He Proved His Love Just By Being There

Bob Coulson is 76. He’s seen his share of life, his share of people. So when he says, “I’ve never seen a love story like that before,” you want to listen.

He tells you about the free-spirited young woman who was his granddaughter, Sarah Nevins.

“She was the apple of my eye,” Coulson says. “She was very special to me, because her parents separated and I was kind of her father figure and grandpa, both at the same time.”

But that isn’t the story he has in mind. He directs me instead to 26-year-old Anthony Guarino Jr., an Orange Coast College student and drummer in a local rock band known as The Iron-ons.

“I’ll just tell you the story from the beginning,” Guarino says. “We met in a coffee shop in Costa Mesa. There was innocent flirting back and forth, but we didn’t really introduce ourselves or anything.”

A couple of weeks later Guarino saw Sarah again, this time on the OCC campus, where she studied and worked at a mobile coffee cart. The two picked up their conversation and flirting. Guarino began stopping by daily to talk to her. “We could talk easily,” he says. “Conversation would just flow.”

That was toward the end of 1997. On Jan. 23, 1998, they had their first date. Guarino persuaded Sarah to sample sushi for the first time. “Then we went back to my apartment and stayed up talking all night.”

That’s how a lot of love affairs start. History is full of them, many fizzling at the first sign of fire. Anyone who thought that about Anthony and Sarah would come to learn differently.

Six weeks after their first date, Guarino came home from a gig at Club Mesa to find Sarah--who by this time was spending most nights in his apartment--complaining of a bad headache. He suggested a doctor, but it was 2 in the morning.

“She battled with me on it for a few minutes but the pain was so horrendous for her, she had no option,” Guarino says. He took her to nearby Hoag Hospital.

By the end of the next day, the circle of life that encompassed Sarah, her family and friends would be forever rearranged. An MRI showed a tumor on her brain, and doctors eventually diagnosed the worst kind of brain cancer you can get, with fewer than 5% of patients living beyond two years. Sarah was 20 years old.

She had surgery the day after she was admitted, the first of several over the next year.

Anthony Guarino, who’d had his first date with Sarah six weeks earlier, had a choice. The family told Guarino they wouldn’t hold it against him if he wanted to step out of the picture.

“I took a couple days and really sat down and thought about what I was going to do,” says Guarino. “Sarah had said if I didn’t want to stick around, that was fine. But at that point in our relationship, there was too much love to do that. When I really got down to thinking about it, there was no decision to be made. To be honest, the decision was already made.”

He stuck around.

For the next 15 months, Anthony and Sarah continued to live together. They tried to live large. “A lot of people said she lived more in the last year than in her whole life,” Guarino says. “We did a lot of traveling and did things she never got to experience.”

They went camping in the Sierras, a lifelong love of Guarino’s but not something the citified Sarah had done. “She was a trouper,” he says.

This past March, things worsened for Sarah. The cancer was spreading to her spine, and she needed much more care.

But Sarah didn’t want to die in a hospital. So Anthony asked his parents, who live in Garden Grove, if Sarah could stay there.

“When I asked my parents, they said, ‘No problem,’ ” Guarino says.

And that is where, last month, Sarah died. She was 22.

Her mother, Chris Matson of Huntington Beach, says Guarino’s love for her daughter has been inspirational. “From the beginning, they were kind of like soul mates,” she says. “When push came to shove and she really needed care in the last two months of her life, he was there nonstop.”

Matson also shares a mother’s love for Guarino because she knows her daughter--her only child--shared things with him she couldn’t tell her. As time passes, she says, she wants to hear some of those things from Guarino.

Guarino says that is indeed true. Sarah wanted to shield her mother from emotional pain, he says. He also says that Sarah did not fear death and felt that things happen for a reason.

“Sarah always made me promise that I’d remain friends with her mother,” Guarino says. “Not that she needed to make me promise, because I planned to.”

Still in the shadow of Sarah’s death last month, those close to her are coping in their own ways. Her mother says her faith in God is strong but that she can’t make sense of her daughter dying so young.

Guarino says Sarah’s death has left him “pretty jaded right now” and asking a lot of “what’s-the-point-of-life” questions. He’s spent 21 of the last 30 days in the Sierras, he says, reflecting on things and “trying to make some major life decisions and decide what to do.”

Everyone, at least, is comforted by Sarah’s strength as death approached. “The sicker she got, the more she talked about it,” Guarino says. “She was very much in acceptance. She was a realist. That realism helped her cope. It helped me cope, too. We knew she wasn’t going to cheat death, but we sure as hell weren’t going to back off and let it happen. She believed everything happened for a reason, and I don’t, and our philosophies bled into each other.”

Coulson, Sarah’s grandfather and the man who years ago wasn’t above letting his rebellious granddaughter play hooky at his home (“Who was I to argue with this beautiful little girl?”) says much of his solace comes from Guarino’s devotion to Sarah.

“Looking back on myself as a young man,” Coulson says, “I wouldn’t have stuck around had I been in his shoes. I don’t know of any young men who would have. It was a very profound thing to do.”

Guarino will have none of that “hero” talk but acknowledges that “the commitment I had is something I normally don’t have in me.”

He recalls what, for lack of a better term, we’ll call a moment of truth.

“When Sarah was getting ready to go into surgery the first time, she asked if I’d be there when she got out. I said, ‘Yeah, of course.’ ”

In an action that no doubt brought her much comfort in her final months, Sarah found out he meant it.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821, by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail at dana.parsons@latimes.com.