'89 Encores : On this last day of the year, and of the 1980s, the View staff pays a return visit to some of the people who made news in 1989. : Waiting for Open Door

‘89 Encores : On this last day of the year, and of the 1980s, the View staff pays a return visit to some of the people who made news in 1989. : Waiting for Open Door

By BETTIJANE LEVINE

Dec. 31, 1989 12 AM PT

When a Times reporter phoned Doris Bartlett to pursue the story of her husband’s May 5 death, she was reluctant to discuss it.

Mired in grief, rage and fear, she was not sure how to cope with or get past her emotions. Her husband had died--after 39 married years and before the joys of retirement--while awaiting an insurance company’s approval of his request for a pacemaker.

But Bartlett didn’t decide to talk about her husband’s death “until I talked with my minister and my husband’s doctors and they, too, insisted I share my story.”

Looking back at her decision, she now says the story, which ran Aug. 15, changed the course of her grief and perhaps her life.

From the day the article appeared, she began receiving friendship calls and letters from acquaintances who hadn’t known her husband had died. And from people who looked her up in the phone book to tell her their similar experiences. And from one friend who said he had a sleeping disorder and needed oxygen therapy in his home, but that his insurance wouldn’t provide it. “He told me he was afraid he’d die in the middle of the night. Then he read the article and got the courage to call (his carrier) and complain again. The man there had just read the article, too, and he said, ‘Don’t worry, within two hours you will have the oxygen you need and we’ll keep it coming to you,’ ” Bartlett says.

Thus, Bartlett believes her candor has helped save at least one life. And then, she says, the television stations started to call for interviews.

Bartlett says she became an activist almost without realizing it. But she decided not to sue her insurance company because “I am 67 years old and it would be in the courts for five to seven years, and I do not want to spend my remaining time that way. There is no amount of money that will bring my husband back.”

Now, she says, she is “waiting for God to open another door. I have to find something to do that would be more beneficial than sitting in a courtroom.

“And just this week,” she adds, “I decided I’ve become a whole person again. I’m back to being me. I feel I can do almost anything now, if I could manage to get through all of this.”