removing a late-stage alcoholic from medical care so soon after a major operation, especially in his extremely fragile, unstable condition.
The doctor directed a nurse to sedate Townes, which the nurse did. Jeanene told the nurse to get the paperwork ready, she was taking Townes home, even though it was strictly against medical advice. The nurse, dismayed, tried to comfort Jeanene.
Her own father, she told her, was an alcoholic who had recently fallen and was hospitalized with a broken hip. There are many critical issues involved with medical care for an alcoholic, and the doctors know what they’re doing; he’ll be okay in the hospital, she said. Jeanene remained insistent.
She went home to get organized, again calling on the Calvins to help with the kids and with moving Townes. She filled a flask with vodka and went back to the hospital. Townes was awake, trembling badly, hallucinating. Jeanene whispered in his ear that she had a jug in the car, and that he’d be going home soon.
Townes reached out for the jug, then began frantically searching his bed for it. Telling the hospital staff that she was his wife, Jeanene signed Townes out of the hospital “AMA (Against Medical Advice).”10 They got Townes to the car, where Jeanene lifted the flask and helped Townes take a drink, “which went against everything I had been through with him all those years trying to keep him away from the bottle,” Jeanene later wrote. “It was too late for that and I had to put that dream behind me and just accept what was and love him as he was.”
By the time they got to the lake house, about a twenty-minute drive from the hospital, Townes was feeling better, though still shaky. Jim Calvin again helped get Townes into the house, where he insisted on sitting up in his wheelchair, and within an hour or so, sipping vodka the whole time, he was laughing and telling jokes. They shared a joint, and Townes seemed at ease.
When Jeanene soon realized that the only medication they had prescribed for Townes at the hospital was antibiotics—no pain
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medication—she called the doctor. Knowing that Townes had left the hospital against medical advice and that he would drink, the doctor would not prescribe pain medication, which would be dangerous mixed with alcohol; he suggested instead that they give Townes an over-the-counter analgesic. Jeanene got Townes into bed, then, with Jim and the kids staying to watch him, went with Royann to get the medication and do some gro-cery shopping. They were gone for two hours, picking up a good supply of food along with a bottle of Tylenol P.M., and Townes seemed to be feeling pretty good when they got back.
Jim and Royann went home for their New Year’s Day cabbage and black-eyed peas. Jim told Royann on the way home that one unusual thing had happened while she and Jeanene were out—that while he lightly dozed in front of a football game on TV, he heard Will calling out from Townes’ room, fearfully. “You okay?” Jim had quickly called. As Will later remembered, “I went and got Jim and I was like, ‘We need to check on dad.’” Will recalls that he was watching his father lying in bed and “his arm flew up like that [gesturing], like real sporadically, and I was like,
‘Hold on, something’s not right.… We went in there and I asked him if he was alright, and he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, I’m fine.…’”11
Jim later wondered whether Townes might have suffered some kind of convulsion or seizure, then recovered.12
Jeanene brought Townes his Tylenol, and he asked for three, saying quietly, “it’s starting to hurt pretty bad.” The kids stayed with him while she went to fix him a plate of cheese and crack-ers, grapes, sliced apples, and roast beef, food that he could eat without having to use a knife and fork, as his hands were still trembling badly. Bob Moore phoned, “to try to find someone home that could tell me how he was. Jeanene answered the phone, and she said, ‘Townes, it’s Bob, do you want to talk to Bob?’ And he was evidently in the process of moving out of his wheelchair and on to the bed, and he just said, ‘I am so tired.…’
Then he caught himself, he didn’t like the way it sounded, and he said, ‘… moving out of this chair and into the bed.’ But I think he meant, ‘I’m just so tired.’”
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Jeanene asked Townes if he needed anything else. “Thanks babe, this is great,” he said. Jeanene went to call Guy and Susanna Clark, as Townes had asked her to, to let them know he was doing okay. According to Susanna, “She wanted to believe he was okay, but she knew. I mean, she shouldn’t have taken him out of the hospital. The doctors told her not to; everybody told her not to. But she did. I was shocked when she called to say he was at home.”
Katie Belle was with Townes, talking to him playfully, when Will asked his father if he needed anything, then went into the bathroom. “No thanks, son, I’m fine,” Townes said. Jeanene was talking on the phone to Susanna. Susanna could hear clearly when, a few minutes later, Will rushed into the room with Jeanene and said, “Mom, you better look at dad, he looks dead!”
Jeanene hurried in. She knew as soon as she saw Townes that
“his spirit was no longer in the room.”
“Jeanene said, ‘Oh, my God, oh, my God, Townes, Townes, Townes,’ and then she said, ‘Hang up, Susanna, I’ve got to call 911,” Susanna says. “I slammed the phone down.”
Meanwhile, the Calvins arrived back home. “When we got home, the phone was ringing,” Jim says. “It was Jeanene saying that he’d had a heart attack, and the medics were there, and please come right back. So we drove back like crazy. It’s hard to talk about it. We drove back there, and we seen an ambulance heading towards the hospital, but they didn’t have their lights flashing and they weren’t driving real fast, and I said, ‘Oh, man.’
And Royann, boy she just started crying.” Jeanene had called Susanna back, too. “She was crying,” according to Susanna, “and I stayed on the phone with her the whole time, until they got him in the truck. And she kept telling me, ‘Oh, the truck is out there, it’s moving slowly, it’s moving slowly.’ And I said, ‘We’ll meet you at the hospital.’ So I went and woke up Guy.”
Jeanene had tried to revive Townes, shaking him, screaming his name. She performed CPR for the fifteen minutes it took a fire–rescue team to arrive. The fireman was hesitant to perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, and Jeanene told him to
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do chest compressions while she continued mouth-to-mouth.
Paramedics arrived a few minutes later and took over the efforts, directing Jeanene to look after the children. A defibrillator brought a brief heartbeat.
“Royann stayed there with the kids, and me and Jeanene went to the hospital,” Jim Calvin recalls. “We got to the emergency room, and we was maybe fifteen minutes behind them or something. And this one doctor comes in this room, and boy he was just real upset. He was mad. He said to Jeanene, ‘What the hell were you doing? What were you thinking when you took him out of this hospital?’ And this other doctor just grabbed him and jerked him out of the room. And he says, ‘Unfortunately, Mr. Van Zandt did not survive.’”
When Guy and Susanna arrived, a nurse took them to the room, where they found Jeanene, who said simply, “He didn’t make it.”
Back at home, Katie Belle explained to Royann that “Daddy had a fight with his heart.”
In the emergency room at Summit, Susanna Clark immediately asked to see the doctor who had attended to Townes. As she recalls, “The doctor came in, and I said, ‘What happened?’ And he said, ‘He never should have left the hospital. It’s as simple as that.’ Think about it. He had all those drugs from the hospital still in him, then she’d given him vodka, then the nurse says to get him Tylenol P.M., and Jeanene told me that he took four of them. And damn, you know, he just laid back. Jeanene said that he had his hand on his chest and was just very peaceful. There wasn’t a peep out of him. He just laid back.”
The autopsy report states that “The patient died of a cardiac arrhythmia. The manner of death is natural.” In fact, “cardiac arrhythmia,” which is a disturbance or irregularity in the heartbeat, cannot reliably be diagnosed post-mortem—it is an effect, not a cause. The term is often used by medical examiners as a catch-all phrase when no cause of death is immediately evident.
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There was no “heart attack,” as such; the autopsy cites a “normal” heart, with no indication of significant coronary disease.13
On the summary page of the autopsy report, “myocardial ischemia”—constriction of the coronary arteries and deprivation of oxygen to the heart—is listed as the second cause of death, though this condition does not show up in the body of the report. Myocardial ischemia is another commonly cited cause of death on death certificates, and ischemia and arrhythmia are very frequently cited together when no other clear cause of death can be determined. These kinds of deaths occur most often outside hospital settings, since patients being monitored in hospitals are normally defibrillated at the first sign of a cardiac arrhythmia, and saved. There was no diagnosis of either condition either before or after Townes’ surgery, and there is nothing in the autopsy report to indicate the mechanism of ischemia.14
The toxicology report revealed the presence of diphenhydramine (likely from the Tylenol P.M.), promethazine and diazepam (likely from the shot administered by the nurse before he left the hospital AMA—promethazine to quell post-op nausea and diazepam to treat alcohol withdrawal), and traces of “mari-huana metabolite.” His blood alcohol level was 0.02, consistent with the reports that he had only been “sipping” in the hour before his death.15
John Townes Van Zandt signed and executed his Last Will and Testament in October of 1988. No new will was prepared between then and the time of Townes and Jeanene’s divorce in 1994, but a codicil with three alterations was added. The first alteration was to a paragraph wherein J.T. and Will would share the inheritance of any of Townes’ assets in succession of Jeanene—the new version removed J.T. and left only Will in line for inheritance. The second alteration gave more details about the intended distribution of Townes’ song copyrights, specify-ing an intent that the Songwriters Guild of America administer the copyrights. The final amendment reads, in full: “It is my
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intention that Lara Fisher receive nothing under this my Last Will and Testament.”16
Jeanene was originally named executor of Townes’ will but was precluded by law from serving in that capacity once she became Townes’ ex-wife. In September of 1997, the probate court appointed Guy Clark as executor, but he declined to serve and offered a statement to the effect that Jeanene, as the guardian of two of Townes’ “residual beneficiaries” and “primary manager of most of the deceased’s property,” should serve instead.
The court then appointed J.T. (also a residual beneficiary) as co-executor, along with Jeanene.
There was a funeral in Nashville, at Belmont Church, downtown near Music Row, “emceed” by Steve Earle and featuring eulogiz-ing and performances by Guy Clark (who joked, “I booked this gig thirty-something years ago”), Lyle Lovett, Emmylou Harris, Nanci Griffith, Mickey White, and others. Jeanene distributed a printed collection of obituaries and quotes, led off by her own statement: “Townes’ message to us was to Love and have Compassion for one another and to drink up Life both the Good and the Bad. My life is a thousand times richer and deeper for his precious words and the Love we shared.” She rounded off her collection of tributes with a discography of Townes’ work, then a handwritten pitch at the end: “More to come: 60 newly recorded songs w/guest Star Duets, Last Recordings of TVZ—2 day [
sic
] before he died w/spoken poetry and video, video, video.…”
Claudia Winterer flew in from Germany shocked with grief, attended the funeral, and stayed for some days with the Calvins afterwards. “They were planning on getting married,” Jim Calvin says of Townes and Claudia. “I think he was trying to save up some money or get another hit record where they could lay off the road for a while … get some more of the ‘Pancho and Lefty’ kind of checks coming in, and have them directed at him instead of Jeanene. He talked about it seriously. There was this donkey farm out in West Texas, a little piece of land out there by Roxy Gordon’s, and he was gonna get two females and a male, The Blue March