Andy Steiner

Minneapolis Star Tribune
July 8, 2003

Rose D’Acquisto knew that she wanted to marry Paul Presnail, but for the longest time she resisted setting a date.

“When you tell people you are getting married, everybody always asks, `When’s the wedding?’ ” says D’Acquisto, 40. “But all I could say was `when the lilacs are blooming.’

Tony D’Acquisto was Rose’s first husband, and lilacs were his favorite flower. When he died six years ago at age 35, Rose believed that she would never love again. Then she met Presnail and slowly began to believe in second chances.

But it would take years of healing, a fateful meeting with a stranger, and the love of her mother to get her there.

‘Man of my dreams’

Rose and Tony met in 1989 when they both worked at Deluxe Corp. in St. Paul, he as a graphic designer and she as a copywriter. She noticed him around the office, a tall, mercurial man with an unruly head of dark curls. He was a native of Janesville, Wis., and had a master’s degree in theater design and a flair for the dramatic that came through in his art and the way he gestured when he talked.

“It was like they took the man of my dreams and plunked him down right in front of me,” D’Acquisto says. For months, the two never spoke. It was just as well for the gentle, sensitive D’Acquisto, who was recovering from a tough breakup.

Then one day they were both at a meeting when Tony, in what D’Acquisto calls “one of his Italian fits,” had a strong disagreement with a stubborn manager. “He said right out, `That doesn’t make any sense to me,’ ” D’Acquisto says. At the end of the day, D’Acquisto took a deep breath and stopped by Tony’s office. “I admire you,” she told him. “It took you a lot of courage to say what you said.” The two began talking, and “the next time I looked at the clock, it was two hours later.”

They courted for a year, and married in 1991, moving into an apartment in St. Paul’s Merriam Park neighborhood.

During the summer of 1996, Tony didn’t seem like himself. He’d fall asleep at strange times, wasn’t interested in finding a job. In September, he made an appointment to see a doctor but fell ill on a Saturday night. The next Monday morning, he collapsed and was rushed to St. Paul’s Midway Hospital (now closed).

At first, doctors suspected an aneurysm. But a neurosurgeon quickly diagnosed a form of cancer called glioblastoma mulitforme , which had rapidly spread through his brain. Doctors removed a tumor the size of a small potato. They told the stunned D’Acquisto that her husband would probably live for two years at best, two months at worst.

At 5 p.m. that Monday, a nurse named Mary came into the room where D’Acquisto was waiting. “Tony’s waking up,” she said. “I made him all handsome for your date.” Mary had given Tony a shave. “He did look handsome, and I could tell he knew it was me. I said to him, `I love you,’ and he mouthed the words `I love you.’ ” That evening, he fell into a coma and never regained consciousness.

As she sat in the hospital room watching her husband die, D’Acquisto was filled with the desire to pull hope out of a seemingly hopeless situation. When Mary suggested organ donation, D’Acquisto agreed almost immediately. The hospital called LifeSource, the regional nonprofit organization that coordinates organ and tissue donation.

“I knew that Tony had an amazingly giving spirit,” she says. “He was the kind of man who would give his life so that others might live. So I told myself that organ donation would be a way that amazing part of Tony’s spirit could live on in others.”

D’Acquisto agreed to donate Tony’s heart, kidneys and liver. After he died, she went home and changed into a black vintage dress to wear to Tony’s wake. It was a dress Tony had bought for her just months earlier. She returned to work a week after the funeral.

D’Acquisto’s mother, Marianne Baumgarten, worried about her daughter. She wasn’t sleeping, seemed despondent. “She was making comments like, `Well, if I’m in an accident, I’ll just be with Tony.’ ”

But as the weeks after her husband’s death turned to months, then years, an inner strength began to appear in D’Acquisto. Because she wanted to know others who had gone through similar experiences, she began volunteering for several donor support organizations, including LifeSource and the National Kidney Foundation.

People who have worked with D’Acquisto say they are impressed by her commitment to heal through work and her honest approach to her struggles.

Sad news, then hope

D’Acquisto often thought about the people who had received Tony’s organs. But because LifeSource has strict policies about confidentiality (donor families and recipients only know each other by first name, and may only meet if both parties request it), she knew nothing about the recipients. She could only hope that one would contact her someday.

“I was really focused on these people’s survival,” she says. “I wanted them to live. I imagined that they would be married men like Tony, and I kept thinking about their wives and how much they were going through. I hoped that they could spend time with their husbands and tell them how much they loved them.”

Two months after Tony’s death, she contacted Lifesource to ask for an update on the recipients, and suffered a heavy blow: The recipient of Tony’s heart and one of his kidneys had died shortly after his transplant. Tony’s parents, who’d pinned their hopes on one day meeting the person who received their son’s heart, were crushed. D’Acquisto tried to see a different perspective.

“Maybe that man’s family got to spend one more day or week or month with him. Wouldn’t I have given anything to have that with Tony?”

Two years after Tony’s death, Baumgarten received a three-page handwritten letter. “Let me introduce myself,” it began. “My name is Mel and I am the recipient of the liver from your son-in-law, Tony. I will forever be thankful for the gift of life I received.”

With D’Acquisto’s permission, Baumgarten had contacted LifeSource, telling them that she would like to hear from people who had received Tony’s other organs. She felt that this would be a good step for her daughter who, after learning about Tony’s heart, was too exhausted to even contemplate making the request herself.

Baumgarten received a short note from a man who had received Tony’s other kidney, then Mel’s longer letter, which included a request for future correspondence.

Mel was Mel Mertz, a 58-year-old Indianapolis man who for 18 years had suffered from a liver disease called Primary Sclerosing Cholangitis. He had been married for 38 years and was the father of two, a grandfather and small-business owner. By the time he received the transplant at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester on Sept. 26, 1996, he was close to death.

“Contacting Rose and her family felt like a natural thing to do,” Mertz says. “My main purpose was to let them know that I was doing well. I wanted them to know that their gift of that organ gave me the opportunity to continue to live.”

For a time, he and Baumgarten exchanged letters, and eventually planned to meet at her house when he came to Minnesota for a checkup.

But D’Acquisto was not sure she wanted to meet him. “On the day he was scheduled to come to my mom’s house, I sat in my apartment and asked myself, `Do I want to go or not? Will it hurt too much?’ Eventually, I decided I did want to meet him.”

Mertz arrived at the door wearing glasses, dressed in a casual striped shirt. He looked, D’Acquisto said, “like a nice dad.” On a whim, she asked him if he’d experienced any cravings since the transplant. “He said, `I never was all that crazy about chocolate, but now I can’t get enough of it,’ ” D’Acquisto says. “I laughed and told him that Tony was a complete chocoholic.”

Meeting Mertz was surreal. “Here I was, sitting in this room joking with this man with a healthy, rosy skin tone, and then I realized that he’s alive because of these decisions I made on behalf of Tony. From then on, it was like an out-of-body experience. It felt something like, `Here I am. I’m watching Rose. She’s talking to this man. She’s being polite. She’s laughing and smiling.’ I had to detach from the situation or I think I would’ve lost it.”

Mertz told D’Acquisto and Baumgarten about the health problems that necessitated the transplant, emphasizing that his liver failure was not caused by alcohol abuse. Meeting Mertz and hearing about his family was an important part of her healing process, D’Acquisto says. It resolved her strong desire to prove that Tony had made an impact on the world.

“After Tony died, I was forced into this place where I could not look back,” D’Acquisto says. “There were so many places where I could beat myself up about what happened, how maybe I could have done something to change the way it all turned out, but now I was forced to live in the moment. I realized there is not a reverse button on life. I couldn’t go back and make everything different. I had to live in the moment if I wanted to keep living.”

Moving on

D’Acquisto met Presnail five years ago, also at work. From the outside, at least, he and Tony had little in common. Presail has straight short hair, and his personality is more even-keeled than mercurial. But like Tony, Presnail is a photographer, “so I think they both look at the world with the same sort of eye,” D’Acquisto says.

Presnail was recovering from a tough divorce and D’Acquisto was still reeling from Tony’s death, so the relationship began as a friendship.

“When I started to have deeper feelings for Paul, I felt like I was being betrayed by my body. But I love Paul, and I know that Tony would want me to be happy.”

A month ago, she and Presnail, a freelance writer, bought a house in St. Paul. Baumgarten says her daughter’s willingness to love again shows her “belief in the innate goodness of the world.

“You don’t get over someone’s death,” Baumgarten says. “You learn to live with it. It becomes part of you. It will always be part of you. You will go on with your life, and you will learn to live with your grief and maybe even make something out of it. That’s what Rose is doing, and she’s doing it in a very graceful way.”

D’Acquisto and Presnail will be wed May 23 in a small ceremony at a Stillwater inn. She wore white when she married Tony. When she marries Presnail, she will wear a tea-length gown of dusty pink. In a gesture to Tony, she will carry a bouquet of roses, lilies of the valley and lilacs. If nature cooperates, the lilacs on the trees outside also will be blooming.

“I wanted to get married,” D’Acquisto said, “when you could smell them in the air.”