Death of an Unknown Cousin

I found out from my Uncle Harold last week that my 60-year-old first cousin, Diane Kennedy Bulger, died April 1 after a 17-day stay in a hospital intensive care unit. She had entered the hospital for minor surgery, but complications ensued.

Unfortunately, I didn’t know Diane; we never even met. I knew her parents, my Uncle Frank — a retired law professor — and Aunt Patricia, when they were alive. We saw each other several times at family reunions of my dad and his four brothers. But Frank and Patricia’s four children never attended, and I don’t know any of them.

From the obituary it sounds as though we would have enjoyed each other. She worked as a broadcast reporter in Atlanta, Tulsa, Washington, D.C., and Lansing, Mich. She interviewed everyone from Gerald Ford to John Wayne.

“She was very knowledgeable about a wide range of issues and popular culture,” her husband of 34 years, Bill Bulger, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “She put people at ease; that was her best talent as a reporter.”

Just today I realized that only two years ago I spent a day reporting an event in Roswell, Ga., the very city in which she lived. I wish I had known.