ABOUT BUC     She was born on September 24th 1949, out of wedlock, in a small Pennsylvania town of Italian descendants, and was mostly raised by her Aunt Joe.  She was the eldest of her two sisters, Maresy and Posie, thus sharing in her mother's responsibility of bringing up their household. When her beloved Aunt Joe died from lupus at the early age of 47, Connie left for California.  She was only eighteen.  This is when I met her.  She was a fresh wind blowing into my life, and our worlds came together.
     Her beauty was soft and gentle.  Her eyes were like a doe's, with long and beautiful eyelashes.  Her hair was auburn and her skin ruddy olive.
     Looking at her, through her radiant smile, you could never guess that when she was very young, she had been very sick.  First she had rectal cancer requiring radiation therapy, and then an enlarged thyroid requiring surgery.  And, as a child, she had become exhausted from caring for her family.
     How anyone as kind and compassionate as this, could be caused to endure the life given to her, is beyond me.  It was though a malevolent wave of cruelty had surrounded her gentle being.
     On December 9, 1996, her beloved father Louie died.  Her mom had passed away several years before, which in itself was bittersweet relief for Buc.  But when papa Louie died, it was a crushing blow.
       For the very first time in our twenty-eight year relationship, I accompanied her to her home town of Dunmore.  It was Christmas, and there was snow.  We drove along the streets where she lived.  It was beautiful.  The homes were lit up with Christmas lights, every turn another miracle as we traveled up and down the hills of Dunmore.  I had never seen anything like it.  It was a picture book scene, breathtaking and real.
    The ordeal of the funeral was beyond bleak.  Before his grave she sat, hunched and sallow eyed.
     In order to celebrate Christmas, I returned home alone to buy and decorate our Christmas tree and to wrap gifts.  She wanted to remain behind a few days together with our son Justin.
     Then it happened, and so unexpected.  We were playing tennis.  It was a beautiful day.  But here, let me give you this old account which I wrote just after it happened.
     It is Saturday, December 28th, about 2:30 in the afternoon.  Buc1 and I are playing tennis at Lincoln School.  It is a gorgeous day, the sun shinning, the quarter-mile oval is a rich and fresh green, having just been seeded.  At the start of our match, Buc looked beautiful,  her long legs brown and sturdy.  I couldn't help to notice her strong back muscles when she took off her sweatshirt to commence play.  At the start of the game, I had immediately jumped ahead with a score of 2-0, when she roared back, taking the lead 3-2.  She had never played so well:  strong and flat crosscourt baseline returns and superb lateral movement.  Then it happened.
     She was just ready to start her serve from the add court, when she said that she thought she had just sprained her ankle.  This was understandable, since she just retrieved a difficult get at the net.  She was looking down at her right ankle with her arms to her side, when suddenly she rears her head back and reaches for her temple with her right hand, saying "I have an awful headache".  I'm thinking to myself, oh, oh, I better go easy on her with a sprained ankle and a headache;  but you see, Buc is not a quitter.  Then, our first twenty-eight years came to a macabre and horrible end.
     As I sit now typing this, it is a cold and gray rainy day;  that once beautiful day seems like an eternity ago.  As I stood there waiting to see if she wanted to continue serving, her left leg abruptly lifts up high in the air, bending at the knee and then replants itself on the ground,  That was strange, I thought to myself.  Then again.  What is she doing I thought.  Then it got suddenly and terribly worse.  More short choppy steps to her left, as she seems to move sideways.  It was surreal, frightening and comical all at the same time.  What is she trying to do, throw my game off?  And before I could answer, she was literally running sideways in the most grotesquely sad way, dropping her racket, then swooning low, gaining speed (she had now traveled more than fifteen feet or more), and then suddenly thrusting herself up into the air with her strong right leg in one final attempt to gain her balance, and over into an arc, landing on the hard and rough surface by smashing into her beautiful lips; her left arm useless in blocking her fall.  She had traveled all the way from the center back line to her left fence near the net.  I was confused, perplexed and devastated all at the same time.  I didn't even have time to catch her.
     Rushing to her, I first cradled her in my arms, but she wanted to get up, saying, "Take me home!  Take me home!"   Like I said, Buc is no quitter.  She pawed at the air with her still functioning right side, trying to get her right leg alone to stand her up;  her left side now dying.  With even a softer voice, and eyelids half closing, she tried to rise, saying, "Take me home, take me home".  I tried to stand her up, but her left side was like sand.  It was no use.  I brought her back down and rested her head on my thigh, and as I did so, one more time she asked to be taken home in a now distant voice, her beautiful eyelids shuttering closed forever.
     I saw blood everywhere:  from her mouth, pooled on the court and on our clothes.  Seeing our car parked not thirty feet away I decided to pick her up and drive to the hospital, but we had climbed the fence into the school yard, and were trapped!  I laid her down again and looked down again at here face for some movement and then down at my bloody socks in despair...
     It is now almost two years later.  Buc is home.  She cannot move nor speak.  It has been a terrible ordeal for her; one moment playing tennis, and then waking up in a strange place, paralyzed and unable to make a single sound.
     So agonizing her stay at a nursing home, she ripped out her lower incisors by gnashing them with her upper teeth.
     I have been told by social workers that I was privileged to be witness her collapse on the tennis court.  They told me police widows who see their husbands leave, but never come home, can remain throughout their life in uncertainty.
     But for me now, it is a very thin veil, like a transparent bubble between two worlds.  Sometimes the bubble which I am in, stretches so far into the other world, that my old world becomes distant and forgotten.
     But where she had fallen on the court makes it always clear to me, each time.
 Before, our twenty-eight years of happiness ends at center service.  This is when and where Buc strangely lifted her left leg up to serve, its image indelibly burned into my soul forever.  In between, a distance of perhaps twenty feet, and a time of twenty seconds, lies her uncertain and grotesque path to the future.  Then where she finally crashes to the ground and succumbs to what could have been eternal sleep, is when she spoke for the last time.  It is a sad mixture of time and space, its milestones clearly marked at the Lincoln school ground's tennis courts.  The rain and sun have washed away all signs of where she landed, but sometimes I place flowers on the spot.  It is the place I first saw her die...
     Needless to say, she survived.  She survived her ride to the hospital, where in route, one in three die.  Six hours later, she survived one of the most difficult surgeries UCLA has ever performed, a very large aneurysm the size of a baseball, lying deep within her basil tip and close to her brain stem.  The chief physician at UCLA really didn't think that she would survive this initial evacuative surgery, let alone the repair surgery scheduled for one A.M.