This is about my friend Rocky, a devoted widower. His daily vigil at his wife's grave keeps their 55 year romance alive. Hot days or cold, rain or snow, 84 year old Rocky Abalsamo has maintained a vigil of love at his wife's graveside for nearly eight years. In November 1993, the former construction worker's beloved Julia Echeverria passed away from complication of triple bypass heart surgery. Nearly every day Rocky rides two buses and walks eight blocks to Joseph's cemetery in West Roxbury, Massachusetts. Since the beginning of his vigil, the widower has only missed three weeks - two to recover from heart surgery himself, and one to visit a dying sister in Argentina. 'She is part of me so here I am whole' says Rocky. 'Being here makes me feel better, not good, but better. I do it for Julita and for myself.' Shouting 'Julia I am here', the Jamaica Plain man sits in a folding chair beside her grave. 'I thought my Julita was alone', says Rocky who suddenly found solace in the thought that he knows people who died and nobody remembers them. Sometimes he breaks the silence with a cassette player and a favorite tape of a duet by Rocky and Julita, a Spanish lullaby. For exercise the widower pays his respects at other nearby headstones as well.

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