COUPLE SEEK FUNDS FOR MEDICAL CARE
Family aiming to keep parents in home as they battle Parkinson’s disease
TOWAMENCIN >> Helen and Alex Kobasa have been married since 1950 and can’t imagine life without each other.
But the two are battling with bureaucracy and hoping friends, family and anyone else who’s feeling generous can help with an effort to raise the money to keep the two together in their home.
“I was down the hall, and those two were in here, talking about this, and what I overheard was basically that they did not want to leave,” said their daughter, Alexis Puglia, holding back tears as she remembered her parents talking about a visit to look at an assisted living facility.
“‘We were kind of doing this, just to go through the motions, but we really didn’t want to leave our house.’ And that kind of made it ... that we have to try and do this for them. I walked in and said, ‘Is this for real? What you just said?’ And that’s what made it real,”
she said.
Alex is now 96 years old,
and Helen is 94 and in the final stages of fighting a disease that has taken her speech and her mobility but not her spirit.
“Mom has Parkinson’s disease, which is a very slow decline. She basically
worked her way from walking with her walker to a wheelchair in the house and mental decline to not being able to move,” said Alexis.
Alex and Helen both were born and raised in Philadelphia and met at St. Michael’s
Russian Orthodox Church, where they were married in 1950. The two moved to Lansdale shortly after and lived in houses on Third Street, Fifth Street, then Second Street. It was there that Helen was a valuable help to her neighbor, Lansdale native Margaret Battavio, who readers may remember as Peggy March, the singer of the 1963 hit song, “I Will Follow Him.”
“Mom managed the fan clubs and was almost like a secretary for Peggy March. Peggy and her manager, they would come to our house on Second Street because we had a piano and rehearse and do demos and stuff,” said Alexis.
FUNDS » PAGE 5