‘I Have No Fear’ : Mary and Fred Were Joined in Life, Death

Fred Valenti died sitting on his favorite couch, a slight grin on his face, his terminally ill wife and his only daughter at his side. He was in his underwear, the way he had always dressed around the house.

“I think it’s the way he wanted to go,” said his daughter, Ann Spiegel, a 46-year-old New York social worker. “I don’t have a terrible feeling about it. I’d normally be freaked out to see someone die, but it was like so natural. He did it his way.

“I kept staring at him. I’m afraid to go to funeral parlors to see dead people. But this just didn’t bother me. I just liked looking at him because he looked so peaceful and happy.”

Like many terminally ill patients, Fred Valenti felt more comfortable at home with his wife of nearly 50 years, Mary, and cared for by nurses and social workers from Merrimack Valley Hospice in Andover.

Mary and Fred had lived in Lawrence most of their lives. As children, both had emigrated from Italy with their parents who came here to work in the textile mills.

At age 14, Mary went from the 8th grade to the mills for $12 a week to help support her parents, both of whom had become disabled. They were so poor that to save 3 cents, they bought cracked eggs for 7 cents a dozen.

Fred worked in a spinning room. He met Mary in a dance hall.

Those remembrances came out while the two were recording an oral history of their lives for John Moore, a hospice social worker, who passed the tapes on to their daughter and granddaughter.

For patients who are depressed, talking about their lives gives them a chance to relive some of their successes and to feel they’ve accomplished something.

“It also gives the person the opportunity to get their mind off the pain,” Moore says. “You start talking about what it was like courting and all of a sudden they’re transformed from these elderly sick people into someone who says: ‘Hey, this was a great life. I enjoyed it.’ ”

Fred and Mary were married on June 18, 1939. Two weeks before he died, they were sitting on that favorite couch, talking with visitors.

At 5-feet-1, Fred was only 3 inches taller than Mary. His weight had shrunk to 130 pounds. “I have no fear,” he said. “We all die.”

Mary came to the hospice first with a long-neglected breast tumor. Fred was diagnosed last summer with bowel cancer that spread to his liver. When Mary was in the hospital for 68 days last spring, Fred visited her three times a day, making the trips by bus.

“I worry about my wife all the time,” Fred said. “She gets me angry when she won’t eat.”

“Eating is one of our major symptoms,” says Patricia O’Neil, a liaison nurse at the Merrimack Valley Hospice. “Food is love. When you cook for people and prepare food for people, that’s showing your love for them. With Italian people, food is a very important part of their life.”

Fred worried, too, about Mary’s pain, frequently reminding her to take her medication.

“She gets all the pills she wants. She gets it from these people here,” he said, nodding toward O’Neil and John Moore, two of the visitors. “Sometimes they bring them late at night.”

“Pain is the problem that most people fear most of all,” says O’Neil. “And we get very assertive about taking care of someone’s pain, whether it’s through pills, liquids, high-tech, morphine pumps or IV drips, if that is what is needed. And we do this all at home. . . .

“I think a lot of physicians have a real hard time with that. Their whole life has been spent in saving people and some of them just can’t deal with the fact that their patient is dying. They have a real hard time letting go. Some of them have tests and procedures, with kids especially, up until the time they die.”

That was not the case with Laura Dahmen, a 63-year-old cancer victim from Turtle Creek, Pa., who spent her last days playing cards and cracking jokes, surrounded by friends and relatives and scores of sympathy cards.

Refused Chemotherapy

She refused chemotherapy because “it wasn’t gonna do me any good.” The cancer in her liver had spread to her spleen and lungs. She endured waves of pain in her abdomen so bad that just thinking about it made her cry. She resisted morphine until near the end because she thought it would alter her mind. Just the same, she outlived the doctors’ prognosis by 4 1/2 months. “I’m just gonna live until I die,” she said.

She tried to be as independent as she could with the help of nurses and workers from the Forbes Hospice in Pittsburgh who became her friends. “They’re so loving and so friendly,” she said. “It makes it easier. I tell them anything, anything at all.”

Leah George, a nurse, visited Laura regularly, checking her condition and medicine.

“We’re kind of the liaison between the physician and the family and that’s a real big thing because families become very frustrated trying to communicate with physicians in offices, trading phone calls, never understanding,” she said.

Her time with Laura was rewarding, she says. “When I see that my visit can really make a difference in the way someone feels, particularly in home care--a lot of times just conversation with people makes an amazing difference in the way they feel.”

Laura died in her daughter’s home last Oct. 17 after she became so weak she couldn’t walk and suffered a fall that sent her to the hospital. She had wanted to remain in her small senior citizens apartment surrounded by cards from well-wishers.

One that always brought a big smile to her face was from a 7-year-old girl named Macha who scribbled: “I hope you don’t get too sick or not sick at all.”