Gallagher died on June 18 from the prostrate cancer he had been fighting for months.
Gallagher was a self-described loner who refused help from the many social workers who visited him. In his last days, the dying man feared surrendering his freedom and being put in a care institution.
 Xenia Giolli looks over Ed Gallagher's Air Force discharge papers at her home in Pacifica. |
Getting Gallagher to accept help was no easy matter.
“He was always sort of a loner,” said Odd Tvedt, a former Pillar Point Harbor fisherman, as he sat at the bar at Ketch Joanne’s in Princeton. “He always kept pretty much to himself.”
For Gallagher, living in a van was his way of clinging to his freedom and life, even as cancer began attacking his body.
“When I met him, I got the opinion that he was lonely and needed a bed and some food and some obvious help,” Giolli said. “I could smell his car … it smelled like foul urine, dirt and nastiness.”
She left some magazines and food for him, and left asking the campsite staff to call if he needed help. That call came one day later — the camp management was kicking Gallagher out, she learned.
“I said I’d be there in an hour,” Giolli said. “I had no idea what I’d do, I just asked him to follow me.”
Gallagher and Giolli made an awkward pair. Giolli, a well made-up woman with giant Jackie-O sunglasses and a BMW sedan, was plotting a transfer to a four-year university to complete a psychology degree. Gallagher, an unshaven Korean War veteran with a white-hair mullet running down his neck, had been living in a travel-worn minivan since his wife died more than five years ago.
As an impromptu plan, Gallagher was told he could stay at Giolli’s apartment. Giolli became his de facto caretaker, but that plan presented some big problems. Gallagher, who was suffering from terminal cancer, wasn’t getting the care he needed. Also, Giolli’s roommate and her parents weren’t too happy to learn a homeless man was now sleeping on their couch.
Giolli found a local Pacifica hospice, the Missionaries of Charity Gift of Love, a care home run by a Catholic sisterhood inspired by the late Mother Teresa. Even though it was the last place he wanted to spend his waning days, Gallagher reluctantly agreed to tour the care home.
“I knew it was exactly what he didn’t want,” Giolli said. “He told me ‘I want to go home’ … by that he meant my home.”
Gallagher agreed to stay at the hospice on the promise that Giolli would visit him everyday.
Paul Smith, a gentlemanly hospice volunteer wearing a cowboy hat, said it was clear Giolli became the closest thing Gallagher had to family in his last days.
“The power of a woman can change a man,” he said. “I’d see Ed with his head cradled in her lap, and he’d look like the happiest person in the world.”
Giolli recalled she and Gallagher were working on a list of things to do in his remaining days, such as cleaning out his public storage containing most of his possessions.
“I told him that he had to get better because we still had a lot to do,” Giolli said. “He said ‘No problem,’ … I hugged him and told him I would see him later that afternoon.”
Twenty minutes later, Gallagher had died.
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