"Officer Boscorelli, would you care to say a few words?" I snapped out of my zone when I heard my name. I glanced around at the small crowd that was staring at me. Many of those eyes were tearstained, many of the faces attached to them were folded into sad frowns. I stood up from my seat in the front, then approached the podium. I stuck my finger between my throat and the starch-white collar of the shirt I was wearing. Over it was my best uniform... The one I was supposed to wear at weddings and funerals.

I never expected to wear it to both.

This wasn't exactly my idea of public speaking, but nobody would say it if I didn't. The pastor, a personal friend of my wife's from Ohio, stepped aside. I stood in front of the microphone. My knees buckled so I braced my hands on the sides of the stand to steady myself. When I cleared my throat I jumped back, not expecting the speakers to reverberate that loudly. There was a long silence after that as I gathered my strength. I heard the occasional sniffle or sudden sob. I looked up at the crowd and took a deep breath.

"I, uh. I met Raeanne a little more than two months ago. I met her on the job, but she wasn't some gun-toting officer who thought she had the world figured out. That was actually my part. She was the victim of a random act of stupid teenagers. My partner, Faith Yokas, and I were responding to a domestic abuse case, and we went to the wrong apartment. Raeanne happened to be in the right place at the right time. The truth is, she was a mistake. But, I never saw her as that. I saw her as this miracle that I had stumbled upon.

I didn't know what to think of her when I met her. She was beautiful, I know that. But, there was something about the way she looked at me. She had just met me two seconds before, but she was staring at me like I held the world in my hands. Like I was something special and that I was the most incredible person to ever walk the face of this planet. I like to tell myself that I made the first move, but I was so speechless by this girl that all I could do was tell her she had a nice apartment. She was the one who decided I should stop by. So I did.

We spent that night together. Talking on the roof of her apartment. We didn't even touch, we didn't need to. We had this connection on the inside. For the next three days I would hardly leave her side, and she never left mine. She even pulled a practical joke on me and this girl I met at a bar one night, because she saw something in me that she wanted for herself. She told me I was too good for her. Nobody ever told me that before.

And then the unthinkable happened. She was reporting live from the hostage situation in Soho and she was the victim of random gunfire. She survived the gunshot to her spine and she even proved that she was strong enough to walk. She was my hero. But before she conquered all of that, she encountered another near-death experience. During a blood transfusion she received a tainted pint of blood. It had Hepatitis C in it. The blood took advantage of her already weakened body, and in a rare case, it rapidly evolved into liver disease. She underwent two liver transplants. Her last liver, the third one that entered her body, didn't do so well at first. But, she pulled through and started to get healthier and healthier everyday. She was even scheduled for a third transplant two weeks from today.

Unfortunately, the bullet and the transplants took their toll on my wife's body. We waited to see if her body would get in any better of condition to allow another liver transplant. It never did. Three weeks after we were married she was released from the hospital. They told me she only had one or two days to live. She ended up living four days longer than they thought. She died peacefully in her sleep, no pain or suffering. We simply fell asleep and when I woke up in the morning,"

I had to stop. The tears had flooded over my eyelids and I was starting to cry. I wasn't a crier, I never wanted to be. But I didn't stop myself. I simply wiped my eyes, took a few calming breaths, and looked out at her mourners. Almost every single one of them were shedding tears. I took another deep breath. Didn't bother wiping the rest of the tears away. With a choking voice I continued.

"When I woke up in the morning she had passed on. It's been three days and I'm still left wondering. I'm wondering how this beautiful person could be brought into my life two months ago and taken away so quickly. I'm wondering why she deserved this, what sort of karma she passed along that justified the taking of her life. I couldn't think of anything. No one she knew could. So it's going to be one of those mysteries that no one has an explanation for or will ever care to. I know I don't care to. I most likely never will.

I do know one thing, though. I know that she is most definitely the best thing that's ever happened to me. She brought this light to my life and showed me that even the most perfect being ever created could love someone as imperfect as me. She gave me the power to fly in a world that strictly discouraged taking more than one foot off of the ground. I think the best gift she ever gave me was the gift of her eyes. I could see the love I felt for her mirrored in her eyes, and when I close my eyes and think of her I can still see the reflection."