Grieving Pesoli family struggles to cope with loss of their beloved 'Vito Boy'

By Mark J. Valentino

Entering the Pesoli home, you cannot help but be reminded of the tremendous love and incredible bond that developed over 25 years between father and mother, sister and brother. Images of happy times and smiling faces adorn the refrigerator door, living room walls and mantel, collages in the family recreation room, and nearly everywhere else you turn.

No one’s smile is brighter than that of Vito “Vito Boy” Pesoli Jr.

“Vito was always a very happy baby, he hardly ever cried," recalled his father, Vito Sr. "He woke up smiling and went to bed smiling. He was a lot of joy. He used to be at my side all the time, and as a family we always did things together."

From the beginning, Vito and his wife, Terri, set a goal to do everything possible to provide a loving and nurturing home for their children, Vito Jr. and Stephanie.

Vito came from a large Italian family on Taylor Street, one of eight kids whom John “Fazol” and Rose “Rosie” Pesoli brought up during the hard-scrabble times of the 1960s and '70s, before the Near West Side underwent a renaissance and became a popular place to raise a family.

Terri, on the other hand, grew up in a broken home; her parents divorced and she found herself out on her own when she was 18.

Somehow, they found each other, believed in each other, and knew deep in their hearts they could blend the best of their Italian-American and Irish-American heritages to create a family filled with love and joy, laughter and promise.

Even the boat they bought recently symbolizes what they built over the past 25 years. “We named it ‘Gaelic & Garlic,’” Vito said with a smile.

They sit across the table from one another, surrounded by family vacation pictures and years of photos showing their children growing up before their very eyes.

Vito remains as ruggedly handsome as in his youth, and Terri’s bright blue eyes still sparkle. Seeing photos of Vito Jr. and Stephanie, you see the apples did not fall far from the tree.

“We knew that if we had a son that he’d be named Vito,” recalled Terri. “It worked out well because he carried his father’s Italian traits. We weren’t too sure about Stephanie until she was born and we could see her light colored hair and the way she carried my family’s genes. There really was no other name for her.”

“I used to tease Stephanie that if she was born a boy and looked Italian like her brother, I was going to name her Mario Enrico. She used to get so mad,” Vito said with a hearty laugh.

Laughter used to fill the Pesoli home, but now it comes in fits and spurts. Vito and Terri have to remind themselves it is okay to laugh and smile even though their tears and heartbreak will be with them for a long time.

The tragedy of July 22
Vito Jr. was only 22 years old that early Saturday morning of July 22 when he took his own life. Though their beloved Vito Boy had his share of trials and tribulations, Vito and Terri could not see his depths of inner despair.

“We had a very good life with Vito,” his father said. “The hardest thing to say is ‘suicide’—that our son committed suicide.”

Just mentioning the word causes tears to well up in Terri’s and Vito’s eyes. They know they must lean on the foundation they built as a family to carry them through one of life’s most difficult journeys.

Before his death, things seemed to be falling into place for Vito Jr. The day before he died he had applied for a job in the reptile section of a pet store. As a young boy with allergies, a dog was out of the question, so he turned to exotic pets such as lizards and snakes, and even had a flying squirrel. Sitting in the Pesoli living room, you can hear the sound of crickets nearby. “Oh, that’s dinner for Vito Boy’s pet lizard," Terri said, smiling. "I can’t part with it and finally built up enough courage to feed it.”

Vito Jr. also had enrolled in emergency medical training classes at Wright Community College in preparation for a career as a paramedic with the Chicago Fire Department.

For Vito and Terri to unlock the “why” behind Vito Boy’s death, they have had to travel back in time, a cathartic trip of retracing their steps as parents and turning over every rock along the way.

“Vito was always sensitive and loving,” said Vito Sr. “He was warm and very intelligent. He talked early and walked early.

“Whenever he left the house, he always gave Terri and me a hug and a kiss. The same with the neighbors on the block and everyone he greeted that he knew. He was always respectful and went out of his way to cross the street to say hello.”

“He didn’t care if you were a man or a woman,” added Terri. “If he knew you, he always gave you a hug and a kiss.”

Vito Boy and Stephanie, just 16 months apart, started preschool together. Vito told his young son, “Now, you be sure to watch your sister.” Terri remembered calling the school later that morning to see how Stephanie was doing and was told she was fine but that Vito had a problem. “I was shocked,” Terri said. “What I found out was that Vito wouldn’t let anyone go near his sister, not even the teachers.”

Vito played every team sport growing up but made time to explore his artistic talent. He played guitar and clarinet, and for four years he and Stephanie appeared in The Nutcracker at the Arie Crown Theatre. In their last year with the show, Vito and Stephanie performed an important dance part together.

Always together
“We did everything with the kids—they were always with us,” Vito said. “Vito Boy was my shadow when we were younger. When I was gardening, he would be right there digging with me, finding spiders and worms. I worked nights to help raise my kids. I’m so happy that I did that for eight-and-a-half years. I was a lunchroom dad, a scout leader, and a baseball coach.”

“The kids were on traveling sports teams and we went to all their games,” added Terri. “If they both had games the same day, Vito would go to one and I’d go to the other and then we’d reverse it the next time so nobody felt left out.”

Family meant a lot to Vito Boy, especially in seventh and eighth grade when the normal teasing among classmates and neighborhood kids grew meaner. Diagnosed with asthma at one year old, the medication he took discolored his teeth. He also had to wear glasses at a young age. Add ballet lessons to the mix and it is easy to see how teasing could get out of hand.

“The name calling really bothered him, it really hurt him, and the kids stopped playing with him,” recalled Terri.

Vito Boy pushed ahead and became involved in football, volleyball, and bowling at Loyola Academy in Wilmette. Then, the summer before his sophomore year, he experienced a life altering event. The football players were taking their annual physicals, but Vito Boy was torn between taking the exam and attending a St. Jude Society dinner to honor Vito Sr.’s parents, John and Rose.

“He wanted to go to the awards ceremony for his ‘nani’ and ‘papa,’ so I told Vito that I would take him to my doctor the next day,” Vito noted. “Maybe that was meant to be because this doctor found the problem that Vito had with his kidney.”

Shocking results
When Vito Boy's routine urine test showed high protein levels, the doctor sent him to a nephrologist; an ultrasound test revealed Vito Boy had been born with only one kidney. More shocking, that kidney was functioning at only 25%.

“It was so hard to believe—he was always active—no symptoms, no signs, no anything,” Terri said.
The race was on to find a donor.

“Vito didn’t want a cadaver as a donor, he wanted someone he knew. So my husband and his Uncle Dominic [Pesoli] were the first to be tested,” Terri recalled. Although Vito's tissue test showed he was only a 50% match, the family decided to go ahead with the surgery. Two weeks before the operation, a 17-year-old boy from downstate Illinois died; his kidney was an 83% match.

“We told Vito that the decision was up to him, that we couldn’t force him to do it,” said Terri. “He decided…to go ahead with it…if his body didn’t accept the donated kidney he still had his daddy as a back-up. That’s when the anger came in—after the transplant.”

The surgery meant Vito Boy could no longer play any major sports. He also had to take 48 pills daily.
“He could get very angry and depressed." Vito said. "He wanted to do what everybody else was doing. Vito held a lot of stuff in. He never wanted to burden us and his sister.”

Vito Boy also struggled with having a kidney from someone outside his family.

“I remember when Stephanie had her tonsils out, I remarked to Vito Boy that she didn’t look good,” Vito recalled. “He said to me, ‘Well, it can’t be as bad as not knowing where you got your kidney from.’"

“We made an appointment with a psychologist,” Terri recalled. “He wasn’t happy that we were going. He felt that things were always happening to him. So now, here we were, going to take him to a psychologist—another stigma against him.”

Six years ago, Vito Boy began another round of emotional blows when Terri’s brother, Eugene, died suddenly. Three years later, his grandfather, John Pesoli, died of cancer. In April, Terri’s elderly great-aunt passed died at 87.

“Vito was extremely sensitive,” Terri explained. “Whenever someone would die, he would get very upset.”

Being "different"
As Vito Boy grew older, his physical limitations constantly reminded him he was “different.” Also, he was able to reduce daily meds to nine pills daily, but they still created adverse effects. To fit in with his friends, he took up social drinking.

“When I was young I, too, wanted to go out with my buddies and have a drink,” Vito said. “But Terri and I always reminded Vito that he had to be very careful because of his health situation.”

“There’s so much peer pressure on young people today,” Vito added. “If you don’t do what everybody else is doing, forget it, they push you aside, and you’re isolated. When he was younger, it was, ‘If I don’t do what they're doing I won’t have any friends because they won’t let me hang out with them.’ He had to fight that all the time. He had this internal struggle because he wanted to do the things he was brought up to do—but he had other people telling him, ‘C’mon, if you don’t do this, you can’t hang with us.’

“As strange as this may sound, Vito felt like he didn’t have many friends. Yet there were so many people who loved him. At the wake, so many people said, ‘I don’t know how he could have said that he didn’t have any friends."

The events leading up to Vito Boy’s death are clear in Terri’s and Vito’s minds, but why he took his own life remains murky.

“He was just getting on track with his life,” Vito said. “Not long ago, Vito was getting dressed to go out. He got into a habit of wearing French cuffed shirts and loved to wear nice cuff links. He always was meticulous in his dress and had to make sure his hair was combed perfectly and his cross matched his outfit. He asked me how he looked, and I told him, ‘You are beautiful."

The last Friday
The day before he died, Vito Boy had planned to go out with a girl he had been dating and some of her friends. Before he left the house that night, he called his grandmother, Rose Pesoli, to wish her happy birthday.

“Hey Non, Happy Birthday, I’ll see you Sunday at your party. I love you,” is how Vito recalled his son’s conversation on the phone.

“My mother told him, ‘Don’t drink’ because that’s what we always told him. “It was always the same for him and Stephanie, ‘Be good, be safe, and check in. We love you.’”

Instead of fun, Vito Boy's evening brought a volatile combination of drinking, a fight with another fellow at a party, and a break-up with his girlfriend.

Around 3:30 Saturday morning, Vito Boy’s girlfriend called his parents, saying had argued and he left the party alone. Terri and Vito immediately went looking for their son; when they couldn’t find him in the neighborhood, Vito returned home and Terri kept driving around. At 4:30, Vito called Terri saying their son was home.

When she got back, “I was talking to him and he was crying," Terri said. "He was really upset. ‘Mom, I didn’t start the fight, I promise you, I didn’t start it. I begged him not to [fight with me] and then he turned around and broke my nose.’ He was pacing back and forth. He went back into the house, and then he walked outside again. He had this thing, to see if I could keep up with him, and I was always on his tail.”

After calming down, Vito Boy went inside and washed up.

“Normally, he would take a shower, but this time he just washed his face and hands,” Vito said. “Terri said to me, ‘I’m glad you didn’t argue with him tonight,’ and I told her, ‘What am I going to get [out of arguing]? I’ll talk to him in the morning."

Vito Boy went upstairs to his room, and as his parents sat watching TV in the recreation room downstairs, they could hear him kick off his shoes and get ready for bed.

Terri had told Vito Boy she would give him 15 minutes and then check in on him. “Sometimes, if something happened that upset him, I would lie down and talk with him or just play with his hair," she said. "I’d tell him how much I loved him and that things were going to be okay.”
When Terri checked on Vito Boy, she started screaming for Vito.

'Please make him come back'
“I tried to resuscitate him until the Fire Department could arrive,” Vito said. “I kept telling him how much I loved him. ‘You can’t do this! You can’t do this!’ And I kept asking God to please make him come back.” But Vito Boy was gone.

“It’s painful every day,” Vito shared. “There’s a big void in your life, and everywhere you go there are memories because we did everything together.”

“Our first grocery shopping together after he died was just horrible,” said Terri. “We were both so depressed. I didn’t want to shop. Vito Boy loved to eat—he loved his mother’s cooking."
Vito Boy’s room remains as it was the night he died.

“We walk in and out of his bedroom and we talk to him all the time," Vito said. "We tell him how much we love him. We’ll go in his closet and just smell his clothes and his cologne.”

“While he was in high school, Vito gave me this CD by Boyz II Men called Momma, said Terri. “The song tells how mom is always there no matter what. I just play it over and over and look at the pictures and feel like he’s telling me, ‘Thank you for being there for me, and no matter what, you didn’t judge me.’

“I sleep in his room and hold his pajamas and sometimes I sit there and put on his shoes so that I’m feeling like I’m holding him as much as I possibly can.”

Stephanie created a small shrine in Vito Boy’s room. On weekends home from college, she places a fresh rose in a vase on the shrine.
Looking back on that night, Vito wonders if hard liquor and medications created an imbalance or if his son's frustration and depression finally caused him to say, “The hell with it.”

“Vito always would talk against suicide,” said his father. “In fact, not long before he died, he was on the phone with [his former girlfriend, Stephanie], and they were talking about how many of their friends had been killed in car accidents or died by their own hands and how much they were against it.

“Whenever we would hear about someone committing suicide, Terri and I would say, ‘Look Vito, a young life is gone. Who do think hurts now? It’s the parents, the siblings, the grandparents, the cousins, the friends, and on and on. It’s a domino that affects everyone in the family.’ And Vito Boy would say, ‘Yeah, I don’t know how anybody can do that.’

“I relive that night in my mind all the time,” said Terri. “I look at his pictures and say, ‘Vito, why? Why didn’t you come to Mommy and Daddy if you were feeling that bad?’”

Daily battle
For Terri and Vito, keeping one step ahead of the pain is a daily battle.

“I can’t be away from home for more than 24 hours," said Terri. "I have to be home so that I can feel connected to him. They tell you to take it day by daythat’s a lie. They say that it gets easierthat’s a lie. It gets harder.”

“All we have left now are the memories, and the pictures, and the videos, and we’re trying to cope with the loss," Vito said. "You fight internally with the ‘why?’ but there’s no answer for it."

“We kept his cell phone activated so we could call and hear his voice,” added Terri.

“So, the crying goes on," added Vito. "The hurt goes on; you try and live a normal life. We still have our daughter who we have to worry about. She holds a lot inside not to make us upset by seeing her upset. We tell her to let it go—don’t worry about it.”

After their son's death, his parents lost faith in every relationship in their lives for a time. Now, the family has healed enough to rely on relatives and close friends for support.

“I was mad at [Vito Boy] at first,” Vito said. “But I told him afterwards that I forgave him. I told him how much I loved him. I hope that he is at peace.

“The worst thing people can say is, ‘He’s in a better place.’ No, he’s not in a better place. When he was with us, this was the better place.”

Said Terri, “At the outset I blamed God for what happened, but later I told Him I was sorry.”

As for helping others prevent what happened to their son, Vito said, “What signs to look for, I couldn’t tell you. I just wish these kids realize the hurt that they leave behind in that last desperate act.”

Terri has found solace by reaching out to two friends whose children recently spoke of committing suicide. “I wrote one of my friend’s sons a letter and sent him one of Vito’s prayer cards and told him that maybe I was being selfish, but I’m a mom too, and if I could help him, I would,” Terri recalled. “Another had a son who threatened suicide over a break-up with a girl and I shared with her what I went through with my son.”

Vito and Terri also are taking better care of themselves. “As a parent, there’s an instinct that you always worry about other people and you don’t think of yourself,” said Vito. “Through all of the heartache, I’m being good to myself and to my wife, but there is a healing process that we have to find that will work for us.”

“We haven’t found that yet,” added Terri. “Every Friday night and Saturday morning we relive it. Those days are the hardest.”

As the evening grew late, it was time to say goodbye. Vito looks at the collage of photos of his beloved Vito Boy that was assembled for the wake.

“Sometimes, I just sit there and look at all of the pictures and recall all of the wonderful times we had with him,” Vito reflected.

Vito walked his guests to the door and gave them a hug and a kiss, both genuine and sincere.
The apple never does fall far from the tree.