My first life-changing “story” occurred in 1969. My second one occured in 2020-2021. I never thought that something like this would happen to me in my seniors years…but it did. When I was in high school in 1968, I had a good friend named Ann Burnett. I wanted it to become more than just friends, but I never had a chance for that with Ann because she had a “steady-boyfriend” named Daniel K. He was voted the most popular boy in the senior class, the best athlete, the most likely to succeed, and the best-looking. On the other hand, I was a short, overweight middle-child, and a very shy introvert. Ann was a high school cheerleader. She then worked as a professional model in Manhattan of New York City when she was in her 20s and 30s. To give you some kind of an image of her, she facially looked almost exactly like the actress Sally Field and was 5ft 8 inches in height and weighed 110 lbs. My wife said “Stew, it should be against the law for any woman to be that thin and skinny.” . Incidentally, Ann did not fit or match the stereotypes that many people have about high school cheerleaders and professional models. For example, she was her graduating class’s Valedictorian when she graduated from SUNY-Old Westbury. I had no contact with Ann from graduation day until 2020 when she phoned me and left a voicemail message saying that she is an alcoholic and is poor and is actively dying from a terminal nerve disease. I asked my wife to listen to the voicemail message. She said “This woman sounds like a very bad alcoholic who has at least two serious mental illnesses.” Then she said “If you want to try to be friends with Ann, I have no problem with that as long as you two never have sex with each other because she poses no threat to any woman. “At first, things did not go well with Ann and I. But things changed for the better, and we became closer and closer emotionally. In the months prior to her passing on January 3, 2021 we had become so close that we would have gotten married in 2020 had I been single. I’ve never had a woman say the affectionate things to me that she said during every phone call. This includes her saying “You are my dreamboy”, “I love you to pieces”, and “I have never known or met a man who had the loving and warm and caring heart that you have. “Ann had a very tragic life. She was brutally date-raped by her own fiancé (until she became unconscious) when she was 20 years old. He beat her up so badly that she was told that she would never be able to have children. She and her mother were beaten by her father throughout all of her childhood and teenage years. She married just one time at the age of 45 to a man she characterized as “An illegal alien from the country of Syria.” It lasted only one year, and she told me that he cheated on her during the whole year. Ann was/is also the most unusual person who I have ever known. Her landlady phoned me and told me that Ann had passed away on January 3, 2021. She told me that Ann had been very happy because she had packed all of her belongings and was preparing to drive to Rochester in a few days and find a place to live here so that she could live close to me during her final months. She said that Ann’s only regret was that we could not get married because I was already married. Ann had lived on Long Island for all of her life. I never thought that any woman would ever want to move to where I lived because she loved me and cared for me so much. But Ann did. She lived 15 minutes away from Daniel K, and I said to Ann “Are you sure you want to move 350 miles away from Danny?” She said “Yes because at this point in my life you are much better for me than he is and because I love you to pieces. “The last time we talked, she asked me to promise her that if there is a “next lifetime” and that if we meet, that I will marry her. Well, there would be two women who I would want to marry, but, after giving it a lot of thought, I will ask Ann. Something that tilted the scales in her favor was one of the last things that she ever said to me. She told me that the song “Lookin’ For Love” by Johnny Lee described how she feels about the men in her life and about me. If you listen and watch the online music video of it, you will notice how loving and caring and touching that the lyrics are. Ann is “the right one” for me. PSYCHIC READING: In closing, I want to share just one example of why I will always have “Unresolved Grief” and “Complicated Grief” over Ann having passed away. Ann always claimed to be “psychic” and that the “Paranormal” Institute at Duke University wanted to study her. Ann sometimes gave me psychic readings and messages that she claimed came from Karen. The gist of them was that Karen wanted me to know that she does not blame me at all for how tragic that her life became after we had our relationship that was forced to an end against both of our wishes. She wanted me to know that I never said or did anything wrong. She also wanted me to know that if she had it to do over, that she would have left her family to marry me so that we could have had a happy married life together with children. And, that she hopes that I will look for her in “the next lifetime” and marry her. Now, I do not know if Ann was really psychic or not, but, if she was not, she must have really loved me and cared for me a lot to give me such a comforting reading like that. That was the kind of thing that a wife would do for her husband. Sincerely, Stewart
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