The Journal News
Author talks about life and loss with North Rockland students
James Walsh
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| Yet the message that Gisonni brought to the biological ethics class wasn't wrapped in funeral crepe. Instead, it presented students with the challenge of believing in themselves, sometimes over the opinions of experts. It asked that they take their fate in their own hands, instead of leaving it to others. |
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The nature of life as a series of choices, challenges and question marks was brought home yesterday to two dozen North Rockland High School students by a graduate who had seen nearly her whole family disappear in four years. First, the youngest of Debbie Gisonni's two sisters committed suicide at the age of 24. Four years later, her mother died of a brain tumor after battling it for 10 years. In between, her father and a favorite aunt died of cancer. All gone between 1990 and 1994. Yet the message that Gisonni brought to the biological ethics class wasn't wrapped in funeral crepe. Instead, it presented students with the challenge of believing in themselves, sometimes over the opinions of experts. It asked that they take their fate in their own hands, instead of leaving it to others. "I never thought it could happen so fast," Matt Raso, a high school senior said. "That so many people in a family could die like that ... But it was also good that her mother had so much willpower to fight for herself." Teacher Mary Lou Dillon invited Gisonni to speak after reading her book, "Vita's Will," a story of her family's battles against demons of the body and mind, then learning life's lesson to learn, heal and move on. "I will never look at kids the same way because of Martha's story," Dillon said of the account of Gisonni's sister who graduated from the high school in 1984. Six years later, on a spring evening, she took one of her father's guns, drove to a parking lot in Orange County, and shot herself. The young woman, recalled by Dillon as strikingly beautifu. "I always wanted to put my head in a bag when she was around" - left behind ripped pages of a note that she had apparently written to herself. She saw herself as a failure and was desperately unhappy. She wrote that she was tired and wanted to leave the world. She saw herself as a burden, a source of worry to her father. She wondered if she could go to heaven, then return to Earth as an angel to help others. The Martha in those writings was a stranger to the family, said Debbie Gisonni, and her sister, Angela Gisonni of New Windsor, N.Y. They said they had no clue that their baby sister was hurtling toward death. She must have been terribly depressed, though, they said, and being at home with her ailing mother, she was under a stress that she somehow managed to hide. "We all begin life with a storehouse of personal power, and then along the way, we sometimes forget it's there," Gisonni told students gathered in the school library. "My mother never forgot it. My sister, unfortunately, never knew she had it." Gisonni, who graduated from the high school in 1979, spoke to the students about her mother's 10-year battle against a brain tumor. For two years, she had gone from doctor to doctor without a firm diagnosis of her headaches. Maybe it's an allergy, one speculated. Maybe a neck problem, another suggested. Maybe she's just a hypochondriac, another said. "Then one night, she said to me, 'Debbie, maybe I have a tumor in my brain.' Just like that, out of the mouth of someone who came here from Italy when she was only 13 years old and had one year of schooling here in the U.S.," Gisonni recalled. Partly to show her mother that she was wrong, Gisonni arranged with a doctor for a CAT scan. Sure enough, she had a brain tumor that had apparently been growing for two years. "One day she had a headache, and the next day she's fighting for her life," Gisonni said. "That's how quickly life changes." Gisonni, of the San Francisco Bay area, said she wrote her book after leaving a 15-year career managing computer publications in Silicon Valley. "I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I knew I wanted to help other people," she said. Her sister, Angela, liked the idea. She also thought it was helpful to her and her sister. "It was good for us to get things out, to get the feelings down on paper," Angela Gisonni said. "Sometimes you don't know the extent of what you're going through until you see it in black and white." Debbie Gisonni told of her mother defying doctors' predictions that she'd never walk, or never eat or drink again. She did both with difficulty or assistance, but didn't roll over and die. Students said they had learned the value of having doctors explain illnesses and treatments. To not just accept a diagnosis and a drug. To think for themselves. Holly Stobo and Brighid Kivlehan, both seniors, saw positive thinking and determination helping Gisonni's mother. "It makes second opinions so much more important," Brighid Kivlehan said of Gisonni's presentation. "And the importance of being positive and moving forward."
May 23, 2001 |
