On a weekday morning earlier this month, Colette Stimmell, communications director for Michigan's 1,714-bed Beaumont Health System, was facing a typical, just-this-side-of-chaos day: Up at 5:30 a.m. to make a 7:30 a.m. meeting, followed by a steady stream of appointments, phone calls, and the usual workplace brush fires.
But today there was an extra errand on her BlackBerry calendar: This was the day she would find time to pick up the family Christmas tree.
There are plenty of suburban tree lots near her home in Novi that Colette could have stopped at on her way home from the hospital in Royal Oak. Instead, leaving work early, she headed in the opposite direction -- to downtown Detroit, to see the man who has sold her a Christmas tree for almost every one of the past 17 years.
"A lot of the trees you see around here could be cut in August in Georgia for all we know," she says. "But Chet has nice trees. Michigan-grown. And he only cuts the best."
Chet Szuber grows Christmas trees on his 400-acre farm up north near Harrisville. Every November he packs up a selection and drives down to Eastern Market, where he sets up his wares and provides top-drawer service for his customers, drilling center holes in tree trunks, bundling them carefully in nylon netting, and offering a special tree stand that, say believers, has no equal.
"A few years ago, Chet tried to sell me one, and I said, 'But I already have a tree stand,'" Colette recalls. "He said, 'Not like this one, you don't.' So I bought one. And it's the only one we've ever had that makes the tree stand perfectly straight."
Still, it isn't just the quality of his product that draws Colette back to Chet's urban tree lot, year after year. "Chet's a great guy -- down to earth, great sense of humor," she says. "I guess you could say he has a good heart."
That last point is something that could be taken in more ways than one.
Colette's friendship with Chet dates back to August, 1994 when, one day on the job at Beaumont, she received a page from a nursing administrator. "She said, 'Something pretty amazing is happening here, and you need to know about it.'"
It seemed that a 58-year-old man on the waiting list for a heart transplant was finally going to get one, because a suitable donor -- the young female victim of a terrible car crash in Tennessee -- had just been found. The prospective recipient was Chet Szuber. And the potential donor was his own 22-year-old daughter.
Colette deals with crises and emergencies at work on a routine basis, but this time, "I thought, 'Wow.' I'd really never heard of anything like that before."
Patti Szuber, the youngest of Chet's six children, had sustained fatal head injuries in the accident, and was a perfect match. Her father, given the circumstances, could be jumped to the top of the waiting list. But at first, Chet, who suffered his first heart attack at 36, had undergone three bypasses since, and whose heart was now in end-stage organ failure, didn't want any part of such a thing.
"I couldn't say 'No' fast enough," he remembers. "I thought, 'You're not supposed to bury your own children. And you sure aren't supposed to take their organs.'" But his family reminded him of a simple truth: If Patti wasn't going to use it any longer, giving her heart to her dad was what she would have wanted.
Colette met Chet's family in a quiet lounge area at the hospital. "They were grieving. There were a lot of conflicting emotions," she says. "A mother had just lost her daughter, and the siblings had just lost their sister. Patti was the baby of the family. And because of her loss, their father was going to live."
The next 24 hours were a blur. Chet went into surgery, received Patti's heart, and was given an excellent prognosis. Several days later at a news conference, says Colette, "One of her brothers called Patti 'the happiest little angel in Heaven.'"
Throughout the Szubers' ordeal, Colette stood by them, offering advice and helping them navigate a deluge of media requests. When the family decided to do a story with John Quiñones of ABC's PrimeTime Live, one segment showed Chet watching a realtime ultrasound of his daughter's heart, now beating in his chest. "It was pretty emotional," she says.
All these years later, on a clear, cold day, Colette parks her Ford Escape at Eastern Market and heads straight for a kiosk of evergreen ropes, wreaths and centerpieces beneath a sign that reads: "Huron View Tree Farms."
"Is Chet in the trailer?" she calls to one of his helpers on the lot.
"No, I think he's around the corner."
At just that moment Chet himself -- a tall, robust man -- appears, and the two hug like old, familiar friends.
"How's the family?" Colette asks. "And how about you? Is Patti's heart still working for ya?"
Together, the two meander through a fresh-scented thicket of spruce, pines and balsams, Chet carrying a pole to measure heights, Colette pretending to weigh her options. "A long time ago, Chet told me, 'You want to get a Fraser fir. They hold their needles longer, and they're just a beautiful tree," she says. "That's what he recommended, so that's what I get."
This year Colette settles on a 9-footer, and Chet's crew bundles and ropes it to the roof of her SUV. She and Chet make a little more small talk, exchange another hug, and say their goodbyes. "Merry Christmas," she says. And he wishes it back.
Chet Szuber has never had a moment's regret about accepting his daughter's final gift. When he first woke from the transplant surgery in 1994, "I felt great. And I've felt great every day since. Whenever anyone asks how I feel, I say, 'Like a million bucks -- even after taxes.'" Over the years he has become a tireless public advocate for organ donation, often speaking on the issue, and carrying business cards that read, "Recycle yourself. Be an organ donor." Says Colette, "It really has become his cause."
There are still plenty of outward reminders of his daughter in Chet's life: the small "Patti's Park" memorial garden up at the Harrisville farm; and the new replacement for her former pet, Patcat, who died this year at age 18. "Two kittens who were littermates," says Colette. "Because Chet didn't have the heart to break them up."
Of course there is another, ever-present reminder, too. "How would you feel if you lost a child that you created," says Colette, "and if a piece of that child is inside you, and because of that, your life has been saved?"
"It's not just about the tree," she admits. "I could get a tree anywhere."
On Christmas morning, the Stimmell family's contemporary home was decked in Colette's collection of holiday decorations, big enough to fill two walk-in closets upstairs and another in the basement. "My husband Tom has put his foot down," she says. "I can buy more Christmas stuff if I want to. I just can't bring it in the house."
But it's not her battery-powered skiing reindeer, or even the Elvis Santa, that take center stage in the cathedral-ceilinged living room. That honor is reserved for what the two grown Stimmell sons call "The Szuber Tree," standing in splendor, its sturdy, upturned branches festooned with cherished ornaments and old-fashioned lights. Says Colette: "I guess you could say that having a tree from Chet has become a tradition."
The tree represents all things Christmas -- gifts and family and some time off work. But it surely stands for something else as well. It is a reminder of the bonds that form between people and bind them together -- sometimes in ways that can be seen, and sometimes in ways less obvious, but as steady and true as the beating of a human heart.
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