Sunday will be Mother’s Day. Try telling that to Charlie Culberson, though.
He’ll tell you differently.
Every day is Mother’s Day, for him. At least it has been since last Nov. 7 when he very nearly lost his own mom. What started out as an afternoon of errands that was to end with dropping off an anniversary gift for Charlie and his wife, Sarah, turned into a life-changing odyssey for the Culberson family.
“We’ve always had a pretty special relationship,” the Rangers utility infielder said of his mother, Kim, last week. “We’ve always been real close. We can talk about anything. I don’t know how we could get closer, but we have.”
He’s already twice tried to answer what Mother’s Day means to him now. On both occasions, he broke down and had to stop. Now, having gathered himself, he’s fingering the bracelet on his left wrist his kids made him last December. It’s really just a green piece of string with some plastic beads strung through to spell out M-O-M. If you look at it from the wrong side, it might as well be W-O-W.
Either way you look at it, it’s appropriate for the retelling of the Culberson family’s journey over the last six months.
“It’s just a string and some beads,” Culberson said. “But things like that mean a lot now. I will keep wearing it until it breaks.”
It began with a baseball practice, which is how most Culberson family stories begin, anyway. Charles Culberson Sr., Charlie’s dad, played minor league baseball for five years, mostly in the San Francisco organization, which is how he met Kim.
He was in his first year in the Giants organization, spending a quick week at the rookie level club in Everett, Washington, shortly after he was drafted in 1984. He was 21. Kim was working the deli counter at a local grocery when Culberson walked in one night. She was 18. She said it was love at first sight. She couldn’t even speak. Culberson came back the next night and asked her out. They’ve pretty much been together ever since. Chelce was born in 1985; Charlie four years later.
Anyway, Charles now operates a youth baseball organization in Plainville, Georgia, and has kids from just north of Atlanta among his teams. On the way to see Charlie and Sarah, they figured they’d stop in on and take in a little bit of one of his team’s practices.
Kim, 56, was sitting on a picnic table when she suddenly started swaying and then collapsed on the table in cardiac arrest. There had been no warning. One of the players shouted and the third base coach from the other team, an EMT-in-training named Kyle Brady, sprinted over. He’d recently finished his CPR certification. And went to work.
Charles held his wife and helped aspirate her between compressions. Somebody else sprinted to get a defibrillator. The first time they tried to shock Kim, Charles was still holding her and they needed to be clear. But they got a pulse back. Doctors would later estimate she’d been in arrest a good 90 seconds.
After they got her to Wellstar Kennestone Hospital in Marietta, the situation was bleak. But that she was at Kennestone, a more well-equipped hospital than the one nearest their home, proved to be a break.
“I know it sounds dramatic,” Kim said. “But I died and came back. That’s what the doctors told me. If we had missed any of those steps, if I had been at home or asleep when this happened, I wouldn’t be here.”
Charlie Culberson was just coming off his first season with the Rangers. He was staring at the possibility of a lockout. Not a good place for a free agent utility player in his 30s to be.
He was prepared for a long winter and unsure of what could come out the other end.
And then everything changed when his father called.
Charlie went to the hospital. His mother had already been intubated and placed in a medically induced coma. She would not open her eyes again until Thanksgiving night. They twitched a little that night. Over the next few days, there was some improvement. Then, one day when Charlie and his father showed up, they looked through the sliding glass door to see Kim’s head turned in their direction. She started to smile.
“That was kind of the moment we knew she was going to be OK,” Charlie says.
Meanwhile, father and son would be at the hospital 36 consecutive days. Kim wouldn’t be released until Dec. 21, the best Christmas present the family has ever had. Her odyssey was hardly over, though. She’d go back for three days a week later for an infection. She was in a wheelchair a while. She had to relearn to walk and write. She was determined to sign her own Christmas cards. They went out in February, but they went out. And she spent most of January and February at therapy, regaining strength.
In an interesting way, it provided therapy for Charlie, too. While the lockout dragged on, he found his mind focused on anything but extending his baseball career.
“In a weird way, I was almost at peace with whatever happened with baseball,” said Culberson, who made his major league debut, ironically enough, in front of his parents on Mothers Day in 2012 and has spent parts of 10 seasons in the majors. “Mentally, it didn’t matter. I was worried about my mom. And she finally got to a point where it was like ‘OK, she’s going to be OK.’
“In January, we came back to it and it was like: ‘Let’s talk baseball again. Can I still play?’,” Culberson said. “My wife said I was going to have extra time to train [because of the lockout]. You’ve still got this. For two months it was my mom and not baseball. But Sarah lit a fire under me. If there hadn’t been the lockout and camps had opened on time, no way I would have been ready.”
In March, Kim and Charles attended Kyle Brady’s wedding. A week after the lockout ended, Culberson signed a minor league deal with the Rangers.
Last week, they were together in Arlington. It was Kim and Charles’ first trip to see their son as a Ranger. They’d had plans to meet up last September, but COVID interfered. Charlie was actually on the COVID list for the final 10 days of August. Kim tested positive for it in early September and the couple decided to forego their trip.
There were no cancellations this time around.
“This has been life-changing,” Charles said. “It makes you appreciate things so much more. It makes you realize how important family is. We don’t know who we really are until we face something like this. You don’t know how strong you can be, until you have to be. We went through this together. We were there for each other.”
They were there for each other last weekend, too. For a celebration. The Culbersons saw Charlie play only once, in the series finale against his hometown team, the Atlanta Braves. Culberson laid down a squeeze bunt in the third inning that drove in a run and propelled the Rangers to a big inning on the way to a 7-3 win.
They considered it Mother’s Day.
Actually, they’ve considered almost every one of them Mother’s Day since last Nov. 7. No matter what the calendar says.
