Help JOAN GIANNINI HARLOW pay for her brother’s funeral

Please help Joan Giannini Harlow pay for her brother’s funeral.

Hello. This is Rosanna Bencoach. My Facebook friends know me from school, career, theatre, genealogy, and other interests. You may not know my first cousin Joan Harlow in Charlottesville, who has borne more sorrow in recent months than most of us could handle. I am asking my friends, Joan’s friends, and our large extended Giannini and Gardner families and their friends to do whatever you can to help her with her brother’s funeral expenses (about $15,000). He had been ill and unable to work for several years and had no savings or life insurance.

Joan’s immediate family is now very small. Joan’s father, George Vernon Giannini, died in 2002 of cancer, and her older sister Karen Dwier passed in 2020. The burden of caring for Joan’s mother Mary Ellen (who suffered from dementia) and brother was entirely on Joan and her son, with key emotional support from a dear uncle, Lewis Gardner. [The photo above is of Michael, Mary Ellen, Uncle Lewis, and Joan, just a few years ago.]

Early this spring, Michael’s health problems (including severe neuropathy and pulmonary emphysema) rapidly worsened; he was hospitalized for two weeks and came home for a short time.

Then, on April 29, Joan and Michael’s mother, Mary Ellen Gardner Giannini, passed away at home from dementia. Less than a month later, Joan’s husband, Donnie Harlow, took his own life at their home in Albemarle.

In the meantime, Michael’s health deteriorated. He was rushed to the ER, hospitalized, endured several emergency surgeries in rapid succession, spent two months in the UVA ICU, and then was transferred to a facility an hour away for hospice care. After two weeks, he was moved to a facility near Charlottesville. I saw him there last Friday and I was glad that we could spend some time together.

He was just a few months younger than me, and as young children, Michael, his sister Karen, and I had been the closest of friends and playmates, with most of that time spent at our grandparents’ house and garden at the top of the hill on Chesapeake St…which would then become their home and Joan’s (she’s a little younger). I had no siblings. They were the closest to me.

At about 12:30 AM on Monday, my cousin Michael Giannini, age 64, appeared at the nurse’s station, fully dressed with a bag in his hand and said that they had woken him up so they must want him to go home. It had taken a real burst of energy to make that journey. The few yards from his bed to the nurses’ station were the furthest he’d walked in almost three months. The staff helped him back to his room and put him to bed. When they checked on him in the morning, he was gone. He had gone home.

Michael did not have any savings or life insurance. The good news is that he has a gravesite where he wanted to be put to rest – buried, not cremated (“burned” as he called it). It’s the last space our family has in a row with his parents and paternal grandparents. But traditional burial is expensive.

Without the funds I hope we raise here, Joan’s only option to pay the approximately $15,000 required immediately for the funeral is to max out her credit cards. That worries me. As she works to settle affairs for her mother, husband, and brother and take care of herself and her son, there will be other needs. No doubt.

Anything you can contribute would help. If you can’t contribute, please share this appeal on your Facebook page or pass it along to others who might be interested and able to help. Thank you for reading this and thinking about contributing. Please PM me if you have any questions.

P.S. Visitation will be this Sunday evening, Sept. 8, 6-8 pm at Teague Funeral Home in Charlottesville. A graveside service will be held at 1 pm Monday at Riverview Cemetery.