COVID-19

“My mother would walk miles with two broken legs for anyone in her family,” says Rocco Deserto. Gaetana Deserto was born in Carini, Sicily, in 1957 and immigrated to the U.S. with her parents and sister in the early 1970s. For her first date with Joe Deserto in 1978, the two saw Grease at the movie theater. They married in 1980 and had two children, Rosanna and Rocco. Gaetana Deserto spent two years caring for her husband as he suffered pulmonary fibrosis, even keeping her “hospital purse” always packed in case Joe had to be rushed to the emergency room. “My mother was always worried about everyone else — but in the end, it should have been us who worried about her.”