“It’s sad. It makes you want to cry.”
“No, it’s sad. It make you want to laugh.”
— BANG THE DRUM SLOWLY (1973)
If there’s one bad thing about being old, and of course there are more than one, it’s that you reach a point in your life where people your own age or younger than you die. And even worse, your reaction to it isn’t “Oh my God. He/she was so young.”
Nope, your reaction is more a feeling of ordinary sadness.
I never really knew Rande Probst, who was Rande Barker when she was a beautiful majorette in our high school graduating class of 1967. She was out of my league, the kind of girl I didn’t even have the nerve to talk to.
I wrote about her more than 40 years later, and it was one of the first times I realized that people I thought had it made had some of the same fears and insecurities as those of us who were ordinary.
Rande had dyslexia, a condition most of us had never heard of back then. It made her think she was stupid, when of course she was anything but stupid.
I wrote about her in 2008, the first story in a book that has yet to be completed about my graduating class. I learned of her failed marriage and her relationship with the man who became the love of her life and her later life in Colorado.
She had two different career pursuits that we all considered glamorous growing up. She was a flight attendant for American Airlines and a model in print ads and television commercials. And despite not really getting together with him till she was nearly 60, she lived happily — if not quite ever after — with John Barretto in Colorado Springs.
She was diagnosed in 1998 with Parkinson’s Disease, and was part of several major clinical trials that doubtless extended her life.
I know little or nothing about how she died, just that it happened within the last few days. From looking at her Facebook page, I see she had many people who loved her, children, grandchildren and good friends.
Looking back at the story I wrote earlier, I think I could confidently say the latter part of her life was the happiest and that there are a lot of people who will miss her.
And yes, just as the character in one of my favorite old movies said, “It’s sad. It makes you want to laugh.”