Fostering Love: Caregiving Parents Lose Daughter 30 Years After She was Supposed to Die

Daughter is Gone, Aging Parents Wonder Who Are We Now?

After 30 years of caring for a disabled daughter, time for parents to grieve and care for themselves

Bridgette, the beloved, ever-smiling, devastatingly disabled daughter of Tom and Marijane Famulari, passed away early this morning.

Aging, caregiving parents must learn to care for themselves

These remarkable parents, full of more love and faith and generosity than most of us can even imagine, were prepared for this mournful moment nearly 30 years ago. Back then, they were midlife parents of teenagers who agreed to take in a deathly ill, ‘medically fragile' girl as a foster child.

I shared their story on the front page of The Washington Post, in 1988, when I was a twenty-something summer intern. Here is what I wrote back then:

The Joys of Fostering a Special Child; Disabled Girl Teaches Md. Family Unconditional Love

"Tom and Maryjane Famulari already have made plans for their 2 1/2-year-old foster daughter's funeral: The service will be the Mass of the Angels, her dress will be lavender with a white pinafore, and they will play her favorite song, "Hosanna."
Their daughter Bridgette is a 28-pound child who was born three months prematurely. She is profoundly retarded, has cerebral palsy and breathes through a transparent tube that runs from a hole at the base of her throat to a steel oxygen tank near her crib. She has been hospitalized more than 80 times.
Despite her long list of medical problems, the Famularis agreed at Bridgette's birth to become her foster parents. "She gives so much more than we can give to her," said Tom Famulari, 40, a high school biology teacher in Baltimore.
"Everybody needs love and to die in dignity," said homemaker Maryjane Famulari, 40, coaxing a pout from her daughter that quickly slid into a contagious smile. "She knows what it is to be loved. She can't hold her head up, but she has a joy about her that I can't explain."

Doctors told them she would die soon. They planned her funeral and fought like warriors to keep her alive with the sheer force of their will, love, faith and extraordinarily difficult 24/7 care their daughter required. And their 'foster' daughter quickly became simply their daughter—by love and law.

Thirty years later they found me again, said I wouldn't believe their journey.

Read the rest of their story: Fostering Love: The Extraordinary Story of the Life of a Dying Child