When a Marquette alumnus taking perhaps his last breaths met a Marquette nurse who knew exactly what kind of care he needed, their prayers showed how much they did to save each other.
By Stephen Filmanowicz
The first conversation with God took place in an intensive care unit for patients with COVID-19. It’s a place of strict isolation — no family or friends. Nurses cover themselves in protective suits to enter patient rooms, only their eyes visible through plastic shields. Sliding glass doors whisk open and shut to let them in.
“The doors hermetically seal when they close. It’s like something out of Star Trek,” says Derek Mosley, Law ’95, the patient in Bed 19 that evening in late March. “And the doctors don’t even come in. They stand outside the glass and call you on the phone.”
Mosley is a big man — 6-foot-2 when standing. Under normal circumstances, he has a booming voice — musical in a range of bass tones. But this evening, his ample lungs were practically shut down, leaving him taking in tiny rapid sniffs from a tube sending oxygen to his nose at its maximum setting.
Before the conversation with God came one with a doctor, serious enough to occur inside the glass wall. After several days in the ICU, Mosley heard, he was at a crossroads that many seriously ill COVID-19 patients face — a point “where either your lungs get better and your blood oxygen levels rise, or you just plummet.”
Plummeting would send his brain and other organs into distress and require him to be connected to a ventilator, a point from which relatively few patients were making a comeback. “So, I really need you to stay on your stomach. I need you not to move. You need to focus on your breathing. That’s what I need you to do,” the doctor urged before departing.
The conversation shook Mosley. Before entering the hospital, he had been on a weeklong descent that made his breathing more labored and shallow, till climbing the stairs to his bedroom “felt like running a marathon,” he says. Still, when his wife, Kelly Cochrane, Law ’96, dropped him off at Froedtert Hospital in Milwaukee after that positive test, he waved goodbye and said he’d call later about getting picked up. “I thought maybe they’d give me some meds and cut me loose,” he recalls.
Now, he realized he might never come home. Watching news in the ICU — practically the only channels he could find — he’d seen bleak reports. “They were saying, ‘Three more people died in Milwaukee County. Five more people died in Milwaukee County.’ And I thought, ‘I’m going to come up on the news. I’m going to pop up. I’m going to be one of those five people.’”
Alone with his fears and an alarm warning of his blood running perilously low on oxygen, Mosley prayed, “God, help me get through this. Give me the strength to get through this.”
“Then I got to the point where I was like, ‘I don’t know if I’m gonna get through this.’ So, I came to grips with that, and it was time to worry about everybody else. I said, ‘God, please take care of my family, my loved ones.’”
His mind raced. He thought of the tax documents in an upper drawer that Kelly might never find. He thought of his teen daughters growing up without him, hoping he had taught them well and that they’d all have enough to survive. He thought of the work that remained ahead of him as municipal court judge and community leader.
But was it ahead of him? “You start thinking, ‘I’m 49,’” he says. “‘God, is this really where it all goes?’”
The man having a conversation with God that evening happened to be a particularly well-known Milwaukeean. Not as widely, or superficially, familiar as a pro athlete or TV anchor, Mosley is unusual for being thoroughly known by thousands, including 5,000 friends on Facebook, as a three-dimensional human being.
As a judge in Milwaukee’s Municipal Court, he’s in touch with people from all walks of life, many struggling with tickets, fines and warrants. He greets each as an individual, meting out justice while carving out a path that may serve as an escape route. With a legal philosophy modeled after the Jesuit phrase that spoke to him as a law student at Marquette — cura personalis or “care for the whole person” — he’s happy when he hears from former defendants. “People say, ‘You don’t remember me, but I was in your court, and I really needed this job. I had a warrant and I didn’t have the money for it, but you lifted it and I was able to get the job. I want you to know I’m still there and now I’m a manager.’”
With his fellow judges, Mosley is known for innovations such as bringing the court to shelters to hold sessions for homeless people. In his earlier years as an assistant district attorney, he was one of Milwaukee’s pioneering community prosecutors, embedded in neighborhoods and using legal resources to solve community problems — sometimes by avoiding prosecution altogether.
He’s also married hundreds of couples in civil ceremonies that draw on African folk wisdom and are remarkable for their affection.
Milwaukee County Sheriff Earnell Lucas, Arts ’00, is a longtime admirer of this body of work, having great regard for Mosley’s “compassion, grace and dignity in balancing the rights of the city and the rights of individuals.” But another thing that leaves him awestruck is Mosley on social media, sharing everything from dining finds posted with the tag #mkefoodcourt to enlightening stories told each February for Black History Month. “He can post a basic story, and within hours, hundreds, if not thousands, of people have liked or commented on his post,” Lucas says. “That’s a rare quality for an individual to connect with so many different people.”
Mosley’s most influential posts catch fire. When a Milwaukee teen drowned in swift Lake Michigan currents this summer after saving two family members, Mosley made sure his name, J’Varius Bankhead, was not easily forgotten. That post was liked or loved 2,500 times and shared 10,000 more.
Finding him expansive in his warmth, direct with his enthusiasms and concerns, people turn to Mosley as a guide, a wise leader. A South suburban Chicagoan by birth and sports affiliations, he’s come to love and embrace the city he discovered when he moved north to study law. And Milwaukee loves him back.
But in those moments in the hospital, the usual likes and shares and comments, the prayers and candle vigils of those who love him most, felt far away. In the ICU, only Derek Mosley really knew what he was enduring that night.
When her husband’s engineering career brought them to Milwaukee from Florida in early 2019, Christin Lissmann was drawn to Froedtert as a teaching hospital with a stellar Magnet rating for its nursing conditions. She joined Froedtert’s medical ICU unit, an intense place for sure, but one where she could focus intently on each patient.
On a regular floor, she might spend a shift bouncing among half a dozen patients. In the ICU, she’d have just one or two, allowing her to pore over their plans of care and interventions. That same drive for nursing at the highest level led her to enroll at Marquette that fall to pursue a doctor of nursing practice degree.
This March, her ICU unit became dedicated to COVID-19 patients. It adopted stricter isolation and infection-protection protocols. Staff huddles at every shift change reinforced the sense of crisis response.
But the nurse-patient ratios didn’t change. As she looked ahead to her overnight shift that evening, Lissmann had just one patient. And since she tends to address her patients with a polite Southern formality that belies her open nature and eagerness to connect, her patient that night was Mr. Mosley in Bed 19.
From the start, it was clear he was a particularly high-risk patient. A transplant four years earlier at the same hospital had given him a new kidney (donated by friend and fellow Judge JoAnn Eiring). The medication he took to keep his body from attacking his donated kidney left his immune system vulnerable to being ravaged by the coronavirus.
Lissmann knew Mosley’s doctor had shared a troubling message with him that afternoon, and, in her initial assessment, she saw evidence of the prognosis herself. Despite his rapid gasping for air, when she put a stethoscope to his chest, she heard nothing — a condition termed “silent chest.” By and large, his lungs weren’t moving oxygen at all.
If his blood-oxygen readings, then in the mid-to low 80s, dipped any lower, he couldn’t go on breathing under his own power. To Mosley, she confirmed the importance of the doctor’s instructions, pleading, “Please, don’t get off your belly. Don’t talk. Don’t move. Don’t exert yourself.”
When she left the room, she got the intubation supplies and stacked them outside his room.
“I was frankly surprised he hadn’t been intubated already,” she recalls. “Every sign said that he would not make it through the night without needing an advanced airway.”
Then, she prepared for something else that might not strictly be considered nursing care but that Lissmann considered essential nonetheless.
Mosley had never felt as dark and alone as he did in the hours after speaking with his doctor. But then, not too long into Lissmann’s shift, he was surprised by the brightness in his nurse’s voice as she entered the room, behind him as he lay face down. “I have a surprise. There’s someone who wants to see you.”
See him? Here? He tried to twist his neck back to see what was happening.
Then Lissmann was beside him, crouching at the head of the bed. She was holding an iPad on which Mosley could see the face of his wife, Kelly, and then his daughters, Kallan and Kieran, and their dog too. “Hey,” Mosley said, elated in his usual musical way. Within moments, tears were flowing — Mosley’s, his family’s, Lissmann’s. “It was a cry fest,” says the nurse. “We all were crying.”
Imagining what it was like for his daughters to see their father hooked up to several machines, Mosley rallied. “I started making jokes, making sure their homework was done. I wasn’t going to let them use me as an excuse just because I was in the hospital.”
After the call, Mosley felt reassured. “I treated it as the last time I was going to see them,” he says. “So, I felt a sense of peace that I was able to tell them I love them, that I’m going to keep fighting, and I’m going to be home soon. All of these things, not knowing if they were actually true, but letting them know I didn’t want them to worry.”
In an hour or two, as the loneliness set in again, Lissmann was back. Mosley heard the sound of a heavy wooden chair being dragged across the floor to his bedside. “I just wedged myself up in the crack between the head of the bed and the wall,” she recalls.
As he turned his face toward her, she could see where his tears had dried. She took his hand in hers.
“I said, ‘You know what? You’re not going to be alone. We’re going to get through this together. I’m yours till 7 in the morning. And if, God forbid, the worst happens and we need to intubate, I’ll be with you the whole time. I’ll make sure you’re not in pain. I won’t stop advocating and fighting for you.’”
“Well, that’s not gonna happen,” he said.
“You’re right,” she said.
Mosley felt peace again. “My biggest fear was dying alone. And if I ever got vented, nobody would be there to talk on my behalf. So what she said meant everything to me.”
Lissmann needed the conversation too. “It’s kind of selfish,” she says. “I needed someone to survive, especially the dad of two girls. I had many patients die before him, so many intubated. And this one I got to talk to. I said, ‘The sun is going to rise, and we’re going to watch it together.’”
Various factors certainly influenced the course of Mosley’s fight with COVID-19 from that point. Timing was in his favor. The medical community had just discovered the benefits of keeping patients face down. It was a couple of days into his stay that the care team introduced the idea, saying, “We’re going to change things up here.”
Mosley also agreed to take a reduced dosage of his anti-rejection medication, risking his kidney to help his immune system fight the infection. That likely helped. But neither patient nor nurse discounts the value of the video chat and other care he received that night. “It gave me hope,” he says.
Lissmann is sure the call provided something important that medicine couldn’t provide. How so? “Well, he made it to morning without the tube,” she says. “He didn’t decompensate, which is shocking because all the cards were stacked against him.”
When the sun started coming up, she went into his room and parted the blinds on the window. “I pointed and said, ‘See this. It’s morning, and we’re here.’”
Arriving for her next shifts, Lissmann rushed to the glass doors outside Bed 19 to see if he’d been able to avoid intubation. The first time, his condition was no better, but he had hung on and avoided a downturn.
Then after a couple of days off, she arrived and found him sitting up in bed. “He’s sitting up, I tell you,” she says, still excited in relating the moment. Through the glass, she gave him a big thumbs-up sign.
Another nurse attended to him that night, but around 10 p.m., she opened the door to his room. “I just want to tell you good night. I’m so happy for you, sir. Just to see you here has made my whole shift.”
He smiled and said, “They say I can get out of the ICU tomorrow. I’m going to a regular floor.”
“And that was the last time I saw him in the ICU,” she says.
The second conversation with God was Lissmann’s. It was Easter Sunday and she’d just finished a long-distance call with her mother on which she tried to sound more happy and settled than she was.
She was quarantining from her husband, as she had been all spring, since he has asthma and is susceptible to complications if he develops COVID-19. Alone, she tuned into a livestream of tenor Andrea Bocelli singing at the Duomo cathedral in Milan.
Her thoughts drifted to patients she’d cared for — in Bed 15, Bed 26 and others. They’d fought hard too but hadn’t made it. “I’d seen way more death than I had in my entire life, packed into a few weeks.”
“Honestly, I was in a dark place,” she reflects. “I said, ‘God, can this be my purpose? What are you trying to tell us? Have I done the right things? How much more can I handle? You have to give me a sign.’”
Bocelli was singing beautifully, like an angel, Lissmann thought. She watched him in one window on her computer, while scrolling Facebook with another. Soon she noticed that a couple of her co-workers had shared a post that was on its way to going viral.
“Honestly, I didn’t even recognize his name at first, not his first name,” she says of the author of the post. “I started reading it and by the time I got to the end, I was sobbing — that guttural, ugly with everything that you have in your body form of crying. And I thought, ‘He’s talking about me.’ It was kind of dizzying.”
In sharing how grateful he was to wake up in his own bed that Easter morning and in recounting his difficult night in the hospital, Mosley was talking about her. He described the video call with his family: “This was the first time I had seen their faces in a week. We laughed, we definitely cried, but most importantly, I got to tell them I loved them.” He described his nurse returning, holding his hand and telling him he wouldn’t be alone. “If I could, I would have hugged her,” he wrote. “Someone who was healthy sat by my side to make me feel comfortable, while putting herself at risk.” Acknowledging his doctors and the smart course of his treatment, he reserved special praise for his nurses: “They gave me hope, and for that I will be forever grateful.”
He closed the message with the phrase his mother taught him as a guiding philosophy: “To the world, we are just one person, but to one person, we can be the world.”
If God had wanted to send Lissmann a sign affirming her value to others and the soundness of her career choice, it would be hard to imagine a better vehicle. The post was liked 7,500 times and shared by 2,500 people. Popping up in her feed, it was impossible to miss. And it opened her eyes that the patient she’d known from Bed 19 was no ordinary messenger.
“We’re living through this horror. And one person who survived reached out and totally touched my life.” Looking upward, she said, “OK, I guess you heard me.”
The months since then have provided ample evidence of how much was saved back in the ICU and again on Easter. After weeks recovering at home, Mosley was there in June exuberantly celebrating his daughter Kieran’s 12th birthday. The family rented a Duffy leisure boat for a ride down the Milwaukee River through the city Mosley loves. He has donned his robe from his living room, and used a courtroom video backdrop, for the virtual reopening of Milwaukee Municipal Court, bringing the spirit of cura personalis to new defendants. And he continues to touch thousands when he posts on social media.
Lissmann’s life has moved forward too. She and her husband have just moved to a new home. And while continuing her doctoral studies, she is thrilled to be a newly appointed Marquette clinical instructor of nursing, guiding students in their rounds in the hospital.
She and Mosley have been featured together in newspapers and on television. Their story has been made into commercials and a spoken-word poem. They and their families have shared hours on patios together. They are part of each other’s stories now.
That’s why Lissmann sent Mosley an article she came across about nurses finding a sense of purpose during the pandemic. It featured Victor Frankl, a psychiatrist whose work drew insights from his experience surviving a concentration camp during the Holocaust. “It’s about ways that people find hope in hopeless situations. I remember one of the lines from the article was, ‘Sometimes meaningful moments sneak up on us in unexpected ways.’”
“I told him, “That time in the hospital was a meaningful moment. A beautiful moment that came together in all the right ways.”
