Day 40

Name: Dorothy Young

Profession: Retired, former owner of DotSon housecleaning service

Location: Her home in Phoenix, Arizona

Question: What brought you to where you are?

Answer: I guess I’m just blessed

Dorothy Young, New York native, got married when she was 17 years old. Now 67, she has seen her share of loss and love.

“I met him on a blind date, and I fell in love with him,” she said, referring to her first husband, Anthony Fichera. “I still love him. Today’s our anniversary. He’s dead twelve years today.”

She recently got married to John Young, her late husband’s best friend and a childhood friend of her own. She married Tony first, and, as she put it, John “never lets me forget it.”

“I’m happy that I got married again,” she said. “I was alone for five years and miserable and unhappy. And then I met John and I got happy again. It was a really good thing that happened to me, and I was really blessed and lucky that it happened, because a lot of people can’t find true love twice. You know, two men. I’m one of the blessed ones.”

Because she was married so late in life (and so soon after her current husband’s first wife died), there were some concerns about how the two families would take it.

“We just thought to ourselves, if they don’t approve of us, we have to think of ourselves because we’re older…. I had to think of my happiness,” she said. “We both said, if they don’t like either one of us, we need to do what we need to do.”

Young came from a Catholic household in Long Island, where she was “poor and never knew it.”

“I had parents that loved me. I had a wonderful life. They were good to me,” she said “I never knew I was poor until I was a teenager. When you’re living in a poor neighborhood, you never realize you’re poor because everybody’s the same. I had a great childhood. I was Daddy’s boy that he never had, and I was his buddy.”

A former childcare worker, merchant, house cleaner, and entrepreneur, Young now spends her time volunteering through the Church, which she became more actively involved in at the desire of her husband.

“I was always Catholic, but I’ve never had what I have since I met John,” she said. “He’s influenced my faith for the better. We do volunteer work for the home-bound, the sick people who can’t go to church. A couple of days we go and bring them Communion and visit with them. Tomorrow we have eighteen of them to go and see. We feel very fulfilled doing that.”