Timeless advice from Hilton Head woman stuck outside 2 days after 2017 fall: ‘I prayed’

Editor’s note: Longtime columnist David Lauderdale retired on July 31. We are reprinting some of his best columns as a tribute to his 43-year career. This column originally was published June 26, 2017.

Bess Marriner looks up and thanks “the Lord” as she recovers from a fractured hip, sun burn and a lost voice after falling and lying outside her Hilton Head Island home from 2 1/2 days in the heat of June.

“Somebody doesn’t want me yet, right?” she said. “I’ve got a lot of work to do, I guess.”

Marriner, 93, fell on steps behind her marshfront home in Port Royal Plantation on the afternoon of June 6, 2017. Town of Hilton Head Island Fire Rescue responded at 9 p.m. June 8 after concerned family members called Port Royal Plantation Security.

Marriner said she went down steps behind the house “to check that stupid basement door, and I never made it.”

She fell awkwardly on the cement and oyster-shell steps.

“I was not lying down or sitting up,” she told me in her comfortable room at the Broad Creek Care Center at TidePointe, where she is rehabilitating.

“I was there for two days and two nights, unable to move anything,” she said.

She tried to grab a bush to pull herself up but could not.

“I yelled and yelled and yelled, but no one could hear me,” she said.

She said she prayed a lot.

“I prayed for it to get cooler and then it rained and I got cold,” she said. She tried to drink the falling rain, but it didn’t work.

When she fell, her sundress flew up, leaving her left side sunburned. The back of her neck got sunburned.

She thought she heard someone come to the front door. She thought she heard the paper being delivered. She regretted that the yard workers had come and gone on the day she fell.

“I worried about alligators and raccoons,” she said. “Maybe I was hallucinating, but I said to an animal, ‘Don’t you come any closer. I can see you.’ You do stupid things. You talk to yourself. I prayed a lot. I prayed and prayed.”

She also was sustained by this thought:

“I didn’t want to die that like that,” she said. “I have such a great family.”

Family members realized that none of them had been able to reach Marriner for two days and called Port Royal Plantation Security to check the house and grounds.

Marriner praises the staff at Hilton Head Hospital and Broad Creek Care Center. She caresses the soft bed. Family has come. A daughter gave her a haircut. Neighbors visit. They bring clothes and encouragement. She said her church has been wonderful.

She calls herself “Miss Piggy” enjoying the food at Broad Creek. She’s added weight to her small, 108-pound frame, but much of it is the swelling, she thinks.

“Just the day before the fall, I was thinking how lucky I am,” she said. “I can live alone and go to the grocery and get anything I want. The house is paid for.”

Her bridge group was set to come to the house the Monday after her fall.

“Life comes at you fast,” Marriner said, smiling. “Before you know it, there you are.”

Now, besides mending a cracked hip with a lot of forced movement and exercise, she has two things on her to-do list.

She said she will get a medical alert button to wear. And she will suggest that security check in regularly on people living alone. She also plans to set up a buddy system with neighbors.

Marriner has enjoyed life on the marshes of Fish Haul Creek for 37 years. Her late husband, Harvey Marriner, died 11 years ago. Their five children are spread around the nation.

Marriner said that as a young woman, she escaped their house with two babies right before it exploded.

“I thank God,” she said. “I thank him for listening. You can’t go anywhere without him.”