Thursday, May 20, 2021
When I think of Toni, I'm filled with gratitude and love. I thought about her loving life and wrote a remembrance.
A Remebrance of Toni
From Cousin Theresa
Our life journeys sometimes offer gifts that are unaccountably generous. This was the nature of having Toni in our lives. Perhaps you know other souls who are similarly blessed: their lives touch us with the certainty that goodness is real and that finding loving realities in tough circumstances actually happens.
I met Toni at her grandparents’ house in Hollis before Aunt Florence married Uncle Fitchie. Mrs. Bianca made a fantastic dinner and boasted about how Toni was her favorite helper. Toni, like her gourmet Grandma… and her elegant Mom… was an enchantingly happy hostess at the age of about 7.
At the wedding of her parents, Toni was a miniature bride in a white jacquard cloth dress that she twirled in, in Aunt Mary and Uncle Nick’s backyard with the kids… while the grown-ups had cocktails on the patio.
It was impossible not to love Toni. She so loved her life. She was beautiful. Her mom says she looked like her birth father who died when she was just a baby. Then Uncle Fitchie became her Dad. Tony was ebullient and devoted to the many people she loved: her parents, her grandparents, her very extended family, and the many, many friends she made in the course of her life.
I would see her at family get-togethers… and suddenly she was grown up… and as bright and untarnished as ever. I remember she was so young, and excited about getting married. Then she was great with child. And you can’t say that enough: Toni was great with child. When Georgie came along, he was different… and so was she. She nurtured him through a tough year of difficult heart surgeries, and the unchartered terrain of raising a child with special needs. Georgie not only survived; he thrived… to be so like her.
Toni and her first husband George eventually divorced. Tony’s parents helped her with Georgie… who would rekindle with his father as an adult. Beautiful Toni remarried and had another beautiful child, Marissa. This marriage was difficult, but Tony kept her children moving forward and positive.
A life-changing parking incident led to the meeting of Toni and her loving husband Bob. She was feeding the meter; he was feasting on her adorableness. The rapid-fire entrepreneur wasted no time moving from the street scene to more romantic proposals. Fondly known as “the pasta king,” Bob included Toni in a work-life that might have been called “romancing the cuccina.” She loved doing food demo’s, talking up Italian cooking, and being with Bob.
Toni married Bob and was a mother to his daughter Caitlin as well as her children Georgie and Marissa. Toni became something of an activist… looking into services for special needs kids. Both Caitlin and Marissa work as educators with an emphasis on special needs.
Toni and I would meet at family functions. I remember her asking me once whether I thought that most folks thought about some of the strategies we rallied in support of our differently-abled kids. I said, “Well, I think everyone has something; but you and I, I think we hit the jackpot!” And we giggled endlessly… scheming to actually give it a shot casino-style.
Toni was always positive and loving. She inhabited the bright side of opportunity. Her experience was spiritually salient, in a way that you could appreciate, listening to her personal stories. She described being filled with golden light… watching the illuminating vision of the Holy Spirit and listening to the reassuring affirmation that she was protected… that she was one with goodness… and safe.
Toni was so enduringly loveable. Throughout her struggle with brain cancer, she continued to give the best of herself. And this was her triumph: loving bigger than her disease… as Caitlin says: “to the fullest.” Squeezing the hands of Bobby, Aunt Florence, Georgie, Marissa, and Caitlin. Smiling a glorious smile when she could no longer speak easily. Bob said she would thank him for taking care of her, and that she died smiling.
Toni was our gift. Our lives were enriched by hers. I will never forget her enormous smile, her rippling laughter, and her powerful spirit. She was a pure, humble, and triumphal source of love. I imagine her in the presence of her grandparents, her dad, and all the loving family members who have gone before her, inhabiting all the powerfully happy spaces that can be filled with her golden light!
