Chicago Tribune - April 16, 2003
Mary Schmich

She died Friday night, no family around, no family to be found. Unless you count Joe McDonnell.

McDonnell was sitting at his office desk Friday afternoon when his phone rang. Could he come to Illinois Masonic Hospital right away? Anna Rokowski was dying. Somebody was needed to sign the papers releasing her into a hospice.

So McDonnell left the Chicago office of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, where he's a supervisory regional economist. When he arrived at the hospital, Anna was in a coma. She died before she made it to the hospice, but to authorize her transfer there, he signed an affidavit certifying himself as a close friend.

McDonnell had met Anna in 1999. She was living at Bonaventure House, a North Side care home for people with HIV and AIDS. He was beginning his field service as part of his studies to become a Catholic deacon.

"We saw one another in the lobby, she looked quite ill, so I struck up a conversation, asked how she was doing," McDonnell said.

She wasn't doing well, but she was a lot better off than she'd been when she was doing drugs and living in South Side boxcars. She and McDonnell started taking walks.

"She was a South Sider who felt out of place on the North Side," McDonnell said. "I was a companion on these North Side of Chicago walks."

He got to know her in fragmented bits. She told him how her big family had come up from Kentucky when she was a kid. That she had two daughters who'd been passed to foster parents. That she loved animals, especially dogs, particularly her old Irish setter.

She told him that after she discovered she was infected with HIV, she'd tried to hang herself.

He never asked her age--he's 58--but figured her to be in her early 50s by the time she died. She was a small woman, a little over 5 feet, her hair variously brunet and blond, stringier as she got sicker. Her eyes, a startling blue, glistened.

Over the years, McDonnell did Anna little favors, like driving her to the bank to help her open an account. When she converted to Catholicism three years ago, he became her godparent. Once, they took a trip to her old Back of the Yards neighborhood. She showed him the park where she used to walk her dogs, and the site of the boxcars where she used to sleep.

He got something in return.

"We could talk to one another candidly, frankly," he said. "You could bare your soul. She was always there to listen, and to offer a lot of good insight too."

Not that they saw each other all that much. McDonnell has a wife, three kids, a job, his deacon studies.

"She had her life and I had mine, but we always kept one another in the back of our minds."

That's how he came to be the closest thing she had to family on her last day of life, and how he came to stand next to her hospital bed reading funeral prayers.

Anna had been living in a nursing home, Sheridan Shores, but she'd applied to return to Bonaventure House, which she'd left reluctantly after what Bonaventure's Brother Bill Hahn calls "a little temper tantrum with the substance abuse counselor."

"I'm sure her family knew about her problems," Hahn said, but he couldn't remember family ever visiting. "We do have clients here, their family disowned them because of drug problems or HIV status, that's not unusual." Nor is it unusual, he said, for clients to hide their condition from their families.

Anna left all her belongings in a small footlocker, but nothing inside indicated how she wanted her body treated after death. McDonnell believes that the daughters, with different last names, are in Champaign-Urbana and that at least one sister is in Chicago. He just wants them to know, in case they want to know, that Anna's gone.

McDonnell has arranged for Anna to be buried by Catholic Charities at Maryhill Cemetery in Niles--he can't stand the thought of her in a pauper's grave--and one day soon, he's going to go pick up her footlocker. Sometimes friendship makes demands you never would have expected.

030416
CT030405

Always watch for outdated information. This article first appeared in 2003. This material is designed to support, not replace, the relationship that exists between you and your doctor.

AEGiS presents published material, reprinted with permission and neither endorses nor opposes any material. All information contained on this website, including information relating to health conditions, products, and treatments, is for informational purposes only. It is often presented in summary or aggregate form. It is not meant to be a substitute for the advice provided by your own physician or other medical professionals. Always discuss treatment options with a doctor who specializes in treating HIV.

Copyright ©1980, 2003. AEGiS. All materials appearing on AEGiS are protected by copyright as a collective work or compilation under U.S. copyright and other laws and are the property of AEGiS, or the party credited as the provider of the content. .