FRONT PAGE PICTURE

Love conquers a lot for hard-luck couple

Saturday, September 10, 2005

By Tracey O'Shaughnessy

WATERBURY -- Some may not understand. It is an unusual, even unlikely, romance.

He is 37, a traumatic brain injury victim, three of his tawny, withered limbs paralyzed. Non-verbal for years, he speaks in a haunting, muffled drone. She is 53, a chronic alcoholic whose liver finally gave up three years ago. Riddled with cirrhosis and nearly felled by renal failure, she is gimpy from a deteriorated knee joint that will need to be replaced.

But when Jane Lockwood needs to explain her love for Richie Marino, she simply directs her wet topaz-blue eyes toward him and says, "Just look at him."

Today, at the Cedar Lane Rehabilitation and Health Care Center that both are likely to call home for the rest of their lives, they will wed. It is not the first wedding Cedar Lane has had; a similar love story ended in nuptials a few years ago. But this wedding, in its tragic irony, is reason for celebration. "I didn't have anyone," Marino says, with effort. When he speaks, his tongue protrudes from his mouth and his caramel-colored eyes inflate with urgency. "I love her."

"All I have to do is look at him that is all," says Lockwood, a petite, leathery skinned woman prone to tears. "He has something he never thought would happen to him. He loves me and that's the bottom line. I know what I feel inside."

The Home-to-Home Foundation, a non-profit group that seeks to improve the quality of life in long-term care facilities by providing more human contact, will sponsor this afternoon's festivities.

Coincidentally, it was Marino, who has been in long-term care facilities since he was 15, who encouraged Home-to-Home founder Richard Silverman, a pulmonologist, to create the organization.

Silverman said while working at Cedar Lane four years ago, he was drawn to Marino. In part because, at 33, Marino was something of an anomaly in a facility filled with elderly residents.

"Here's a young guy in a nursing home, and I'm saying, 'what's he doing here? What happened to him?' And once I found out about his story, I felt horrible for him."

Twenty-two years ago, Richie Marino and his family were headed back from the fireworks at Waterbury's Municipal Stadium. He was 15. A Chevrolet Chevelle, driven by an 20-year-old drunken driver, struck the Marino's station wagon. Marino's brother Michael, 12, was killed. His mother was critically injured. And Richie Marino lay in a coma, in which he would stay, intermittently, for two years. The driver of the Chevy was killed.

"There was a lot of sadness and tragedies in our lives," says Lockwood, who has three children, the youngest of whom is 18. "There were times when I'd been with Richie when I'd go back in my room and put my head in my hands and cry. I'd say, 'What if this,' 'What if that?' But I love him and he loves me. Out of this sadness something very wonderful happened. If you believe in destiny -- which I don't -- it's like I was meant for this."

In a grisly irony, alcohol brought the bride and groom together. Were it not for alcohol, neither would be there. "It was just like a path that led me to Richie," says Lockwood. "By getting sick, was that a blessing because it led me here? Something very good came of it for both of us."

Jane Lockwood knew of Richie Marino, but only distantly. Richie's mother, Regina Davino, and Lockwood's father, Walter Warden, were at the Health Center of Greater Waterbury together before Warden died of throat cancer five years ago.

As Lockwood tells it, she had been at Cedar Lane three years when a nurse informed her that Richie was the son of Regina, whom she knew from her association with Warden.

"There was that connection there," says Lockwood. "But even before I knew he was Reggie's son, I used to wonder what was wrong with him. I admired his tattoos and he was handsome. But there was something about him that brought this feeling to me.

"I used to study Richie," Lockwood continued, rhapsodically.

"I remember one night just looking at him and he looked sad to me. I looked at him and I felt something grow in me."

In the summer of 2004, Richie looked at Jane with what she calls his "puppy dog eyes" and asked if he could kiss her.

"You could have knocked me over with a feather," she says.

Just after Valentine's Day, Richie Marino asked Jane Lockwood to marry him. After today's 1 p.m. ceremony, Cedar Lane will seek a room to accommodate them both.

"When I saw him and her together he looked so happy," said Silverman, the pulmonologist.

"He says she loves him and he can't believe somebody fell in love with him. This can't be a relationship based on money, because there is none. It must be a pure thing."