Death of 34-year-old Laura Levis reaches far beyond friends and family
We never know when a conversation with a loved one will be our last, and there was nothing momentous about that final phone call between Laura Levis and her husband, Peter DeMarco. They had been planning Friday night nachos, a Saturday picking apples.
Only later did he realize her closing words — “I love you” — were the last he’d ever hear her speak.
Laura was 34 when she stopped breathing during a severe asthma attack. Paramedics revived her strong heart several minutes later and she lived six more days before dying on Sept. 22. “I am trying to keep my head above water in an ocean of grief,” Pete texted me from the hospital a day after she collapsed. “I am shaking as I type this.”
If we’re lucky our lives are love stories – poems that never end. Often only those close to us see what’s in our hearts and share tender moments, but after Laura died, millions caught a glimpse of her last days with Pete, her final hours alive. He wrote a heartfelt letter thanking those in the Cambridge Hospital intensive care unit who took care of her, and when the New York Times posted the tribute, it went viral online and was featured on the NBC Nightly News.
There is more to Laura’s life than the aching tragedy of that final week, though, and since then Pete has posted thousands of words on Facebook — a growing biography in social media-sized chapters.
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