The last thing Colleen Panzino wants is for you to think of her as some poor widow. Please.
Yes, it’s true her beloved Bobby died last year on March 15, the day she turned 50. And, yes, he’d been the roly-poly picture of health, the life of the party, the one who once squeezed his size 46 gut into her brand-new size 8 mink coat just to get the last laugh as friends who were like family strolled out the door one raucous Christmas Eve.
Heck, he’d shot 18 holes of golf the day he turned 50, just nine months before, the last day the picture seemed shatterproof.
And yes, the nice Irish girl (maiden name, Scanlon) had threatened her all-Italian sweetheart for weeks that she’d get back at him if he died on her 50th; do that, she told him, and she would have a roiling Irish wake for him on St. Patrick’s Day. And because he went ahead and died that day anyway, she went ahead and had the Irish wake. Eight hours she was on her feet, didn’t even stop to go to the bathroom. They were pouring in from all over the country. Some 1,500 people packed the church, even the guy who picked up their garbage, a guy whom Bobby–who befriended all sorts–had called a good friend.
Everyone in the world wanted to say goodbye to Bobby.
No one could believe he was gone. Least of all, Colleen. She was the one who, until his final breath, truly thought he’d somehow never die. Maybe she just wanted it that way. Wanted him with her for the rest of her days. After all, they’d been together since she was 13, he was 14. They’d dated all through high school back in blue-collar Pittsburgh. She was prom queen, he was cornerback on the football team. They’d married in 1971, had four kids and three houses through the years. He had a great job; she hadn’t worked until the youngest was in kindergarten, and then only part time, because she always wanted time to be the room mother. It was all pretty much just the way she’d dreamed it would be.
But there was the day–three years before the morning Bobby woke up and his smile was all droopy and he couldn’t remember his name–their eldest, Matthew, had a cough and they went to get a chest X-ray and the doctors looked at Colleen and told her Matt had Hodgkin’s disease, a cancer of the lymph glands that scared the hell out of the whole family. They thought that was the worst it would ever get for the Panzinos of Hoffman Estates.
And it was pretty bad: the chemo, the waiting, the yearly checkups to see if the cancer had come back. (It hasn’t.)
But then, on Bobby’s 50th birthday, a day he celebrated with the guys, playing 18 holes and then going out for chicken Milanese at Cafe Clemenza’s, the neighborhood joint he loved to go to for a bowl of pasta, a Scotch and a cigar, something even worse happened.
By the time the crowd trooped into Clemenza’s, everyone had noticed. Bobby’s smile. It seemed droopy. And then the guys who’d played golf with him, one by one they were pulling Colleen aside. Something’s wrong, they all said. Bobby’s like out in left field.
Jean Hachmann, a close friend since they’d moved to Hoffman Estates back in 1987, walked right up to Bobby and said she was worried about him, his face was sagging, it looked like maybe he had Bell’s palsy, a nerve inflammation that distorts the face. Bobby, who hadn’t said anything to Colleen, turned to Jean and said, “I’m not worried about that.” He paused, looked right at her, and finished the thought: “I mean, sometimes I can’t even remember my name.”
The bad news
The next morning Colleen woke early and told Bobby, “I’m taking you to the hospital.” He refused, saying he had plans to go golfing. A second later, though, he looked at Colleen and said, “We better go now.”
“Never in a million years did I think,” says Colleen, just about a year later, sitting on the grass outside United Airlines Credit Union, where she works in the administrative department. “I figured a stroke would be the worst.”
It took less than two hours to find out otherwise.
In the emergency room of Northwest Community Hospital in Arlington Heights, Colleen stepped out of the cubicle where she was waiting with Bobby. She walked over to the nurses’ station. A doctor was standing there, talking on a cell phone. She heard him say, “Oh, here she is.” The doctor handed her the phone. It was Bobby’s doctor on the other end of the line.
“They’re seeing a mass,” the doctor told her.
“What do you mean a mass?” she asked.
“A growth,” he said.
“Where?” she asked.
“The middle of his brain.”
She handed the phone back to the other doctor, who looked at her and asked, “Do you want me to tell your husband?”
“No,” said Colleen. “He doesn’t know you. I’ll go tell him.”
“I walked in. There’s no easy way to do it. You just say it,” she says, retelling the story all these months later. “He said, `What? How can that be? I just had a complete physical.'”
They had given him straight A’s on his physical two months earlier, not a sign in the world that anything was brewing.
The next week was hell. And, what kills Colleen, it shouldn’t have been.
A neurosurgeon said he would have to do a needle biopsy to determine what sort of tumor was lodged in the core of Bobby’s brain. What the surgeon ended up doing, says Colleen, was a complete craniotomy.
“He does this biopsy on him and Bobby doesn’t talk anymore, he doesn’t eat anymore, he doesn’t walk.” He didn’t open his eyes for a week. His head shaved, wrapped in bandages, Bobby just lay there as Colleen and the kids, Matt, then 24, Nick, then 21, Tahnee, then 20, and Blake, then 16, sat vigil, waiting for the flinching of a finger or even a flicker of an eyelid. It never came.
Remembering the joy
By week’s end, they transferred him to Evanston Hospital, where Dr. Nina Paleologos, a specialist in brain tumors, took over his care. She put him on steroids to decrease the swelling, and his hands started moving. He stayed at the hospital 2 1/2 weeks, went to physical therapy every day, and came home walking 1 1/2 miles a day.
“They’d told us he wouldn’t live through that first week; we were determined to prove them wrong,” says Colleen, whose friends contend it was the sheer will of her conviction that stretched Bobby’s life for nine more months.
The Bobby who came home was not the Bobby who had walked into the emergency room.
Bobby, in sales for an athletic shoe company, was loud, funny and plenty irreverent. Flipping through a stack of family photos one night, the stories come at quite a clip: Bobby trying to coax a waiter into helping them filch a life-size stuffed kangaroo from some South Carolina Outback Steakhouse. Bobby and friends dropping drawers at Myrtle Beach–for the camera, thank you.
Around Fremd High School in Palatine, where all four kids have gone–the boys all on varsity teams, Tahnee, the homecoming queen–Bobby was a fixture: at the top of the bleachers, meticulously dressed, arms folded, yelling at the top of his lungs.
Kids used to joke about what kind of job he had since he always seemed to be right there where the action was, always had time to coach all the kids’ teams. A priest at church once called him “the best of youth ministers, never formally installed.”
A newfound quiet
Colleen, just so you know, is still prom-queen adorable: blond hair that swings whenever she moves (which is always), a thick Pittsburgh accent, blue Irish eyes that well up at the drop of a Bobby story. At work they joke she should get the Statue of Liberty Award because it seems there’s a steady flow of the ailing, the bereaved, the beleaguered always beelining toward her desk.
They used to joke, too, that she was Frick to Bobby’s Frack. He’d be outrageous, she’d be miffed. He’d vote one way, she’d go out and vote the other. He loved to golf, she loved to buy. He’d go to Florida, knock out 36 holes a day; she’d go to New York, shop till she dropped. He loved to eat, she loved to cook for him.
Their house was the place everyone came to; every night, no matter the time, no matter the extracurricular craziness, the whole family sat down to dinner. It was not unusual, on weekend mornings, for a few extra bodies to come shuffling to breakfast. The Panzinos’ was a sure place to crash. Everyone loved the Panzinos.
And the Bobby they brought back to that house, after his stint in the hospital, never was the same again. Oh, sure, sometimes the gleam in his eyes still shone through. But, for a salesman who could sell anything to anyone, and never met an opinion he wanted to keep to himself, there was a newfound quiet in Bobby. They joked he was a “kinder, gentler Bobby,” but the sad thing was the spark was gone, snuffed right out.
After a while he would sit stumped by a 30-piece Bugs Bunny puzzle. Colleen, who cut her hours to part time just to hold on to the benefits, would come home from work and find him sitting in the same chair he’d been in when she left. He sometimes felt shy about going out, especially to varsity basketball games at Fremd, where Blake was a junior, because he’d be talking to someone he’d known for years and he couldn’t remember the person’s name. When he walked, which he did at least a mile every day, his feet would fall cloddishly, as if wearing lead boots.
Redefining `normal’
The goal around the house was to keep things as normal as possible. Nick stayed home from school at the University of Kansas that first semester. But Matt was offered and took a job that meant five months in New York for training. Blake decided to quit the football team, a decision for which he has no regrets. Tahnee took classes at Harper College, just minutes away.
Colleen kept the house hopping, with friends coming in and out all the time. And every day, she says, she held Bobby hostage for two hours as she drove him back and forth to Evanston Hospital for radiation and physical therapy. She peppered him with questions, sort of a Trivial Pursuit on wheels, to see if he could remember little things, like who was president, what their phone number was, who he’d talked to the night before. She was unrelenting in keeping their life afloat and not letting Bobby go under.
“I was like, `You know what? We have to do this. We all have to do what we’re supposed to do.’ Number 1, that gives him something to think about, `Hey, they’re doing OK. And we’re doing OK, and we’re gonna get through this.’ I think we kept things pretty damn normal around here all the time. We never did let him give up.”
In September, Colleen packed Bobby’s things and hauled him onto a plane for a friend’s wedding back in Pittsburgh, where they’d both grown up, him up on the hill with all the Italians, her out by the airport with the Irish.
Bobby wasn’t himself at the wedding but at least he was there. And that meant everything to Colleen. Midway through the reception she looked over and saw Bobby sitting off to the side with one of her oldest friends, Beverly Thomas, who has been fighting breast cancer for the last nine years.
“Bob,” Beverly began, “look in this room. Every single person in this room is going to die. We just don’t know when. Some people go before others. You’re 50. I’m 51. Think about it, Bob. We’ve had a great life. We’ve had a wonderful life. I know how you feel. I want more. But if we don’t get it, we’ve had a wonderful life. You could be 80, in a nursing home, all alone. But you’ve got all these people who love you. They’re all going to help us get from here to there. We’re gonna have all these people around us who love us. Who could ask for anything more?”
When they got back to the hotel, Colleen and Bobby had a fight.
“I wish you were more like Bev,” he told her.
“Why?” asked Colleen.
“She’ll let me talk about it,” he shot back.
A treatment fails
Months later, Colleen can say: “He needed to talk about dying and I wouldn’t let him. He’d say, `Why won’t you talk about this? Why won’t you let me talk about this?’ And it’s just that I thought it’s like him giving up. It’s just how I thought; if you’re gonna talk like that, you’re not gonna try.”
He kept trying, right through Christmas and into the year 2000. For four months he had been taking a new drug, a miracle drug they were calling it, that kept his brain tumor from growing. But then, at the end of January, it started to grow. His doctor tried one more drug, but within a few weeks it was clear it wasn’t working. Bobby had fallen over the clothes basket getting out of the shower early one morning. Colleen had been downstairs and she heard the thud. She came upstairs and he was having a seizure. She was sure it was over. It took her almost two hours to get him off the floor and back into bed. She was afraid to call the doctor; she didn’t want him to die in the hospital. Matt, then in New York, called and told her she had to call. Sure enough, the doctor wanted him brought to the hospital.
Once there, Dr. Paleologos sat down beside Bobby and took his hand. “You’re tired, huh?” she asked. He nodded yes. “I’ve always told you that when I thought you’d had enough, we’d stop. It’s time to stop.”
She talked to Bobby for a while, oblivious to the fact that all four of his kids and his wife were sitting there, crying, listening. When she was done, Bobby looked out the window and sighed.
“Oh, well,” he said to no one in particular.
The kids were all over him, hugging him, saying thank you, telling him he was the best ever father, the one all their friends wished were theirs.
Then, on the first Tuesday night in March, they brought him home. Got a hospital bed delivered to the living room with the rose-colored walls and the double French doors. Colleen filled the room with candles, put Louis Prima on the CD player.
That night, Blake, the youngest, couldn’t sleep. He climbed out of bed and tiptoed into the room where his father was lying. He sat next to him and put his hand on the bed rail.
“I was just waiting for him to get out of the bed and be himself again,” says Blake. “I just talked to him out loud. I was saying everything I always wanted to say. I was apologizing for little things.”
He told him he was sorry he’d quit the football team.
Bobby wasn’t saying a thing; Blake wasn’t even sure he could hear. But then all of a sudden, says Blake, “he reached up and put his hand on mine. He said, `It’s OK.’ That’s the last thing I heard him say: `It doesn’t matter.'”
A full house
The next morning the doorbell rang, and it pretty much rang for the whole next week–except when the house was so packed that the windows were steamed up and whoever came up the walk just walked right in. One night there must have been 65 people there. Food was piling up everywhere, in the kitchen, on the dining room table, in the garage. That Saturday night all Bobby’s golfing buddies were packed in the living room. They’d tucked a cigar in Bobby’s hand. They were puffing away on their own, toasting him with rounds of drinks. Friends and family had come from all over. And by the end of the weekend, when Bobby was still there, they started teasing him, “OK, Bob, we’re leaving now. You can wait till we get to the state border if that’s what you wanna do.”
Finally, on Tuesday, Matt asked everyone to leave. It was time for the family circle to draw close.
The next morning, a Wednesday, Colleen’s 50th birthday, a visiting nurse named Gabrielle came to the house. No one had seen her before. No one has seen her since. The hospice program that was coordinating the visiting nurses doesn’t know who she was. Says Colleen, simply: “I swear she was an angel.”
She walked in and in the most tender way, started to give Bobby a bath, right in his hospital bed. She had just lifted his ankle, and his whole body started to tremble. Colleen, standing right there, asked Gabrielle to get the kids, who had just stepped out of the room.
“The kids came in and we all stood around the bed. Everybody kind of held part of him because he was moving so much. And it wasn’t like anybody said, `You take this and you take this,’ we just held him. His whole body shook for like five minutes. And [Gabrielle] stood behind us and let us do our thing. And she was saying, `I’m sorry if I upset him,’ and I was saying, `No I don’t think so,’ and all of a sudden, his eyes had been closed, he just stared up into the corner and his eyes got like this,” she says widening her own eyes. “And all of the sudden, I swear to you because the kids saw it, too, he laid back, he didn’t smile or anything, he just stared up into the corner of the living room. And I said to the kids, `Look, he sees something.’ And all of a sudden his body stopped shaking.
“I truly believe his spirit left that morning, and his body didn’t shut down until that night.”
The final vigil
And so, the rest of the day, it was only the kids and Colleen, leaning on Bobby’s bed, draped on the couch, sprawled on the floor. All day there was a rattling to his breathing that would not stop. All day they kept asking him, “What are you waiting for?” Because it seemed like he wasn’t letting go, and they all knew it was time.
And then, that evening, at 5:55 Blake looked at his watch and had everyone in the room make a wish. And not long after that, the kids walked out of the room to get something to eat. And Colleen, who’d stepped out to meet a friend who had stopped by to drop off more food, stepped back into the living room, where Bobby was breathing that same awful breathing. And then, like that, it stopped. There was no more awful breathing.
“That damn breathing stopped,” says Colleen, months later. “That really hurt me.”
Her friend got the kids back in the room, and all at once, everyone was crying, wailing, telling each other how much they loved each other. And then they looked at Bobby, and without a word, they fell into a synchronized flow, taking off the clothes he had died in, ripping away the damn diapers he’d needed the very last days. They bathed him. They put on a clean golf shirt. Colleen, worried his feet would get cold, rolled on a pair of socks, wrapped him in an extra blanket when the ambulance finally came to take him to the funeral home.
Two days later, St. Patrick’s Day, Colleen had her Irish wake for her husband of 28 years who loved meatballs and red sauce–and, by the way, always hated St. Patrick’s Day. The day after that, in the packed Holy Family Roman Catholic Church, Matt, who’d been utterly stumped when he tried to sit down the night before the funeral and write out his thoughts, got up and winged it. He said his father had left “some big shoes to fill. Thank God there’s four of us, because I don’t think any of us could do it by ourselves.”
And then, the casket tipping as they carried it out of the church, prompting one of the pallbearers to quip that he hadn’t lost much weight after all, they buried Bobby Panzino in St. Michael the Archangel Cemetery, not far from the big white house off Algonquin Road where all the cars were always parked out front because Bobby Panzino had a thing for cars, Cadillacs in particular.
And now, whenever Blake drives by, he always makes sure the radio’s off in the car, even if it’s his girlfriend’s car, because it just seems like the right thing to do. And Colleen, she goes out there most Saturdays, just because she’s Irish, she says, and she likes it at cemeteries.
And Colleen and the kids have gotten on with the business of life without Bobby.
“The next morning after the funeral, that was horrible waking up,” says Nick, who has stuck so close to his mother’s side all these months that she jokes that he’s her new husband. “It was almost like you wished it was a dream. You wished it didn’t happen. Like when you woke up, you said, `Please, I wish it was one of those dreams where it was so real but it really wasn’t.’ It was almost like the rest of your life had to begin that day. That was it.”
Life without Bobby
And they’ve done all right, Colleen and the kids.
In her letter to friends at Christmas, Colleen wrote: “I am coping pretty well. Don’t like support groups, don’t like to feel sorry for myself or listen to other people feel sorry for [themselves], so I decided to help people who are in need of attention in other ways. I am now a minister of care at our church and work at a homeless shelter one Thursday a month and teach a Junior Achievement class, that is therapy for me. …”
Indeed, except for the little changes, the fact that she now walks by the boxes of Raisin Bran stacked on the grocery store shelf, the fact that she hasn’t yet turned on the coffeemaker since Bobby’s not around to drink his pot a day, the fact that the La-Z-Boy in the family room sits empty, Colleen, who still wears her wedding ring and had his melted down and made into a heart she wears on her wrist, has barreled on with her life.
She leapt when her dear friend Ellen Freeman asked her if she wanted to take a class to be a minister of care through her church, meaning she would be the one who did the visiting and the caring for those who are sick or waiting to die. She sat through four weeks of classes, sometimes in tears, like the night when the teacher, Sister Jane Schlosser, said, “It’s comforting to think we’ve been with someone right before they’re with God. That’s a blessing.”
Says her friend Freeman, herself a critical-care nurse for 31 years: “Giving herself to other people was the medicine Colleen felt she needed. I know some people think she’s running, without time to think. But she has time to think. She’s in that bedroom every night without him. Every time she opens that front door and spends any time in that house, his presence is missed. She can’t bring Bobby back. So, to her, spinning your wheels trying to do what can’t be done would be a waste of time.”
A new purpose
And so, the Christmas holidays behind her, the one-year anniversary just a calendar page away, Colleen Panzino has found herself in the oddest place. She walked into a nursing home not long after the New Year and looked at the list of people she was to visit. There was the name of a Romanian man, young by nursing home standards, who has no family and who has the exact same brain tumor that Bobby Panzino had. She hasn’t told him, of course, that she knows all about the tumor. But it’s the darnedest thing how much he reminds her of Bobby, how his leg is swollen just the same, how he shakes just like Bobby, how he wipes his mouth just the way Bobby did.
And she’s finding reasons to stop there most nights on the way home from work, bringing him fried chicken one night, batteries for his remote control the next.
Her kids, especially Tahnee, are like, “Mom, don’t you think you shouldn’t be doing this?” to which Colleen responds: “I definitely know I should be. Can you imagine going through that with nobody?”
Says her friend Freeman: “I really think this is a gift to Colleen. It gives her a chance to examine some of the feelings she was too exhausted to in the midst of Bobby.
“Who would’ve thought when I asked, `Do you want to do this,’ that one of the patients would have the exact same diagnosis, be almost the exact same age, have the same doctor. But the missing piece is he has no family, nobody to listen.
“And what does Colleen do best? She’s a listener.”
Says the listener, who, by the way, does not do a bad job of talking: “What the hell choice do you have? You could curl up in a corner, and then everyone would leave you alone, or you can trudge on.”
And so she trudges, right into a nursing home where a man with a brain tumor will not die alone. Colleen Panzino is doing it again. She will be the last person, she hopes, to sit with a dying man right before he goes to God.
That she was there with Bobby, that was her biggest blessing. And Bobby’s, too, without a doubt.
