COVID-19 took her parents just days apart. Now, this KC interpreter has a message
Michelle DeMartino took a deep breath as she stood just feet from Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas during the State of the City address. She looked up and thought, “Mom and Dad, please be with me at this exact moment.”
It came as the mayor held a brief moment of silence for family of DeMartino, who lost both of her parents to the coronavirus within days of each other before the annual address on Feb. 10. She put her head back down, glanced at Lucas and sensed that her parents were there with her.
“I don’t want anybody to go through what we’ve gone through,” said DeMartino, a sign language interpreter who has become a familiar face to Kansas Citians who watch Lucas’ news conferences about COVID-19. “I would not wish that upon anyone.”
DeMartino’s mother, 66-year-old Susan Barreca, died on Feb. 4 after battling the virus since Christmas Eve, when DeMartino and seven of her relatives tested positive for COVID-19. Her father, 69-year-old Ralph Barreca Jr., who friends called “Satch,” died five days later after he separately contracted the virus at a nursing home.
Now, DeMartino’s 7-year-old son cries each night as he holds photographs of his grandparents.
DeMartino hopes to keep educating people about public health guidance to help prevent the spread of COVID-19. And she wants people to know the virus is real.
“Getting the vaccine and wearing your mask says that you love people,” DeMartino, 35, said during The University of Kansas Health System’s COVID-19 briefing Thursday. “If talking today about my parents saves just one person, then I know both of them would be looking down and saying it was all worth it. Because that’s how they were; they loved others more than themselves.”
‘More about us’
DeMartino’s father grew up in Kansas City’s northeast “Little Italy” area, while her mother moved to Raytown when she was 10 after having spent her earlier childhood in the Chicago region.
The pair met at a wedding and married a year later in September 1979, according to their obituaries. The devoted couple, who loved to play bocce, had two children. They took trips together, and when Ralph Barreca’s cancer metastasized in recent years, they went to Disney World with their family that, by then, included three grandsons they adored, who are now between ages 7 and 8.
“He was just a big kid at heart,” DeMartino said of her father, recalling how he rode a roller coaster, even though he wasn’t supposed to.
While her father was the quiet one, DeMartino’s mother was bubbly. She would ask strangers about their work and children and genuinely be interested in their answers.
Both loved to cook: he, hot dogs and sausages at high school football games; she, meatballs, lasagna and streusel pie. Susan Barreca knew food was the way to people’s hearts, DeMartino said, and if you came to their home, you would leave with to-go boxes.
“She filled your belly,” DeMartino recalled Thursday in an interview with The Star.
When her parents were in the hospital recently, DeMartino would call them to pray for them, something she continues to do. She hears her parents’ voices often, and sees them in her two sons, she said.
DeMartino believes her mother’s calling on Earth was to take care of her father, who for 12 years fought terminal cancer. He had also been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and had diabetes. The two, she said, were “perfect testaments of, ‘For better, for worse. For sick and for poor.’” They never left each other’s sides.
Doctors initially told Ralph Barreca he would live just five years after his cancer diagnosis. He was so proud he was able to meet his grandsons, something the family did not think would happen, DeMartino said.
While DeMartino’s father medically had “everything under the sun,” including high blood pressure, those struggles were not what ended his life, DeMartino said on the KU briefing.
“That’s not what got him,” she said. “It was what COVID does to your brain. I think there’s not enough awareness out there for COVID patients who have Alzheimer’s because that’s ultimately what happened.”
Her mother, meanwhile, had no preexisting conditions, she said.
The family had been doing everything right, including social distancing from her parents and wearing masks, DeMartino said. She took knowledge from previous KU briefings she had interpreted for the region’s deaf community and applied it to her own family.
At Thursday’s briefing, Dr. Steve Stites, KU’s chief medical officer, called DeMartino’s loss an “unspeakable tragedy.” Her story, though, has been all too common during the pandemic, he said.
DeMartino’s parents, who left behind a large Italian family, were among more than 1,970 people to date who have died of COVID-19 in the Kansas City metro area and more than 500,000 throughout the U.S. Since the pandemic began, 138,353 metro residents have been infected.
“We should be united more now than ever,” DeMartino said as she held her mother’s rosary.
Psychologist Greg Nawalanic echoed that message. He said residents need to remain diligent, even as COVID-19 infections across the region decline. He said it “has to be less about me and more about us.”
Nawalanic advised people grieving to find purpose in their loss, as DeMartino has. Memorializing a loved one by living a more directed life, he said, is the “best gift you can give them from the other side, if you have that belief, and also yourself.”
“Are you taking advantage of the opportunities that every morning waking up gives you?” Nawalanic asked.
‘A shining example’
Comments on the mayor’s Facebook page are often depressing, he said. But when Lucas shared a video two weeks ago of the moment of silence, he learned how much DeMartino meant to those who have watched his news conferences.
Even if they have never met DeMartino, many residents have formed a connection with her by watching her interpret. The governors of Missouri and Kansas sometimes alternate their translators, but DeMartino has been a constant face for Kansas Citians, Lucas said.
“She’s been with us through some tough times, for us and now her,” he said Tuesday. “And she always shows up with a smile.”
Residents in the comments offered their condolences and commended DeMartino for her strength and commitment to providing interpretations for people who are deaf or hard of hearing. Some said they cried during the moment of silence. Another called DeMartino a staple of Kansas City.
“What a shining example of bravery ... despite such unfair and tremendous loss,” one woman wrote in part. “You are an inspiration.”
When Lucas’ staff told him DeMartino would interpret during the State of the City address, on the same week she lost her parents, it stopped the busy mayor in his tracks.
“How unbelievably devoted to her job, to the viewers who need her, to our city that she is,” he thought.
The moment of silence, Lucas said, was one of the “more moving moments I’ve had the chance to be a part of in my entire life.”
DeMartino, who has two deaf cousins and whose company, Beyond Interpreting, also provides services for schools and hospitals, said the deaf community deserved just as much access to Lucas’ information as those who could hear him well.
It’s her passion, she said, and her parents loved to watch her work.
The next week, DeMartino was next to the mayor again to interpret the news that the city planned to roll back most of its COVID-19 restrictions for bars, restaurants and indoor gatherings.
“That’s the sort of person who makes such a difference in this world,” Lucas said. “When you talk about service, it comes in so many different ways, and she’s done one hell of a job at what she’s tasked to do with all of us.”
This story was originally published February 26, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
