A mother’s wish for her children is remembered

This is a story that I tell around Christmas time. It's the story of Mary.

Mary was a patient of mine many years ago. It's not her real name. W used because it was close to Christmas, and we called her Mary for a newspaper article.

Mary was a young woman with two preschool children. She was not doing well. This was 1985, and there were no drugs for AIDS. So it was a tough haul for her.

One day at the end of a visit, I just out of the blue asked her. “If you could do anything in the world, what would you do?”

And immediately she responded, “Take my kids to Disney World.”

And I thought, “Why not?”

We had very good relationships with media people at the time and thought we could raise some money.

And I called the reporter and asked if they wanted the story.

In the morning paper on December 17, 1985 they told the story of Mary. She was in the hospital in a wheelchair talking about how she was sick and having trouble hiding it from her children.

The story also made a pitch for donating money to help send her and her kids to Disney World. And we raised a lot of money. One man just walked into the office one day out of the blue with a check for $1,000. He said he wanted to help.

He brought us over the top and we were able to do it and we sent Mary and her two young kids and her mother to Disney World.

And when she returned from the trip of a lifetime, she was all smiles. She handed me an envelope, and in the envelope was a Minnie Mouse decal.

The Minnie Mouse decal has been on the laundry room door since Mary brought it back from Disney World. Provided by Dr. Bill Valenti

I've lived in the house I live in today for 40 years. So this decal has been on the door of the laundry room in the basement for all these years. And I smile when I go down to clean the litter box and see the Minnie Mouse decal. I see the smile on her face and the joy that it brought to her and her children.

The rest of the story is that five years ago, I got a phone call from her son. He said that the grandmother had died and he found the newspaper clippings about the story of Disney World.

He and his sister already knew that both parents had died of AIDS, so that was not a secret. The kids had driven to Rochester with their mother and grandmother for the appointments. They played in the waiting room with their grandmother while Mary saw me.

But the origin of the trip was a secret. And he told me that over the years when they were growing up, one of their fondest recollections, and their grandmother talked to them about this over the years, was this very joyful trip to Disney World that he had with his mother when she was so sick. In fact, she did Disney World in a wheelchair. But she did it.

After all these years, he still remembered the joy of that trip. And then he said he had put some money away to take his kids and his grandmother there. They did the trip one more time.

I told this story the other day to a group of new employees. I had blown up photos of Minnie Mouse and the headline in the newspaper. The point that I wanted to make is that the work that we do is important and it's all teamwork and long-lasting.

In this case, there are four generations of people involved here who remember the good work that the community did to send this woman to Disney World before she died.

There's a lot of cliches going up through your head here. All the gift that keeps on giving and all this crossing generations and lasting a lifetime and all that. But it's true.

I think it was a unique time in our history where people pulled together toward a goal of wanting to do something. And I think it's unique to not just Rochester, but certainly it  reminds us of the great community spirit here and how people are willing to get involved in a difficult and unpopular cause because it's the right thing to do.