Melody Mauldin Covington, 1958-2026

The earthly part of the love story of Michael and Melody is over. After a third hip operation on Wednesday (her ninth in total), followed by a day of seemingly good recovery in the ICU of St. Mary's Hospital, much of which I spent with her, her heart stopped unexpectedly and unexplainedly at 12:25 a.m. and could not be restarted. She died quickly and without pain.

Given the number of different serious medical problems she was fighting, I am glad that she avoided a long, slow decline, and it may well be that she simply asked God to let her out and He did.

I have been braced for this moment ever since her difficult heart surgery a quarter century ago, in November, 2001.

May God enfold her in His arms and may her memory be eternal.

One of our last extended conversations is encapsulated in the previous Notebook entry below, "Help real people, not imaginary ones." Many Notebook entries are ideas that she contributed to, not just my thoughts. And during her last day, we were exchanging humorous observations and puns, something we'd always done a lot of.

In this Notebook I have already chronicled how we met on November 8, 1975, at a University of Georgia recruiting event; started dating the following spring; enjoyed a year together at UGA; endured five years of a long-distance relationship, which assured us that we were together voluntarily; married; and lived happily ever after.

Before anything else, we were best friends, and we remained so. She completed me in a way that I would have thought impossible. I could already get girls to like and admire me — which in itself I had thought was never going to happen — but Melody was different. From very early on, she was almost the only person who understood what I wanted to do with my energy and time, and she was the only friend I've ever had with whom I did not have to set aside, as an interest not shared, anything I really cared about. Lots of people had said, "These things you do are amazing, I don't know how you do them." She knew.

How do you love a man who is into everything from ancient languages, to computers, to electronics? By understanding what is interesting about all of them. Likewise, I enjoyed learning about art, music, and the French language from her. She was a connoisseur of popular music in a way I had not realized was possible — not a "fan" of anyone, but appreciating particularly good guitar passages and well-constructed songs even when they were surrounded by mediocrity, and she had shared only part of this knowledge with me. That is one disappointment; I was hoping to get a lot more of it during the homebound period that we were expecting her to have.

We were happy to celebrate the 45th anniversaries of several of our first dates (they are chronicled in this Notebook) and the 50th anniversary of the day we met; that was a very good day, with a trip to Amicalola Falls and Perimeter Mall. (Read the whole story there.) And we had a good trip to Louisville to see the grandchildren at the end of June.

Our earthly romance lasted 4,635 times as long as that of Romeo and Juliet. And we maintained a perfect record — during our entire acquaintance, more than half a century, we never had a quarrel. Not even once.

In fact I can assure you there are no annoying habits of hers, or scraps of ill will, that I am glad to be rid of. We liked each other. I would have nursed her for another hundred years without complaining.

Sharon and I have decided not to do much rearranging of the house or removal of her possessions until the end of 2026, and then to approach it thoughtfully. I am always going to want the house to show her touch and her continuing presence.

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Help real people, not imaginary ones

As most of you know, I've just helped a large part of my family survive the death of a granddaughter, and now I'm taking care of Melody through repeated, difficult hip surgeries. Through all of this, there is a principle I live by:

Help real people, not imaginary ones.

That is, find out what people are really experiencing, feeling and needing, and help with that, not my own or someone else's guess about what they are experiencing and needing.

It's natural to imagine yourself in the other person's place. But that only provides a first guess, not "ground truth" as they say in the military. Other people are not me. So I do not assume other people need or want exactly what I would need or want if I were in their place. I have to pay attention and find out.

Then there are third-party guesses. I don't want to get tangled up in a web of other people's guesses about what's needed. Other people might know something useful, but, again, that's not ground truth either.

Two small examples: Melody wants more privacy that some people do. She actually does not want someone sitting with her 24 hours a day in the hospital. If she did, I'd be doing it, but she doesn't, so I'm not, and it's not because I don't care or am not available. Similarly, we do not need meals delivered to our house, despite people eager to cook for us; Melody wasn't our cook in the first place, and we're not at home to eat them.

All of this leads to another principle I live by:

Guesses have to be tested against reality.

That is (to borrow a term from electronics) there has to be a feedback loop. In fact, I wonder how much human relations can learn from the mathematics of the control of machines. Guesses are never perfect, and there has to be a feedback loop to correct errors. If the feedback loop is disconnected or is tied to some other inaccurate estimate, rather than the actual output, the system veers off to an extreme. I could be describing either an op-amp or a human activity when I say that.

In fact, there is one very simple way to break the feedback loop when dealing with human beings: Assume that people don't mean what they say (or expect others to assume that you don't mean what you say). Anybody who plays such a game invites chaos, in the mathematical sense of the word.

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Deceptive use of AI is wrong

I don't mind making a medical appointment by talking on the telephone to a speech-understanding system, as long as it works well enough.

But when it introduces itself as Barbara, has humanlike hesitations in the speech, and has fake office noises in the background, then it's not helping me. It's deceiving me.

Why do they think customers will enjoy being deceived? Let's let machines be machines.

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Personal updates

[Updated.]

As I was saying at the end of July, Melody was admitted to St. Mary's Hospital (Athens, Ga.) on July 28 and had an operation to clean out her artificial hip and replace some parts the next day. She has been there, bedridden, ever since, making a slow recovery that has necessitated transfusions, strong antibiotics, and a lot of medical monitoring. Physical therapy has consisted of getting her up on a walker briefly each day and into a chair. She is indeed getting better, very slowly.

At some point she will be transferred to the rehabilitation unit in the same hospital for extensive physical therapy combined with continuing medical monitoring. We expect then to have to give her IV antibiotics at home for several weeks.

I have been visiting her at length every day and not writing Notebook entries. My disconcerting experience this evening was sorting our laundry, and finding that not even one piece of it was hers.

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