The last three minutes of the last football game of the regular season at Douglas S. Freeman High School in 1977 changed the lives of Evelyn Filomena Esposito and her husband forever.
During a goal-line play, their linebacker son Bill, whom big-time colleges were scouting, lowered his head to tackle a fullback from the Highland Springs team. After the collision, Bill wandered off the field in a daze, was checked at a hospital and diagnosed with a concussion. Doctors told him to lay off football for several weeks.
Two weeks later, he collapsed on a practice field as the result of a blood clot the doctors had not discovered. He spent 13 days in a coma, near death, had brain surgery and endured years of slow, frustrating recovery from a serious brain injury.
Mrs. Esposito, whom her husband said "was not a crepe-hanger," became proactive and founded the Virginia Chapter of the Head Injury Foundation in 1983. The group, whose name was changed to the Brain Injury Association of Virginia Inc., helps more than 10,000 people each year. It is the only nonprofit in Virginia devoted exclusively to the brain-injured, their families and supporters.
Mrs. Esposito, who led the group for 10 years, was laid to rest Saturday at Westhampton Memorial Park in Henrico County after dying at 79 on Wednesday.
A Mass of Christian Burial was celebrated Saturday at St. Michael Catholic Church, where she had served as a eucharistic minister.
"We were devastated," said her husband of 60 years, Frederick W. Esposito, about son Bill's injury. Frederick Esposito started his own organization, H.I.G.H. Hopes, a project to house the brain-injured. Family and friends rallied.
"In the beginning, we didn't know if Billy was going to be able to talk, if he was going to be able to walk — or what we would get out of it in the end."
Today, Bill Esposito has a job, a son and a meaningful life, Frederick Esposito said.
"She was the driving force behind (all of it)," he said. "She was an up-person.
"She had a spirit that just wouldn't quit. She went to meeting after meeting after meeting."
Mrs. Esposito lobbied for and started Camp McCoy for the brain-injured.
The youngest of nine children, she was born in Hamden, Conn., where she met and married her husband.
They reared their children in Appleton, Wis.; West Hartford, Conn.; and Richmond, where they lived more than 35 years.
In addition to the brain-injury group, Mrs. Esposito organized women at the YMCA to send care packages to troops overseas.
She read to students at her grandchildren's schools, where children knew her by the moniker her grandchildren gave her: "Gege."
In addition to her husband, survivors include three daughters, Carla Snoddy of Goochland County and Cynthia Foust and Dorothy Dixon, both of Henrico; two sons, William D. Esposito of Henrico and Fred W. Esposito Jr. of Seward, Alaska; and 12 grandchildren and a great-grandson.
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