Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette The mayor's widow, Judy O'Connor, reflects on her husband's life in her Squirrel Hill home yesterday -- "He did such a wonderful job as mayor, as a person, as Bob."

By Rich Lord, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

It has been two weeks since her husband's death and Judy O'Connor's Squirrel Hill home is still full of cookie trays, flowers, get-well and sympathy cards, and, often, visitors.

Every day she goes to his Calvary Cemetery grave, then tries to lose her grief in the business of being Bob O'Connor's widow, but at night it all rushes back.

	Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette A necklace with Mr. O'Connor's image -- and the words "The Heart of Pittsburgh" -- was left as a gift on the family's mailbox. Click photo for larger image.

"Every night before I go to bed, I just run through the whole thing and wonder, how did this happen?" she said yesterday. "That it just had to happen like this, it just boggles. We're just devastated."

During a two-hour interview yesterday afternoon, Mrs. O'Connor spoke openly and emotionally about the progression of the rare brain cancer that killed her husband on Sept. 1, nine months after he realized a lifelong ambition of becoming mayor of the city of Pittsburgh.

She said she first noticed something was wrong with Mr. O'Connor, 61, the first week of June, at a mayors' convention in Las Vegas. He seemed tired and begged off the after-dinner parties.

"That's unusual, because Bob liked to schmooze," she said.

Two weeks later, they went to Charlotte, N.C., to study city-county consolidation.

"He was kind of tired," she said. "I told him to slow down. We all told him to slow down."

Only later did she learn that he had suffered, uncomplaining, from headaches.

"I wish I would have known a month or two earlier that he was having headaches," she said, though it's unclear whether earlier diagnosis would have allowed doctors to beat his aggressive cancer.

He didn't slow down, even as sleeping became difficult. He tried pain medicine left over from a knee replacement he underwent last year, but it didn't work.

"When he would lay on a pillow, it felt like rocks," she said.

July brought a dramatic worsening. On the first of the month, he went to a wedding and danced, but declined to make a speech.

He went to a party in West Virginia hosted by casino owner Ted Arneault, and asked someone else to drive -- another rarity.

A July 4 party in Brentwood proved exhausting. The next day, the back and neck pain became hard to bear.

The night of July 6, he was admitted to UPMC Shadyside with what aides said at the time were flu-like symptoms. By the next day, scans showed lesions on his brain. At the time, his administration reported only a lesser diagnosis, an ulcer.

"He didn't want to do the chemotherapy until after the [July 11 Major League Baseball] All-Star Game, because he didn't want anything to detract from it," said Mrs. O'Connor. So the doctors sent him home with steroids, in hopes of shrinking his tumors.

News of the mayor's condition was not disclosed then, and it was a grim weekend, she said, in which her husband was in a haze. On July 10, he returned to the hospital, was diagnosed with the extremely rare T-cell type of primary central nervous system lymphoma, and began chemotherapy.

For nearly a month, there was reason for hope. Rehabilitation started, and Mr. O'Connor was eventually able to walk four laps around the hospital's seventh floor.

Mrs. O'Connor monitored the tension between his healing and his duties as mayor. She gave aides five minutes each with her husband, and yelled at those who sneaked back in for another session.

On July 27, the mayor phoned in to city hall to fire three top staffers.

"When he fired those three people, he knew what was going on," Mrs. O'Connor said.

In early August, the family held a birthday party for the mayor, complete with cake, even though he was born on Dec. 9. Pictures on her cell phone show the mayor sitting in front of the cake, in a tank top and unbuttoned dress shirt, smiling.

They signed papers to transfer him to a South Side rehabilitation facility, and started talking about a welcome-back parade.

But on Aug. 6, a fluid buildup forced doctors to install a shunt in his skull. The mayor was moved to the intensive care unit, on the hospital's fourth floor.

Mrs. O'Connor said she'd stay with him until 2 a.m. or later each night, then move to another room to get some sleep -- sometimes not much.

"Four in the morning, I get a call that Bob wants to see me," she said. "I said, 'Bob, what's wrong?' He said, 'I think I need some applesauce.' "

He was able to speak through the week of Aug. 21, she said. One of his last conversations with anyone outside of the immediate family was with state Auditor General Jack Wagner, she said.

Seizures starting Aug. 27 marked the beginning of the end, she said. For her, the last week is a blur. At some point, doctors approached her about putting the mayor on a respirator.

"I said to the doctors, 'Please don't put him on the respirator, because that is going to be the end,' " she said. But the alternative was death.

She said her husband was on life support for two days. Those were wrenching days for the family.

"I just felt like I had to hold on to him as long as I could," Mrs. O'Connor said. At the same time, she wondered if she was being selfish, if it wasn't kinder to just let him go.

"The doctors explained how aggressive [the cancer] was, and how he'd never come out if it," said their daughter, Heidy Garth.

The mayor's younger son, Corey, struggled with the idea of his father's passing. Their elder son, the Rev. Terrence O'Connor, felt that God wouldn't want his father to linger on life support.

"I just couldn't let go, but finally I had to," said Mrs. O'Connor. "I didn't think I'd ever have to do that."

In the evening on Aug. 31, doctors turned off the respirator.

"They said it would be 15 minutes or a hour," said Mrs. Garth.

Instead, "it was a whole day," said Mrs. O'Connor. "And we didn't know if he could hear. Everyone would just kiss him and hold his hand."

Mrs. Garth wanted to be sure that the mayor's successor, Luke Ravenstahl, truly felt like the heir to the O'Connor agenda.

"When we took Dad off the respirator, I called and said, 'Is there any way you can come to the hospital?' And he did," she said.

She kept her three young daughters away from the hospital room. But on Sept. 1, as night fell, one of them, 11-year-old Kennedy, pleaded to see her grandfather.

Mrs. Garth told her daughter that her grandfather could probably still hear and feel. Kennedy took his hand.

"She said, 'I love you,' " Mrs. Garth said. "And then he took this last breath, and it was a sigh, and that was it." He died.

They picked a grave site, under a tree. They chose a coffin -- a model called The Statesman.

The cards poured in. People sent photos of themselves with the late mayor. And when Mrs. O'Connor returned from the Sept. 7 funeral, there, hanging from her mailbox, was a necklace, its dog tag-shaped charm etched with her husband's face and the words: "The heart of Pittsburgh, Bob O'Connor."

"I don't know who did this, and I'd love to thank them," Mrs. O'Connor said.

Mr. O'Connor's preserved spinal and brain fluid could be used in research into the rare cancer, Mrs. Garth said. Proceeds from the sale of "Everybody's Mayor ... Bob O'Connor" bracelets will fund lymphoma research.

"He did such a wonderful job as mayor, as a person, as Bob," said Mrs. O'Connor.

Her family, their network of friends, and the entire city have rallied around her. Reading the flood of cards is "therapy," she said. And reliving the late Pittsburgh mayor's last months gives her reason for hope that great things will come from his brief tenure, and even from his grueling decline.

"To be mayor, it was just his dream come true," Mrs. O'Connor said of her husband's quest, which took three attempts. "He loved the sound of the title. But privately, he didn't let it get to his head. He'd say, 'Judy, let me tell you something: It's only a title.' "

Mrs. O'Connor said she's most proud of his success at arranging a pending Downtown development, and "redding up" abandoned cars, tumbledown houses and illegal dumps.

He also changed the nature of the office, she said, turning it from a desk gig into a leadership position acted out on the streets, and a traveling sales job.

Though he was busy, she loved the whirl of events. She'd bring a friend with them to dinners, since he invariably whisked from person to person.

She bought things at charity events.

"I did a lot of spending at those silent auctions," she said. "He didn't care."

In some ways, she's returning to normal. On Wednesday, she cooked for the first time in months. She made chili.

She said she won't soon get used to not having her husband, everybody else's mayor, around.

"It's going to be lonely."