Selfless service touches hearts
Sunday, June 29, 2008
By Tom Rademacher
The Grand Rapids Press
Dying now, and with less than two months left, she grasped the pencil with her right hand as best she could, trapping it between a rigid thumb and forefinger.

She stabbed at the pad on her lap, and in the laborious way amyotrophic lateral sclerosis demands of its victims, barely managed to write two questions and hold them up to Lisa Schuel.

"How's Brittany?" she asked of Schuel's daughter. And then of the other, "What's Taiylor doing?"

Pure Marianne. Vintage Marianne.

"I smiled," remembers Schuel, "because I knew that would be the first thing she would try to convey -- something about someone other than herself."

Marianne Longo-Casarez was unable to walk or talk that day, but in the only manner left for her to communicate, she did what she did best -- giving on a day when it might have been so much easier for her to take.

Eight weeks later, she was dead of the same degenerative muscular disease sometimes named for baseball great Lou Gehrig, who left New York's Yankee Stadium humbly considering himself "the luckiest man on the face of this Earth."

Given a voice in her final stages of ALS, Longo-Casarez might have uttered similar sentiments, if only for the countless patients she served in her 30-plus years as a registered nurse at Metro Health Hospital.

So beloved was she by administrators, doctors and co-workers that the facility planned to unveil a work of art this afternoon in her honor and hang it in a hallway leading to a surgical unit.

No doubt they all will tell variations on the same theme: That nearly to a fault, she honored others more than herself.

"She always wanted to know everything about you," said Schuel, a nurse manager and one of Longo-Casarez's superiors. "She was always making connections with patients, and keeping it personal."

Added longtime colleague Abbe Hildebrandt, a registered nurse: "She would turn the conversation around so it was about you. Even when she was ill."

Longo-Casarez grew up in Grand Rapids and graduated in 1968 from Catholic Central High School before earning her nursing degree from Ferris State University.



With husband George, she had two boys, now both in their 20s. They've been invited along with Longo-Casarez's mother Julianne, 84, and others to take part in today's ceremony.

'Her hobbies were people'

It will pay tribute not to a donor, nor philanthropist nor someone with traditional power or influence, but a diminutive nurse who worked the trenches.

When it was time to discharge patients and provide them a day's supply of dressings, Longo-Casarez snuck a little extra into their take-home bag.

When patients went home without their meds, Longo-Casarez drove out of her way after work to deliver them to their residence.

"Her hobbies," said fellow registered nurse Candy VanValkenburg, "were people."

After she was diagnosed in 2006, co-worker Linda Gabrielse helped design and then stitched the bulk of a prayer-and-care quilt for their terminally ill friend with handwritten messages from staff. It adorned Longo-Casarez's casket during her funeral Mass in February.

Artist Lori Bearss was commissioned to produce a work of art, and fashioned a mixed-media collage inspired by the quilt. It features bold blues, bright yellows and soothing shades of pink and lavender.

Look close, and you can see repeated words such as faith, hope, charity and love.

On the grounds of the hospital now located in Wyoming, there are plans as well to plant a tree in her memory.

In time, it will boast a growing shadow, but none as large as that which Longo-Casarez cast during more than three decades of selfless service.

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