Sunday Morning Rambling

Here I sit once again, a slacker who is the last person in the household to wake up as Michelle has been up for a couple of hours already drinking coffee while I was still in lala land. I'm such a slacker on a Sunday morning...lol

There is something I wanted to talk about yesterday, but being it was a football Saturday I didn't think the subjects mixed very well so I hesitated and ended up not doing it due to the nature of the topic.

Years ago, it was the Spring of 1982, we moved into East Gate Manor. We had a number of great neighbors, it was a very close neighborhood and more specifically a great area of the neighborhood. Across the street there was a young family with a young Daughter named Valerie. Quiet and conservative, but a sweet young lady.

Years later when she got married she lived in the house with her first husband Jason and a couple of kids that they had.

When I was in college, Valerie had also started to attend and was actually a 4.0 student and a very amazing young lady. I remember speaking to her about an hour or so one day between classes catching up on things and Jason. That turned out to be the last time I had ever spoke to her.

About a year later there was a very tragic event in front of the Waterfront, Valerie was shot in the head by her new Husband (not Jason he was a great guy) who I guess she had married since the last time I had spoken to her.

Well earlier this week I was looking back through some of my blogs from years past (13 years and nearly 5,000 posts makes some interesting reading of your own life) and saw one that had an exceptional number of views compared to anything else I had written at that time. It was the blog post that I liked earlier in this post, so I thought I was inquisitive and decided to seek out if there was any news on Valerie. She was in a vegetative state and was blind after the shooting and there were a couple of fund raisers through the years for her.

I found my answer, Valerie had passed away about three years ago. My heart sunk, this was an inspiring young lady who had the world to capture in front of her. She lived nine years after the murder attempt, not sure how much of a quality of life that she had after the cowardly attempt on her life, but her suffering had finally ended.

It's amazing that in just a split second how someone with so many dreams, desire, vision and the get up and go to make it happen had their life forever changed.

Have yourselves a great day and appreciate it, you never know when it could change.

RIP Valerie.