It's funny how some stories stick with you. Like cops and doctors, reporters meet a lot of people in their moments of triumph and tragedy, but it's impossible to attach yourself to all of them. More often than not, you tell their story as best you can and move on to the next one.
For whatever reasons, though, the story of Megan Bosselman and the Belldini brothers clung to me after I wrote about them in August 2005. She lived in Omaha, my old hometown, but the column was more about her mother and the two California brothers.
This week the sequel came.
Megan, then 24, had adrenal cancer in 2004. Looking for any way to cheer up her daughter, Valerie Bosselman showed up in the ICU one day wearing a sweater with the Belldini label that Megan, a bit of a clothes horse, had long admired.
Coincidentally, the Los Angeles-based Belldini company kicked off a $1,000 giveaway contest some time after Megan's surgery. Megan, by then home from the hospital, told her mom she wanted to win it.
She didn't, but a mother trying to cheer an ailing daughter isn't always daunted by such things.
On a whim, Valerie wrote a letter to Belldini in July 2005, laying out Megan's infatuation with their clothing line and her recovery from cancer surgery. She said the family was throwing a party in August and invited Belldini Executive Vice President Joseph Esshaghian.
To Valerie's amazement, both Joseph and his brother Benjamin accepted. Unbeknown to Megan, they brought with them from Los Angeles the entire new fall line of Belldini sweaters.
At the appropriate moment at the party, Valerie announced to the group of 120 people: "And now, I'd like to present to you the Belldini brothers."
The Esshaghian brothers -- their father had dreamed up the company name -- rolled out a rack of about two dozen sweaters. Valerie says the house was awash in tears.
I loved the story then, because of the confluence of the mother's love and the Esshaghians' kindness.
That feel-good memory was pierced this week, however, when Valerie wrote to tell me Megan had died on Easter Sunday. She was 27.
But a line in her note cheered me. "Joseph Esshaghian (of the famous Belldini Brothers) remains my lifelong friend." She said he'd been a rock throughout her darkest days.
