Wherever she goes beyond her recent retirement from “Good Mourning,” a bereavement program for children and families, Vicki Scalzitti will always take her son Joey with her.
“Joey is with me every single day,” Scalzitti said. “My child is as close to me as he ever was. Joey and I are very connected.”
The light of her life and a magnetic personality around his neighborhood, Joey Scalzitti drowned in an accident at 5 1/2 in a pond in Busse Woods near the family’s then-Elk Grove Village home in 1989. But instead of being consigned to a deep, dark trench of grief, Vicki Scalzitti retained all of Joey’s life force to counsel others that the loss of loved ones is not an ending by any means.
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“Grief doesn’t stop a child from becoming the person they are meant to be,” she said of her message conveyed for the better part of a generation working for the Park Ridge-founded Rainbow Hospice and Palliative Care.
Scalzitti matter-of-factly described Joey’s disappearance that enlisted a score of law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, before his body was discovered in a pond crevice.
She recalled how the search dogs had no scent to follow into nearby woods, leading would-be rescuers to the water. She also told of the police officer, assigned to her home, getting the news via radio of the grim finding, and then turning away from her likely due to the overwhelming emotions involved.
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Scalzitti estimated she has told the story more than a thousand times to individuals and groups as a teaching moment. Empathetic by nature, Scalzitti was a teacher by training, having idolized her own teachers growing up in Des Plaines, where she still lives.
Now Scalzitti can more pick and choose her activities after giving up the full-time role with “Good Mourning” program, which has been run by Rainbow Hospice since 1997.
“Years ago, I helped with the establishment of a bereavement ministry in my local Catholic Church,” she said. “Maybe I’ll go back to the bereavement industry. They also have food initiatives, filling backpacks for kids. I’ll spend a little more time with my family. I’ll do a little bit of travel. I still have groups to speak to.”
Scalzitti is the right person at the right time to help with mourning children and their families, according to longtime friend Jackie Mathews.
One in a million
“Vicki is a role model for me,” said Mathews, now executive director of the Park Ridge Chamber of Commerce, who met Scalzitti working at Rainbow Hospice in 2005. “She’s really like a miracle in how she deals with people. Vicki was the first call the superintendent of District 64 would make after the death of a teacher.”
“Here, Vicki lost her child, and turned her pain into a mission that impacted thousands of people across the country. Her kindness and her care — whenever you need to say the right thing, you ask her how to say it. There’s nobody I know better.”
Former Rainbow Hospice CEO Pat Ahern called Scalzitti a “one in a million” individual who not only took care of hospice clients, but also the company’s employees and volunteers. Always, Ahern added, her sense of purpose and timing were spot-on.
“We had a (monarch) butterfly release,” she said of an event at the hospice’s Mount Prospect office. But when the moment of the release came, the organizers found to their shock all the butterflies were dead.
“Vicki never missed a beat,” said Ahern. Scalzitti quickly reminded the assembled that all exist with life and death daily, and they needed to appreciate life.
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Another time, Scalzitti and others visited Maine East in the wake of 9/11. Scalzitti found a boy crying in the hall because his dog had died that day, but nobody was going to talk to him because of the national tragedy. But the counselor talked to the teenager.
“This has become her life’s mission,” Ahern said. “At Rainbow, she found what she would do with her life’s work.”
Resilience in children
Scalzitti has an even longer form than her talks to groups to codify her approach. She authored a 2018 book, “The Road to Good Mourning: Growing Resilient Children through the Grief Experience.”
“Mister Rogers recalled his mother years before said to look for the helpers,” she said. “It’s always an honor to come into people’s lives and provide something that people need.
“It’s helping the child identify (grief) and contain it. Sure, it’s an awful thing that happened.”
But as Scalzitti transitions to a more flexible life, she shakes her head vociferously at the level of grief many children must endure in an age of frequent mass shootings and gun violence. She is upset at the common denominator of assault weapons employed by individuals who could not access such armaments in, say, the 1970s.
“Robert Crimo III is the poster child of why it’s all about assault weapons,” she said of the person charged with the Highland Park mass shootings.
“Trauma has a greater effect when it’s by human design.”
Scalzitti said grief counseling must evolve as society around it does, often for the negative as she said violent acts, including mass shootings, become “normalized.”
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One thing that thankfully doesn’t change is the story of Joey Scalzitti. A photo his mother possesses from Dec. 1988, seven months before his death, shows a child with a radiant smile. In the manner of religions and cultures that teach that a loved one is never really gone if survivors keep talking about him or her, Scalzitti will always tell the story of a kid who seemed wise beyond his years.
“Joey was the most alive person probably I have ever encountered,” she said. “Joey was a beautiful blue-eyed Pee Wee Herman-impersonating child. He always had to do with fun and food; just this amazingly alive and hysterical person.
“When Joey died he was five and a half. A bunch of people I never knew showed up at his funeral. But he knew them. People were saying things that when they moved into the neighborhood, Joey was first person to greet them. He brought them a package of cookies.
“He took very seriously that everyone thought he had very beautiful eyes. Told him you have to learn to read, that one day you’ll have to get a job and know how to read. He looked at me, and said, ‘Why? People will give me food.’ I asked, ‘Why?’ He said; ‘My eyelashes.’
“He made me laugh every single day.”
The story repeated to those in mourning may not provoke a smile. But if it assuages grief by even a small percentage, Joey Scalzitti has” lived” yet another day thanks to a mom who has extended herself beyond most emotional limits.