Farmingdale’s Rita Dehn dies at 107
Smoking a cigarette now and then? Why not? After all, she had been a cancer survivor for more than 50 years. And what harm could they inflict on a centenarian? Besides, she needed something to do to fill the long hours. Rita Dehn lived life on her own terms, and it came to an end on Dec. 7, nearly seven months after her 107th birthday.
“She always wanted to know why she was still alive,” said Sandy McAslan, who shared Dehn’s Farmingdale apartment with Rita’s daughter, Susan Rogers. “I told her, ‘God must have a plan for you.’ She was feisty and never lost her marbles.”
Dehn had just passed the century mark when McAslan came into her life. He was a cook at the Daleview Adult Care Center in Farmingdale (from where he retired a few days after her death) and was used to being around the elderly. He had seen the ravages of age.
“You wouldn’t think of her being over 100,” he related. “She didn’t look it and she didn’t act it.”
He noted that she enjoyed attending Bingo games, going out for dinner, shopping and even getting her nails painted.
In an interview with Anton Media Group in 2015, Dehn listed some of her favorite things: “seafood, fruit, eating gooey desserts, scratch-off lottery tickets, listening to the television, smoking an occasional cigarette and enjoying the outdoors.”
In the same interview, Dehn observed, “People don’t believe me when I tell them my age. When I go to the doctor’s office or get my nails painted at the salon, people think I’m making it up or I’m senile. The doctor at the hospital even said that they never had a patient as old as me.”
Until the end, McAslan said, Dehn loved going outside and chatting with passing neighbors.
Until about a week before her death, she could get around on her own in the apartment. A fall led to a visit to the hospital, where nothing wrong was found. However, Dehn decided to remain there.
“She didn’t want to be a burden to us. She gradually went down…they gave her painkillers and she died in her sleep,” McAslan said of the woman whom he came to see as “another mother. She was always asking where I was, why I hadn’t come home yet.”
Dehn was born in New Zealand on May 10, 1909 and moved to the United States in 1937, settling in Northport. McAslan said she described a two-week voyage in which she was seasick virtually the whole time. A few years ago, she and Susan took a 20-hour plane ride to revisit her native country, and Dehn told a reporter that the trip was worth it and the country was beautiful.
Among other places, she also lived in Hicksville.
This past May, Dehn’s last birthday was celebrated at Uboldo’s in Farmingdale. In addition, Farmingdale Deputy Mayor Patricia Christiansen and Trustee Cheryl Parisi presented Dehn with a proclamation at her home. Earning recognition from the village was a welcome and unexpected surprise for Dehn, McAslan related.
“It’s great that my mom has been with me so long. I love her very much,” her daughter Susan told Anton on her mother’s 106th birthday, which coincided with Mother’s Day.
Dehn’s husband was the late Henry. She is also the mother of Vaughan Cotsonas and son-in-law Phil of Northport. In addition, she leaves behind six grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.
