With the exception of the missing cowboy hat, this is how many of you would remember Bruce.

Bruce looks like a Mr. Potato Head...you could choose hair, no hair, big mustache, little mustache, cop glasses, etc.

Our friend’s final resting place, and a fitting sendoff for a helluva man!

I want to die just like my grandfather did...peacefully, in his sleep. However, as his car drove over the cliff, the other four people riding in it were not so fortunate!

Sorry, but I think that’s a funny joke. On a serious note, have you ever thought about how you would prefer to die? That may sound like a ludicrous question, but every one of us eventually will expire, and wouldn’t it be cool if we had the choice of HOW we went?

Imagine somehow being able to know that you had a year, six months, or 60 days to live. What would you do? Who would you visit? Where would you travel to? I hear that question bantered around often, and people understandably answer it in (what I think is) a cavalier manner. The assumption always seems to be that you will be in good health until the day you die (I’m imagining a car accident or a sudden heart attack). For so many people, though, the last days, weeks, and even months are spent as an invalid, unable to really “live”. For my mother JoAnne, she was bedridden the better part of three months. For my friend Bruce, he was in a seven-week downhill slide.

Having just attended Bruce’s funeral, I think it’s natural to have thoughts like that. Many say that Scott Kalitta died doing what he loved, but I couldn’t imagine the pain something like that would cause to one’s family. If I’m going to die doing the thing I love most, I will definitely be asleep... I just hope it’s years down the road.

Having gone through the amount of chemotherapy that I did, I realize that my system, specifically my heart, will never be as healthy as before I got cancer. If you ask any person who has never faced serious health issues what the most important thing to them is, chances are that “health” will be far down on their list...it’s simply never given them a cause for concern, or much thought. Ask someone dealing with an acute or chronic illness to list their priorities, and I guarantee that “health” will be at the top of that list. It’s a matter of personal experience, and now I get it.

Bruce was 69 years old, but I would bet money that anyone trying to guess his age never would have gone higher than 57. He took good care of himself, and he looked healthy. About two months before he died, Bruce passed out while driving on the freeway. Fortunately, his buddy in the passenger seat was able to get the car stopped without an accident. Bruce and I spoke many times while the doctors ran tests to figure out what caused his seizure, and the eventual diagnosis of brain cancer was a huge shock. I visited Bruce just after he started his treatments, and he eventually was sent back home for what we all hoped was a speedy recovery. His sudden death came as a surprise to many of us.

Bruce goes WAY back in drag racing...to the early ‘60s. He saw this sport from so many different angles: painter, crewman, driver, announcer, and friend to so many. I know Bruce didn’t go out the way he wanted, or planned, but the solace that we friends of his can take is that he packed a LOT into his life. As is typical of funerals, I actually found out a couple of things about Bruce that I didn’t know; he never told me that during his tenure as a cop that he was undercover as a narcotics officer.

Though he never married or had kids, he had plenty of “adopted” children that were there to help support him in the end. His funeral was roughly half racers and half “normal people”, and the salute he was given by the Hawthorne police department was incredible. Bruce hung up his badge back in the ‘80s (and went on to become a financial advisor), and watching the cops fold the flag that draped his coffin and present it to one of his close friends was very moving.

I haven’t written a blog for several weeks, and I just haven’t felt “motivated” enough to sit at the keyboard for an hour plus, and I think I just figured out why; I’m going to close this blog, keep it as a tribute to a great friend of the sport and a wonderful man who we will all miss dearly, and start another entry that will represent a more “standard” blog for me.

Stay tuned, stay healthy, God Bless Bruce, and watch out for Narcs!