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Northport man plans Montauk-to-Manhattan memorial run

BY CAROL POLSKY | carol.polsky@newsday.com

5:53 PM EDT, May 15, 2008

Vincent Mannelli of Northport and his wife, JoAnn, in photo from the family.

Vincent Mannelli runs most days, sometimes for four hours at a stretch. He's run in marathons and half-marathons, and, at age 56, is trim and agile.

But this Monday, he'll commence a journey beyond anything he's done before. He plans to run from the eastern tip of Long Island in Montauk into Manhattan over the course of three days. If all goes well, he'll arrive on May 21, the first anniversary of the death of his wife, JoAnn, at age 54, from a brain aneurysm.

An aneurysm is an abnormal ballooning in the weakened wall of an artery that is at risk of rupture and hemorrhage.

Mannelli and his family -- children Christopher, 35, and Carrie Ann Zwielich, 31 -- hope to raise funds for their JoAnn Mannelli Fund (joannfund.com/jamfund/Welcome.html), set up to educate the public about brain aneurysms and strokes, and award an annual college scholarship to a Northport High School senior.

But that's only part of it, Mannelli, of Northport, said. "I conceived of this as a big event to recognize her life and honor her memory."

She was, says her husband and children, a woman with a gift for friendship, a listener who shared herself with kindness and laughter.

"This is the first time I've ever tried to do anything like this," said Mannelli, owner of a mattress store, One Stop Sleep Shop, in Coram. "It's not my thing. This is all for JoAnn and comes out of my heart."

He began planning a run last year as a way to raise funds for her care after she suffered brain damage from a seizure and cardiac arrest in April 2007.

"She was going to need a lot of rehabilitation, and constant care," he said. "I knew I didn't have the funds to support it and only had 60 days of rehabilitation available to me under my health insurance plan." Then, suddenly, she died of a burst brain aneurysm, the last of several that had shaped her life since her first such event in 1974, not long after the birth of her first child.

She was eight months pregnant with her second child when she learned her brain contained another aneurysm. It burst a few hours after she delivered her daughter by Cesarean section.

In 1993, it burst again. As she was carried out of her dining room on a stretcher, before sinking into a three-week-long coma, she told her teenage daughter to put on a coat because it was cold outside.

Over the next 13 years, she underwent yearly procedures to monitor her brain, and unsuccessful experimental procedures to try to fix her. Each brain event had taken its toll, her husband said, impairing her memory but not her joy in living.

"She and I knew that life was special; she could go at any time," said Mannelli. "She knew there was a purpose why she was still there. ... She never complained about her condition and always tried to have a positive outlook about everything."

Her only regret, he said, was that she wanted six children and could only have two.

"We used to joke all the time, you put her in a room with 10 strangers and she'd have ten friends within 10 minutes."

And so, in her memory, he will start out early Monday from the lighthouse at Montauk Point as relatives trail him in a vehicle, and run 45 miles to Quogue, with a stop in at the Hampton Maid Inn. Then it's 45 miles to Elwood and a night at home, and finally an "easy" 40 miles into Manhattan.

The $1,000 JoAnn Mannelli Memorial Scholarship will go each year to a senior at Northport High School, where JoAnn graduated in 1970 (and where she met her future husband, whom she married in 1971.)

Beyond that, ideas for the JoAnn Mannelli Fund (tax-exempt status pending) are evolving, Mannelli said.

He encourages donations in his wife's name to the organization Hope 4 Stroke as well.

Fundraising letters are going out to friends, suppliers, relatives, doctors -- "anybody who was in contact with or a friend of JoAnn," he said. "So you can imagine there were hundreds."