“Daddy Loves Mommy” :(
This evening Mikey came down with a fever. Not sure where it came from at all. One thermometer had it going all the way up to 105 and another around 103. Regardless that’s HIGH. He was also complaining that his tummy was hurting. So instead of having a real meal I just gave him some bread for dinner to keep things simple on his tummy. Well came time to put him to bed and he insisted that mommy go to bed too so I laid there next to him. We sang songs and all of a sudden he stopped and said “Daddy Loves Mommy”. *Sniff* it was so sweet. Just out of nowhere too. We weren’t really even talking about Gary at the time and all of a sudden he burst out with that. When I ask Mikey where daddy is he points to the window and says sky with the moon and stars. This is only going to get harder the older he gets 
Letter from Heaven
Even though Gary wasn’t into religion or anything partly because of his scientific background I thought this was touching:
To my dearest family, some things I’d like to say…
but first of all, to let you know, that I arrived okay.
I’m writing this from heaven. Here I dwell with God above.
Here, there’s no more tears of sadness; here is just eternal love.
Please do not be unhappy just because I’m out of sight.
Remember that I’m with you every morning, noon and night.
That day I had to leave you when my life on earth was through,
God picked me up and hugged me and He said, “I welcome you.”
It’s good to have you back again; you were missed while you were gone.
As for your dearest family, they’ll be here later on.
I need you here badly; you’re part of my plan.
There’s so much that we have to do, to help our mortal man.”
God gave me a list of things, that he wished for me to do.
And foremost on the list, was to watch and care for you.
And when you lie in bed at night, the day’s chores put to flight.
God and I are closest to you….in the middle of the night.
When you think of my life on earth, and all those loving years
because you are only human, they are bound to bring you tears.
But do not be afraid to cry; it does relieve the pain.
Remember there would be no flowers, unless there was some rain.
I wish that I could tell you all that God has planned.
But if I were to tell you, you wouldn’t understand.
But one thing is for certain, though my life on earth is o’er.
I’m closer to you now, than I ever was before.
There are many rocky roads ahead of you and many hills to climb;
but together we can do it by taking one day at a time.
It was always my philosophy and I’d like it for you too…
that as you give unto the world, the world will give to you.
If you can help somebody who’s in sorrow and pain,
then you can say to God at night……”My day was not in vain.”
And now I am contented….that my life has been worthwhile,
knowing as I passed along the way, I made somebody smile.
So if you meet somebody who is sad and feeling low,
just lend a hand to pick him up, as on your way you go.
When you’re walking down the street, and you’ve got me on your mind;
I’m walking in your footsteps only half a step behind.
And when it’s time for you to go…. from that body to be free,
remember you’re not going…..you’re coming here to me.
~Author~ Ruth Ann Mahaffey
TGIF??? I think not!
Call me bitter but I’ll never be thankful that its Friday. Friday’s are a reminder of losing my best friend, my husband, Mikey’s daddy. It’s only been 4 Friday’s but my Friday’s always start the same. A BIG sigh that I’m even up at 6am to get up for work. Then another sigh at 6:30 because that’s when my cell rang 4 Friday’s ago. I remember so vividly the feeling I got. My heart pounding like it was about to jump out of my chest. Racing across the pergo in our room hoping to not fall and break my leg while trying to gather some clothes to throw on to race to the hospital. Then waking up everyone I could in the house so that I didn’t go to ICU alone.
I remember getting to the hospital and running the hall to the elevators, then running again from the elevators on the 3rd floor to get to Gary’s room. The lights were all turned on. The curtain pulled. A bunch of people around his bed, performing CPR. I remember the doc coming out at one point to tell me that they’d try for 30 minutes, that was the max. I guess after 30 minutes he’s technically brain dead. As the clock ticked my panic grew and grew.
Now when I look at the clock and its 7:10am on a Friday I remember sitting there in front of his room hearing the doctor call the time. I heard it so vividly. Her voice is one I’ll never be able to forget. I remember sitting there as they came out of his room and the doc came up to me and I let out a scream because I didn’t want to hear what she had to tell me. I knew Gary was gone.
So yeah I’ll never be thankful its Friday. Maybe one day when I’m senile I will be. But right now nope not gonna happen. To top it off I get to go through a weekend and then I get hit by what will be the 1st day of February. I’ll have hit a month without my Gary. One freaking month! It’s still seems to unreal and yet the pain is still so very raw.
An Honored Hero!
This afternoon, much to my surprise, I got an email from Jill over at the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society’s South Florida Chapter asking me how I felt about having Gary as one of their Honored Hero’s for the 2010 Light the Night Walks. I could not believe I was being asked this. What an HONOR to even be asked about this. I immediately wrote back and told her that on behalf of my family we’d be honored for Gary to be one of their Honored Hero’s this year. I STILL can’t believe I was asked this but I have the email as proof 
Not in a million years would Gary ever think that he’d be considered an Honored Hero for anything let alone something cancer related. Just the thought that the local chapter thought of Gary just amazes me and I’m just speechless and so very humbled by it. Such an amazing honor for Gary and shoot for Mikey and I too to be apart of. Mikey will be barely 3 years old at this year’s walks and I hope he’ll somehow remember everything about it because this year will be a much different walk for us. This year instead of Gary walking with us with his white survivor balloon, survivor t-shirt, and his big ole walking stick we’ll be walking for him holding his lit up gold balloon. *sigh* It won’t be an easy walk to do at all but I know Gary will be there with us in spirit and he’ll be smiling down and Mikey and me for continuing the fight for him.
I’m the team captain of 2 teams this year. One for the Miami walk and another for the Ft. Lauderdale walk. When I posted earlier about how I really felt this was my mission in life, I’m serious about it. It’s my mission to help the LLS raise as much money as possible to help bring a cure to blood cancers.
So if you can spare some of your hard-earned money please do not hesitate to donate towards a FANTASTIC cause. Here are the links to my two personal pages Miami Walk and Ft. Lauderdale Walk. You can donate to either one of my donation pages. Really every little bit helps us out.
Help me meet my goal of $1000 so that I can get my medal like I promised Gary I would at last year’s walk 
From the bottom of my heart <3
Dear Ultimate Software Employees,
You all are the most fabulous group of individuals on the planet! Words cannot describe how appreciative I am right now of everything you have done for our family during this past year. Most of you don’t know but Gary only applied for a job there because I pushed him. Why switch jobs if you have something good right? Well back in the summer of 2008 I happened across this article on Sun-Sentinel’s website about how great of a company you were. The comments I read made it seem like it was too good to be true. Well I sent the article to Gary because not only was it a software company but it was in Weston, practically down the street from our house. WAY better than a 45-60min drive to Boca one-way. Just so happens Gary had a former coworker at Ultimate and he contacted him to see if it was too good to be true and it wasn’t. So I pushed him even more to get that resume put together so that we could try to get him a job there.
I’ll never forget the day that he was offered the job. We were on the way back home from one of his oncologist appointment, just another one of his every 3 month appointments because he was a wait-n-watch patient with “leukemia” at the time. We both knew that he was going to take that job and you know what I’m so happy that he did. From the moment that he joined Ultimate Software he has LOVED everything about his job. Let’s face it a programming job is not glamorous no matter what you are programming, but to him it was more than doing what he loved, it was the environment and people he was around.
He always had the fondest things to say about his coworkers. He always raved about the days that the ice cream man would come driving up to give everyone their ice cream. We both thought it was amazing that just a month after he joined we were invited on a company trip to Universal, even if our poor Mikey had the hives from a bad reaction to amoxicillan. Ultimate truly did live up to that Sun-Sentinel article.
But Ultimate has gone above and beyond what any other company has done to date, at least in my opinion. From the moment that Gary told them that he had lymphoma and needed treatment they opened up their hearts to our little family. You all helped us out at the very beginning by raising money for us so that we weren’t overwhelmed by the cost of traveling to and from Maryland every 3 weeks. When Gary was in the hospital and needed platelet transfusions you all immediately called up the Blood Bank and had them set up shop for platelet donations just for him. The response was so high that you all had to send willing people home and offered to have the blood bank come back out the following week.
Today I had the pleasure of having lunch with some fabulous individuals from the Ultimate family, when I say family I mean it, they’ve done everything to make me feel like I’m family just like Gary was family to them too. We had a wonderful lunch at a local Mexican restaurant that Gary really enjoyed eating at. A few weeks ago they had told me that they were raising money for Mikey and at lunch they presented me with the money that they raised. To top it off they dedicated the first release of this year’s Ultipro software to Gary. In the release they hid what they call an Easter Egg. Which is a page that you have to go to and enter in a specific key combination and bam the Easter Egg (aka image) pops up. Here’s Gary’s Easter Egg:
In the online community Gary was known at MrPixar. He LOVED everything Pixar so when asked for my idea of what a good Easter Egg should be for him I told his team the little light guy from the Pixar logo. So that’s why you see them on the screen shot. I LOVE this and I’m so honored to have something to show Mikey later on in life about his fabulous father.
The text under Gary’s picture says:
This release of Ultipro is
dedicated to one of our fallen.
Gary Thomas Zullo
2/25/1976-1/1/2010
Development misses you
Honestly I can’t even tell you all how grateful I am. Gary would be beyond touched at everything you all have done for our family, and you better believe that little Mikey will know about how wonderful his company was to us. He had always told me that you made a life-long employee of him, sad that it came true so soon, but believe me when I say that he was so proud to call himself an Ultimate employee. Seeing how happy he was to go to the office every day made me happy because I knew even as sick and crappy as he felt at times he was going to a good place
Thank you from the bottom of my heart. I’ll NEVER forget everything you’ve done for us.
Love Always,
Sam and Mikey
Fulfilling his wishes
Gary would be soooooo proud of me for doing stuff that he has wanted to do for quite some time but just never got around to it for whatever reason. For the longest time he has talked about getting a brick for himself and one for us that would appear at Westcott Plaza at FSU. For those of you that have never been to FSU it’s a beautiful spot with a beautiful fountain. As a student it was a big deal to be dunked in the fountain, almost like you weren’t broken in as a true Seminole until you were dunked in Westcott fountain.
When we were in school they had just started selling bricks and we’ve always talked about getting one for us. Well instead of getting one for us I ordered one for him. It takes at most 6 months to get installed but once its in they’ll tell me exactly where its located.
I also ordered a replica brick for home which I plan on passing along to Mikey one day.
The bricks will say the following:
Gary T. Zullo
Class of 2000
1976-2010
I was limited by the number of lines and the amount of text I could put on there. So that was the best I could think of. I’m now looking forward to this fall when I plan on heading up to Tallahassee with Mikey for his first football game and I can’t wait to see Gary’s brick in place.
Some moments are just HARD
This evening was just hard. I don’t know why all of a sudden I broke down. I quietly cried hiding my face so that I didn’t have to hear little Mikey say “Mommy don’t cry”. For some reason our song popped into my head and the tears just came pouring from my eyes. Then the random thoughts of Gary not being there for anymore Disney trips with Mikey. He won’t be there to see Mikey graduate high school or college. He won’t see Mikey get married or see and enjoy his grandkids. We won’t have the moment in the nursing home racing down the hall in our power scooters like we had talked about when we were newlyweds watching two teens racing down the aisles at walmart in the store’s power scooters. We always teased each other about it and I was secretly hoping to grow old with him, but that’ll never happen. Never. Yeah he’s “with” me. But he’s not WITH me. I hate the fact that I can’t sleep in my own house. Things will never be the same.
Everyone else’s lives has returned to normal and mine is still upside down. It’s not getting easier, its getting harder. Just like our wedding officiant, turned reverend for Gary’s services, said at his services, its the weeks coming when I’ll need the support the most. When everyone else has returned to normal, that’s when its going to hit me and he couldn’t have been more spot on.
Finally some closure
Yesterday we found out that Gary’s ashes were ready to be picked up so my mom and I went by the funeral home this morning to pick them up. To my surprise they had the death certificates ready too. We didn’t expect those to be ready until Monday or Tuesday but they had them ready today so of course I’ll take them! Well as expected I had requested his ashes were already inside his beautiful urn. Also as expected they were HEAVY! I thought it would be difficult to pick up his ashes, urn, and death certificates but I think after the stressful week I had working on getting all of these I was sorta numb to it all. When I got him in my car I put him in the passenger seat since he normally sat there. And I held onto the box the entire ride to my mom’s house. It was nice to have Gary back even if its not the way I’d prefer.
I’m pretty sure I’m still in the denial phase of grief because I look at the urn. I know it has his ashes. I see his name on top of it but does it feel like its Gary inside. Not at all. I know one day it’ll hit me and I’ll realize that it indeed is Gary inside that wooden urn, but for now I sorta have comfort being in my denial phase. It’s nice to not have to cry my eyes out every day. And yes you can go ahead and call me a crazy widow because I’ll admit that I did talk to his urn
My new purpose/passion in life
I think I have found my purpose in life besides the being a loving wife and mother job that I’ll gladly say I’ve done a damn good job at
Besides my passion to help raise as much money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society to help bring us that much closer to a cure I’ve recently discovered that I have another passion, being somewhat of a patient advocate. While Gary was going through chemo I quickly learned what kind of healthcare was ideal and what flat out SUCKED. So it should not be a surprise if I tell you that normal healthcare just flat out sucks and definitely NEEDS changing.
Now I won’t be the first person to say that the healthcare plan that the Obama administration is trying to push through sooooooo fast isn’t the solution. I don’t think its that easy to overhaul a poor product. Ok enough of my soapbox political mumbo jumbo, now on to the real purpose of my post.
On two separate occasions when I took Gary to one of the Memorial Healthcare system hospitals we were asked who his primary care physician was when we checked into the ER. This is the norm no matter what ER you go to. Well our primary care physician is associated with the Memorial Healthcare system. He has rights to see patients at these hospitals, for gods sake the guy has an office in one of those hospitals so he better have rights!
Well on both occasions the hospital failed to even notify our primary care physician that Gary was in the ER. On the first trip I had taken Gary because he developed an oncologic fever. They ran cultures on him immediately. I had to call our primary only because the doctor the hospital assigned to Gary refused to release him and wanted to keep him in the hospital for 36 hours until his blood cultures came back. That wasn’t acceptable to us because we had to be on the plane back to the NIH the next day. After getting in touch with the on-call doctor for our primary he met us at the hospital and took over the case and you better believe he got Gary discharged!
On this last trip Gary was once again assigned some doctor that wasn’t associated with his primary doctor. The day after Gary was admitted I saw Gary’s wristband and saw the name of the doctor who wasn’t our primary doc, and immediately told the nurse about it. She said she couldn’t do anything about it. I told the nurse manager, he couldn’t do anything about it. Finally I told THE actual doctor that’s name was on the wristband that I wanted GARY’S primary doc to take over the case and he said he’d talk to them. Ummmmm let’s just say that NEVER happened, NEVER.
What the hell is the point in asking a patient who their primary care physician is if you have no intention on calling them at all. It took ME to call our primary for them to even know that Gary was admitted, that was 3 days after Gary was in the hospital in ICU!!!! It took ME to call our primary for them to even know that Gary was D-E-A-D! In my opinion that is unacceptable. The patient and their family should NOT have to be the ones to deal with this crap. They should just have to worry about being supportive for the patient and getting the patient back to good health.
I just so happened to have an appointment with our primary doctor this morning and I brought this up and she looked over my file and noticed our insurance type and she noticed it was a PPO. She said that’s why they didn’t call them. It’s because with PPO all of the doctors know they’ll get a decent payout from the insurance company so why the hell would they even bother to give the money to MY doctor. Better to keep it in the family right? This pisses me off and you better believe I’ll write a letter and call whomever I need to in order to voice my opinion.
This should not happen EVER, its extremely unacceptable and its not fair to all of the patients out there! You better believe this will not be the last you hear about this topic from me.
Finally a step forward
With the help of my aunt, Gloria, we’ve made progress on the death certificate/cremation front. She followed up with the funeral home and the medical examiner’s office first thing this morning. The funeral home had faxed over the amended death certificate that now DID mention that Gary had lymphoma to the medical examiner’s office this morning. Within a few hours the medical examiner’s office did their part. This means that Gary’s body will finally get to be cremated. I did NOT want to know when this was going to happen but now because of the circumstances I know that its going to be happening today and that I should have his ashes with me tomorrow or the next day at the latest. In a way I’m comforted knowing that I’ll soon have Gary back, even if its not the way I’d prefer. At least I know he’s not going to be sitting in some body storage place awaiting being turned to ashes.
No widow should ever have to deal with something like this. Losing your loved one is enough to deal with.
A recent widow and single mom doing my best to survive on my own.
Last year I told Gary that I'd raise $1k at the 2010 walk, please help me reach my goal. This year Gary is one of the Honored Heroes for the walk so its even extra special to me. :) Just click on the Sponsor Me image to be taken to my fundraising page. Thank you!!!
Help me get to my 1st Half Marathon in Walt Disney World where I will run in memory of Gary :)
