Deathly interlude interrupts year of music, but can’t stop it
Oct. 21 was the day Kathy Thomas found her husband, Jeff, face down in a box of wigs.
“I dropped dead, literally,” Jeff Thomas says.
The couple now separate their lives into before and after that day, when Jeff Thomas suffered a heart attack — “the kind they call ‘the widow maker’ because you just drop,” he says. His “incredulous” cardiologist calls him a “miracle man.”
There are expected reasons, such as medical care, why Jeff is still alive, though Kathy’s determination and the love from of a wide circle of friends certainly play a part, too.
“There was this kind of mass energy,” Kathy says of the well wishes that came Jeff ’s way.
An unexpected reason Jeff is alive today: the COVID-19 shutdown.
It was the shutdown that led the Thomases, both musicians, to don silly wigs and play daily duets on Facebook Live to entertain stir-crazy friends, a project detailed in the Orlando Sentinel and other media outlets last year.
But the shutdown also meant Kathy was home when Jeff collapsed; normally, she would have been somewhere between her teaching job at Stetson University in DeLand and rehearsal with the Bach Festival Orchestra in Winter Park. “Thank God for COVID,” Kathy says. The pair, married for 15 years, finished up their year of lighthearted online performances last week — with a new appreciation for life and love.
“It started out as way to help other people get through something,” Jeff says of their video series. “It ended up being our salvation.”