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This month our client spotlight is on Thomas Ebro.
His story began in Estonia in 1940. His parents wanted a better life for Thomas and his brother, and fled the grip of the Iron Curtain to Germany. Because his parents were quite educated, his father an engineer and his mother a doctor, they lived a good life in Germany, until the Nazi’s forced them to work under their rule. He and his brother were raised by their grandparents during the war and ended up living in refugee conditions and were quite poor. Once the war ended, they were reunited with their parents and fled to the United States in 1951.
As a young man in a new country, he was bullied often, as he wore lederhosen, and spoke with a funny accent. He made the decision to overcome the bullying and be a stronger, better man – he served in the Marine Corps and went on to graduate from the University of Oregon. He became an aquatics director and medical examiner deputy coroner in California. He created safety and education standards for SCUBA instructors from all over the world and fell in love with the sea.
In 1975, he left public service for the private sector to work over a 10-year span at upscale SCUBA diving resorts in the Cayman Islands and The Bahamas. In 1985, he launched Aquatic Risk Management, a private water safety consulting practice furnishing litigation support and accident investigation services. During the next 30 years, his testimony in over 1700 cases as an expert witness, earned him tremendous wealth. He married the love of his life, Wendy, raised a son and travelled the world.
In 2015, his rise to wealth and success quite suddenly came crashing down and Thomas once again saw the ravages of war, this time, it was not a war of countries, but a war of two ravaging diseases. His wife was diagnosed with a very aggressive form of Alzheimer’s Disease, and he was diagnosed with Retinal Drusen, which caused sudden diminished vision and ultimately Macular Degeneration. He was forced to close his practice and use most of his wealth to place his wife in a nursing home that required 24-7 care. He fell into a deep depression, lost most of his sight, and spent the next 5 years watching his wife slip-away from him.
Having no wife at home to care for him, or vision, he hired a full-time personal assistant who took him daily to visit his wife, assisted him with various tasks, and eventually brought him to the Lighthouse for the Blind of the Palm Beaches for the first time a few years ago. “That day transformed my life,” said Ebro. “I met Mark Gracey. He became my shepherd in very clever ways. Yes, he and others at the Lighthouse taught me living skills and technology skills, but Mark would slip in questions that only a fellow visually impaired man would know to ask. Mark reminds me of a Marine Corp drill sergeant, he never allows me to give up and is helping me and repairing everything in this old carcass of a man. He built my confidence and modeled behavior of what I could accomplish and become. I guess because of everything my parents went through and taught me, or my Marine Corps training – I fought back and became a stronger and better man.”
In 2020, Wendy passed away in his arms, and of course Mark was there for him. Now in 2022, he is almost 82 but feels and acts 20 years younger. He is diving again, with the help of an aide who uses hand signals, as he can’t see the fine print on the gauges. He still has Susan, his personal assistant who is always by his side, and he still gets instruction from Mark weekly. “I’m getting older and losing my memory, so I tend to forget what Mark taught me, or maybe I just keep coming back as he is a remarkable man who teaches me to live one day at a time – I’m privileged as I have Mark and that is indeed a blessing.”
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