(Steve Griffin | The Salt Lake Tribune) Tony Velasquez and his hospice chaplain, Peter Nackowski, laugh during Nackowski's visit to Tony's Syracuse, Utah, home Wednesday Feb. 24, 2010. Velasquez, a Navy veteran and submarine mechanic, died at age 60 on Dec. 11, 2012, more than six years after he was diagnosed with a degenerative disease.
It has been more than three years since Tony Velasquez got the news no one wants to hear. He is dying. It?s just a matter of time.
And yet on this day in March 2010, he tells his friend, hospice chaplain Peter Nackowski, a story that is all about life.
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Editor?s note
Tony Velasquez, a Navy veteran and submarine mechanic, died at age 60 on Dec. 11, 2012, more than six years after he was diagnosed with a degenerative disease. The Salt Lake Tribune spent time over several months with Velasquez and his hospice chaplain, Peter Nackowski, to better understand the chaplain-patient relationship. This story provides a snapshot from that period.
Velasquez?s 4-year-old grandson, Corbin, had been watching him whip up pancakes over the weekend and suggested another ingredient.
"Stir in some love," Corbin told his grandpa.
"That was a moment, wasn?t it?" asks Nackowski.
"It was," says Velasquez. "It was."
Once a week for an hour or so, Nackowski visits Tony Velasquez at the Syracuse home he shares with his wife, Robin Velasquez, a house that increasingly is Tony?s world.
Tony no longer rides a four-wheeler in the Uinta Mountains nor "invites the fish for breakfast" with a graphite rod ? pastimes that once reminded him of the beloved peaks surrounding his hometown of Ignacio, Colo.
Although Tony feels closest to God in "the chapel of the whispering pines," he rebuffs many of his wife?s attempts to take him for a drive for fear that it will only remind him of everything he no longer can do in the outdoors.
"What it does is take the disease and stick it in my face," Tony says one day in early summer. "Sometimes, I don?t like where I?m at."
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It?s Nackowski?s job to help Tony with perspective, to help him tap into his spiritual reservoir.
"The most enlightening thing for me with people facing an indefinite prognosis," Nackowski says, "is the courage they build over time ? and the joy when they?re able to experience [dying] free of fear."
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Trouble in paradise ? It was 2006 when the Velasquezes first noticed something odd about his gait. Tremors, too, showed up while they were visiting friends in Hawaii that year.
The Aloha State held good memories for the couple, who met on a Navy ship in North Carolina and married in 1992 after each of their prior marriages failed. Each of them has two daughters.
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Source: http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/lifestyle/55599761-80/chaplain-couple-death-hospice.html.csp
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