Kathleen passidomo: Triumph and Tragedy

November 11, 2024

Late last March, Kathleen Passidomo stood before television cameras, before the governor, her peers in the Florida Legislature and numerous medical leaders proclaiming that “today is the culmination of, I think, my career in the Legislature.”

Gov. Ron DeSantis was in Bonita Springs to sign a series of bills into law that make up the “Live Healthy” package, a priority of Passidomo’s as she ended a two-year tenure as Senate president, just the third woman to hold the job. The initiative seeks to improve access to health care for rural and poor Floridians, enhance behavioral health services and research, and take steps to ensure the state has enough doctors, nurses, dentists and other medical professionals to care for an ever-growing population.

Passidomo’s tenure has been marked by a series of bills that aim to preserve and enhance the state’s quality of life far into the future. That includes attempts to increase affordable housing and preserve vast sections of state land. Live Healthy, however, tops her list.

“Suffice it to say that this is a game changer,” the Naples Republican said at the signing. “Our state will forever be changed in a really good way.”

The plan was for her life to change in a really good way, too. Passidomo, 71, has two more years left in the Legislature before she’s term-limited out. But with her tenure as Senate president over, the pressure and demands for her time would be much lower. She and John, her husband of nearly 45 years, planned to travel. He wanted to see all the National Parks. She wanted to visit all the presidential libraries.

John, 72, mapped out the first trip while Kathleen was working in Tallahassee. She’d come home on weekends to find the kitchen counter filled with books, charts and notes about where they’d go, where they’d stay and what they would do.

“You know how you go on vacation with your spouse you start nitpicking on things? ‘I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to do that.’ From the moment we left Naples, we agreed on everything,” she says. “It was just natural. Everything was perfect.”

She never saw him fall — but she heard it. John was walking behind her as they made their way back up toward the top of a trail in Utah’s Bryce Canyon National Park on April 3, just 12 days after the Live Healthy signing marked the pinnacle of her 14-year legislative career. “I turned around and I saw him lying face down in the path. I started to go down to him, and then I started to slip because it was icy,” she says. “A guy who was coming down as we were going up grabbed me and said, ‘No, you stay right here. You’re going to fall.’”

She didn’t know it, but John broke his neck. It was clear he wasn’t breathing, and other hikers, including a doctor, started doing chest compressions. “Meanwhile, I’m shaking,” she says. The lack of oxygen left him brain dead. Doctors kept him alive with a ventilator long enough to give the Passidomos’ three grown daughters time to fly to Utah to say goodbye.

She wonders if John had become dehydrated. It was cold, and she didn’t think he was drinking enough water. Maybe that’s what led to the fall, she says back in her Naples home, trying to come to terms with her loss and figure out what comes next.

“The first month, I didn’t talk to anybody. I just hibernated,” Passidomo says. “I just stayed home. I couldn’t do anything. It’s still hard. Every day is different. I live hour by hour.”

For weeks, she harbored the routine expectation that John was about to come through the front door. Tucker, their 9-year-old yellow lab, “looks for him all the time. If the door is closed to the bedroom, he goes and stands in front of it thinking that he’s in there. He’s still looking for him. He’s suffering.”

As is she. She keeps his key fob to his gym in her car and treats it like a worry bead. “I just keep feeling it because that was his everyday life. And it keeps him close.”

It was the second major loss to upend her life in a matter of months. Passidomo’s father, Alfonse Cinotti, died a year ago in Naples at age 100. When Passidomo came home from Tallahassee on weekends, she’d devote a day to John and a day to her dad.

She has been boosted by an outpouring of support and love from her family, friends and community, and has learned about everyday acts of kindness John did that touched lives. It seems to give her strength.

“She is really strong,” says eldest daughter Catarina Passidomo Townes. “(Townes’ sister) Francesca has said she’s the strongest person she knows. And she’s very independent. But they were just an incredible team ... she is coping as best she can.”

As parents, the Passidomos taught as much by deed as by word, says Francesca Passidomo, a Naples attorney.

“She and my dad both had this absolutely inherent ability to treat people with respect and nothing else ... and it doesn’t matter what level the person is at. It’s complete respect for their humanity. And that’s something she brings into politics, but that’s something that she brought into our childhood.”

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