When you’re counting your last minutes with your loved one, food is of no importance.
When his wife, Judith, spent her final week at St. Luke’s Hospice, Bob Agentis says he subsisted on pretzels from the vending machine.
Since she passed in January, Agentis has spent Thursday afternoons calling upon a growing list of Lehigh Valley restaurants to help him feed the patients, staff, and families at the Lower Saucon Township hospice facility.
His nonprofit foundation, the Judith Adele Agentis Charitable Foundation, works with restaurants such as Shula’s Steak House to drop off a spread of appetizers, entrees, salads, and desserts for about 32 people.
“There was no sense of time. You didn’t think of eating,” Agentis says of his experience. “I observed that other families weren’t eating, either.”
Judith got sick on Thanksgiving last year. She thought she had the flu, Agentis says. Doctors ordered a CAT scan in early December and found she had stage 4 pancreatic liver cancer, terminal within 60 days. She passed away Jan. 10.
Judith Adele Agentis Charitable Foundation in the Express-Times, by reporter Kelly Huth.