Family Photo
Maria Fiore.
Maria Fiore instilled a love of language into young New Haveners, and brought that love home to her family’s table.
She was a dedicated teacher, a fluent speaker of six languages, a world traveler.
On Monday she also became one of the latest New Haveners to die of Covid-19, two days after her aunt Gerardina Renna died of the same disease.
Covid-19 has also killed at least one cousin of hers in New York, with another wrestling with the disease.
Covid-19 hasn’t struck Maria’s loving brother Rocco, who’s now trying to make sense of it all.
He wants people to know how cruel Covid-19 is. And he wants people to know how special Maria was.
Newlyweds Angelo Alessandro Fiore and Delia Zarra Fiore in 1956 with family in Conza della Campania.
Rocco didn’t always appreciate Maria’s talents when they grew up together on Orange Street, the children of the late Angelo Alessandro Fiore and Delia Zarra Fiore. Angelo, who worked in the servicing department of the water company, and Delia, who ran a daycare center in East Rock, originally hailed from Conza della Campania in the Southern Italian province of Avellino.
Maria was born four years before Rocco, on Aug. 3, 1959. She picked up languages the way other kids pick up colds or hairstyles. Rocco was more interested in running outside to play ball.
“She was obsessed with them,” Rocco recalled. “She knew six languages. Of course English. She was very fluent in French, Italian, German, Spanish, and Portuguese.”
Maria (at right) with her mom and brother.
They grew up close not just with immediate family, but with their aunt Gerardina, a baker at Waldbaum’s. They’d visit her in North Haven. And eat well.
“She was awesome. She was more like a mother” to him, Rocco recalled. “She was a really great cook. Always had a lot of people over.”
He’ll never forget one visit, when he was 10. It was “the first time I ever ate macaroni al forno. It was like baked ziti. But my mother never made it like that. I was talking about it for weeks. Finally she made it the same way. I was 10 years old, and I was like: ‘I never had anything like this.’”
Maria attended Fair Haven School, which she loved, then Sacred Heart Academy. She earned her undergraduate degree at Providence College, spending junior year abroad in Fribourg, Switzerland. She earned her master’s at Southern Connecticut State University.
Then she put her facility with languages to work. First she did so at Masten Wright International in North Haven, an import-export company.
Maria with her father Angelo at her Providence College graduation.
“All these people would come into New Haven. Because she knew languages, she would wine and dine them” and bring them to the family for dinner, Rocco recalled. “The president of Mexico’s son was there one night. Me, I was just a regular guy who wanted to play sports. I was always unimpressed with this stuff. I used to tease her, because Portuguese — let’s face it, it is Spanish.”
Next Maria taught foreign languages at Sacred Heart Academy for 10 years, then at Wilbur Cross High School for 10 years. She remained close to Rocco — and never stopped talking about her students. “She loved the kids. She would always tell me how great they were.”
They knew how she felt. So did any parent who ever attended a parent-teacher conference with her, during which she would get almost teary-eyed talking about her students. (Objectivity alert: I was one of those parents. She instilled a love of Italian language and culture in my daughter Sarah, who went on to study and work in Italy during college.)
As a teacher and language tutor, Maria had a mission, Rocco said: “to create circumstances that allowed ‘underdogs’ to succeed.”
Maria also was finding bargain deals to travel abroad. Rocco would receive surprise phone calls from around the world. Since her death, he’s been looking back on the postcards he saved. Sunset at the Eiffel Tower, at a French market. Lake Como in Lombardy. English rugby. He has saved “stacks and stacks” of those postcards. Maria particularly always made a point to stop in Avellino to visit her cousins and aunts and uncles.
After Maria retired from teaching, her language skills disappeared. Rocco didn’t know at first what was going on.
“Her words got jumbled. Everything was ‘thing.’ I thought she was pulling my leg for a while: Maybe she wants to spend time with me and get me over to her apartment.” Then she was driving one day to his local birthday celebration — and ended up in New York.
Maria and Rocco, back in the day.
Maria had early onset dementia. She went to live in the Meadow Mills assisted living facility in Hamden. Aunt Gerardina, who had developed Alzheimer’s, lived there, too. So Rocco became a regular.
Fortunately, he hadn’t paid a visit there since mid-March.
He was starting to hear more about Covid-19, a threat he at first didn’t take seriously, he said, because “my government told me” not to. But then he was watching a Xavier basketball game — and it was cancelled at halftime. “Jesus Christ,” he said to himself. “This is serious.”
He learned that one of his second cousins in New York City died of it. Another second cousin tested positive.
The people at Meadow Mills sent family members an email in the first week of April reporting that no one there had come down with Covid-19.
The next day someone from the facility called Rocco. “Maria has a fever,” he was told. “We think she should go in to the hospital.”
The next day he received a call from Yale New Haven Hospital. She was Covid-19 positive. “We’re going to put her on oxygen and chloroquine,” a doctor said. The idea of a drug that might work lifted Rocco’s optimism, until a doctor said, “We don’t really have much confidence in it.” It was used because no alternative existed.
Two days later, Rocco received a call from his cousin: “Mom’s now in Yale with your sister.”
Rocco received daily updates from doctors or nurses or physician’s aides at the hospital. His loved ones’ conditions were worsening, to the point at which they would not be able to breathe without respirators.
Gerardina Renna.
Maria and Gerardina each had do-not-resuscitate orders. So they were transferred to hospice at St. Mary’s Hospital in Waterbury. Gerardina died first, this past Saturday, two days shy of turning 87. Her survivors include her children Joseph and Raffaela Renna; daughter-in-law Lynn Renna; grandchildren Alivia and Madyson; along with numerous siblings, nieces, nephews, great-nieces, and great-nephews.
Maria died Monday at 12:26 a.m. She was 60 years old. Besides Rocco, she leaves behind her sister-in-law Heather Fiore, “who became such a wonderful friend and companion”; and “a very loving and supportive extended family of dozens of aunts, uncles and cousins both in the United States and Italy,” Rocco would write in her official obituary.
The family decided on private burials, with memorial services planned for a later date. (Memorial contributions may be made to United Way of Greater New Haven, 370 James Street # 403 New Haven CT 06513.)
Rocco, a retired Regional Water Authority water treatment plant operator, is not feeling any symptoms of Covid-19. He is feeling “angry at the administration” for downplaying the threat of Covid-19 when lives could have been saved. “I feel like I was lied to,” he said. “I need my leaders to have a high IQ.”
He’s not tempting fate. “I’m wearing the masks,” he said. “I’m very nervous. I’m having Amazon deliver my food.” Covid-19, he has come to understand, is serious business.
Beautiful piece, Paul. In this pandemic, too few of those we lose will have the obituaries (and none will have the funerals) that they deserve. Thanks to the Independent for trying to document some of those who are disappearing from our community.