Member-only story
A Good Friend — When I Really Needed One
During our junior-high years, he once punched me in the face and gave me a bloody nose.
In preparation for our Senior Ball in high school, he secretly asked the girl that I had planned to invite.
And after college, when my friends were planning a going-away party for me, he wrecked the surprise.
Yes, my good friend Bernie did all of these things — and more.
This is the one essay I really did not want to write. Bernie had been seriously ill for almost 15 years, and he passed away just a few weeks ago. When he was first diagnosed, the doctors estimated that he might live for five years. Obviously, he proved them wrong, yet he couldn’t hold on forever. This is the story of a special friendship.
Bernie and I attended the same Catholic school together, beginning in kindergarten. We really got to know each other, though, in third grade when his family moved in across the street from our family on Wilson Avenue. From that point on, we became pretty much inseparable because we began to share not only our academic lives but also our athletic lives. Bernie and I played basketball in his back yard together. We played touch football in the street together. And we played daily baseball games together all summer long with the neighborhood kids in the nearby fields at the public high…
