Death
In April 1959, Lanza suffered a minor heart attack followed in August by double pneumonia. He died in Rome in October at only 38 from a pulmonary embolism after undergoing a controversial weight loss program colloquially known as "the twilight sleep treatment," which required its patients to be kept immobile and sedated for prolonged periods. At his funeral were singers Maria Caniglia and Lidia Nerozzi and actors Franco Fabrizi and Enzo Fiermonte. American crooner Frank Sinatra sent his condolences by telegram.
Betty, his widow, returned to Hollywood with their four children but died five months later at the age of 37. Cesari cited the apparent cause of her death, according to the coroner, as "asphyxiation resulting from a respiratory ailment for which she had been receiving medication." In 1991, Marc, their youngest child, died of a heart attack at 37; six years later, Colleen, their elder daughter, was killed at 48 after being struck by two passing vehicles on a highway. Damon, the couple's oldest child and elder son, died in August 2008 of a heart attack at 55.
Read more about this topic: Mario Lanza
Famous quotes containing the word death:
“My glass shall not persuade me I am old
So long as youth and thou are of one date,
But when in thee time’s furrows I behold,
Then look I death my days should expiate.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“For in the word death
There is nothing to grasp; nothing to catch or claim;
Nothing to adapt the skill of the heart to, skill
In surviving, for death it cannot survive,
Only resign the irrecoverable keys.
The wave falters and drowns. The coulter of joy
Breaks. The harrow of death
Depends. And there are thrown up waves.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“The dignity to be sought in death is the appreciation by others of what one has been in life,... that proceeds from a life well lived and from the acceptance of one’s own death as a necessary process of nature.... It is also the recognition that the real event taking place at the end of our life is our death, not the attempts to prevent it.”
—Sherwin B. Nuland (b. 1930)