This is somewhat awkward. I wasn't sure how to take a picture of tonight's event. Beverlee Lombardi, my families next door neighbor for 30 years died over the weekend, tonight was her viewing. It wasn't a quick or unexpected death, in fact she had outlived the doctors predictions by 25 or 30 years, so in a way it was unexpected. Her daughter Deidre and I were best friend growing up. When Deidre was born she was diagnosed with a disease called Scholederma. She wasn't suppose to live long with it, but she promised she would live to see Deidre turn 18. Well Deidre is a year younger than me, so she is now 31, married and has a kid. I guess she felt it was finally time to let go. It is sad to see her go, but also good that she's out of her suffering. She also had breast cancer and had chemotherapy back when I was in my early teens. She had been through a lot.
Since her kids have moved away and gotten married I haven't kept in contact with them, so oddly enough, I was somewhat excited to go to the viewing to see them again. We were all really close as kids, our neighborhood did all kinds of things together. But it's sad how far we've drifted apart, it was almost like seeing strangers, we didn't have much to talk about. Plus the awkwardness of seeing them when there mom had just died, maybe it would be more fun to reminisce under different circumstances.
I'm sad for the family, but glad that Beverlee is no longer suffering. It was so funny to grow up next door. They are a loud Italian family, we could hear her yelling at the kids from inside our house...but the best part was she could never get the name right and would go through the list of kids before she got the one she wanted to yell at. There was just the three girls but they all had "D" names, so it made it especially difficult.
One of my other favorite stories about Beverlee was when Dana was in high school she had a party at their house and it started to get kinda noisy. Beverlee was in her room trying to sleep. Part of her disease made it so she had to tape her eyes shut to sleep because they didn't close all the way. She also only had one boob due to the breast cancer. So when the party got out of hand she got up out of bed with her eyes taped shut and one boobed and went and yelled at all Dana's friends. They were scared to death I'm sure.
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