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.
 During her short stay at UCLA, her lung was accidentally punctured, she contracted spinal staph and pneumonia.  On a cold a rainy day, with a rash all over her body and a 103o fever, her HMO2 forced her removal from UCLA.  During her transportation, neither UCLA nor her destination hospital, the Daniel Freeman Marina Memorial Hospital, knew where she was.  At nine o'clock in the evening, I finally discovered her lying in neglect on a bed in a cold room without warm blanket, her pulsatile stockings and sheepskin boots thrown aside on a nearby chair.  She was asleep and without food and medication, for her inter facility transfer summary had not traveled with her.
 Over the ensuing months, she remained in quarantine inside her room, which for the most part, was without ventilation.  It seemed that the air conditioning had been turned off on her wing of the hospital, and though the other patient's doors were allowed to remain wide open, hers always remained shut.
 One evening she almost died from coronary failure due to overheating when two nurses accidentally left her heating lights on, which they were using for illumination.  The doctors had to rush her back into intensive care.  Twice she had been inadvertently dehydrated from lack of water and rushed back into intensive care.  Conditions were so bad, her social worker called for a nurses meeting to look into things.
 During this time, her HMO neurologist was scarce. After about six weeks, he called me one evening.  This was after complaining for a week to her primary care physician at Prairie Group about his lack of communication.  He told me, that though he hadn't had a chance to look at her charts and records, she would be chronic vegetative.  My knees buckled.  I was devastated.
 Sometime later, one afternoon, her HMO assigned internist drew me aside to tell me that I should seek psychiatric help and that I should let her go!  By now, more than a half-dozen people had told me the same thing, from family members on both sides, to her close friends and physicians.  I can even remember one of her original physicians, whom I respect very much, tell me with tears in his eyes, that we should consider letting her go, non-Kivorkian style.
 Buc was a hard worker ever since she arrived in California.  At the end, she was moving from one temp position to another as an administrative assistant.  Everyone loved her.  She worked at the Getty Museum for awhile and a few other places.
 Because she was moving from job to job, she was on COBRA3.  I think this is why her HMO wanted to abandoned her, because when this happened to her, she was almost ninety days in arrears paying her health insurance premium.  I was of course frantic at the time, because I didn't know if her insurance plan was active or not.  At the last moment, with only a few days to go before its expiration, her friend Erika who worked with her at Williams TV, got her reinstated, and her close friend Mary, who she met at Sun America, came up with the money.  I think, that her reentry into coverage under COBRA, shocked Maxicare, who knew full well that her medical expensive could breach one-half million dollars and more.  After all, Buc was the recipient of the most advanced surgical procedures called GDC (Guglielmi Detachable Coils).  GDC is a procedure only a few years old, where a thin platinum wire is coiled into the site of the aneurysm, permanently sealing it.  Five years before, mortality for intra-cranial aneurysms leading to SAHs (Subarachnoid Hemorrhages) was 100%.
 After her initial surgery at UCLA, Buc never received any treatment for her condition, other than damage control for her hospital contracted diseases.  Then suddenly and without recourse, she was moved to an outpatient facility, called Casa Colina, about sixty miles round trip!  This was in March, barely three4 months after her initial surgery.  The HMO said that this would be appropriate treatment for her, where she could receive speech and physical therapy.  Again she was moved, this time her body ravaged by the deadly disease called VRE (Vancomycin Resistant Enterococcus), which she had acquired at Freeman.  VRE is transmitted by unsanitary conditions, when doctors and nurses fail to wash their hands thoroughly.
 Then, about the middle of May, I am informed that her coverage had been retroactively terminated by Maxicare, as of April 1st, when they claimed that they were no longer doing business in California.
  Since then, it has been an up and down battle, evoking the Department of Corporations;  California's agency overlooking HMOs.  To this day, they have sided with Maxicare, finding nothing wrong with their actions.  Strangely, they support Maxicare's continued business in the State, in the acquisition of healthier patients, and they continue to outright deny that Maxicare stopped doing business, despite Maxicare's announcements to the contrary.
 Buc is home, and I pay for her nursing, medicine, chucks and diapers.  Though I asked for State support, that's like trying to catch a burned-out firefly at night, and she is deemed to be too young for Federal assistance.  Hell she's a totally incapacitated California worker and broke.  What more do they want?
  I cannot afford twenty-four hour nursing, so after work, at night, I take care of her, and I am exhausted and desperately need help.  We are broke and behind on all payments, including mortgage and insurance, including her health insurance of $400 per month to Cobra, which if I miss, will deny her future Medicare.
 Earlier this year, I again complained to the Department of Corporations (DOC) who momentarily reopened her case.  Shortly thereafter, a new insurance company, CareAmerica, took over.
 On her first visit to see a doctor in more than six months, he was pessimistic about her outcome, reminding us that her original surgery was only experimental.  She didn't like him.
 Their next assigned doctor was much more understanding, and he even made a house call.  He ordered her wheelchair, which by then, was already fifteen months overdue, its specifications sent over and over again to Maxicare's Provider, the Prairie Group, by Casa Colina's administrators.
 We still get a lot of strange bills for medical services performed more than a year ago.  We have a bill for ambulance service when Buc was confined to Casa Colina.
 Just the other day, an accountant from one of our food suppliers called me, alluding to the possibility that I am behind!  This is strange, because I am C.O.D. and write them a $216 check when Buc's food is delivered.  She commented that though Maxicare has ordered Buc's food delivered, they haven't paid their bills!  It is a triple-edged sword.  Not only has Maxicare abandoned Buc, they are taking a write-off on the food I pay for, and the food supplier thinks that I am in arrears!
 All that which has happened, as unbelievable and cruel as it is, is my fault, for I have angered Jehovah.  I wrote a book entitled The Exact Nature of the Universe & God, where within I stated that no god could have created the Universe because it is too big, far in excess of the length and breadth of any god.  Further, I stated that its fundamental elements are indestructible, and thus they cannot be created nor destroyed, even for a god.  For this, though it is I who had been marked, God chose to kill my mate, and for reasons I do not know, chose to let me live.
 Perhaps this is my penalty for what I have done, to live in anguish, despair, pain and agony, as I watch her beautiful body give way, her spirit disappear, and her smile fade.  By how could he do it to such an innocent creature as Buc, who had done nothing?
 Buc always said that she wanted to die on a tennis court.  But a number of incidental things changed that.  If she had died there and then, not only would she have died on the tennis court, she would have died on her Aunt Joe's birthday, December 26th, at the age of forty-seven, the same age her beloved Aunt Joe died from lupus!
 There is no question that this is Jehovah's handiwork, who in his own anger has attempted to kill an innocent child and become the assassin of a helpless and mortal earthling.
 And though he has done this, there is no anger in my heart, for despite what he has done, he is my spiritual father, along with my beloved mortal father Jerry, who one Sunday morning last summer, chose not Sunday services, but chose to go into Jehovah's realm in our defense, to persuade him from his awful path.  I pray that his son Jesus will walk with him, restoring temperance to his spirit, that his father Yahweh will remind him of the eternal wisdom which abounds within and throughout the Universe, and that Allah will surround him with the beauty and serenity of the Cosmos...
 Buc is alive and healthy, awake every day, asleep every night.  Other than being unable to move or speak, she is Buc.  Every morning she awakes with a smile, each day being a blessing to her and another chance to heal.  Please make it a blessing to Jehovah.  Thank you all for your prayers, wishes, mediations and candles.  Joel, Justin and Buc Webb, 910-B 20th Street, Santa Monica, CA 90403, (310) 829-0767.
 Buc loves flowers, cards, letters and visitors.