(4 Aug ,1931 - 24 Dec 2001)
She preferred to be called by her nickname “Bev” if you knew her, and was someone who strangers would come up to and just start telling their story to. I think because she would just listen to them without judgement. Bev was born on the fourth of August, 1931 in the Providence Lying-In Hospital in East Providence, Rhode Island. She was the daughter of Victor Roland and Myrtle Adeline (Luther) Swanson of Seekonk, Massachusetts. Seekonk was Bev’s hometown. She was an only child and always wanted a sibling so badly that she decided when she had children of her own, she would make sure they had another sibling. She had two children by her first marriage to Bruce Beals on the 11 January, 1954. The eldest being the founder of this blog, Donna Lee “Chickie” Beals, and her sister, Sandra Ann “Sandy” Beals. They divorced in 1971-2.
She married her second husband, John Ricardo Roderick, who was friends with her first husband on the 11 February, 1973 in Scituate, Massachusetts. She had one daughter by this marriage, Christa Lynn Roderick.
She saw all three daughters through high school and watched her youngest graduate from college and her other daughters attend college. Unfortunately she passed before her other daughters actually graduated from college.
Sadly, none of her children have married yet or had given her grandchildren. She would have loved that experience. She would have made a grand grandmother. Her eldest became part of a bulletin board group called South Shore Secrets in the mid-eighties to mid-nineties and organized outings for members to meet face to face. Bev played an active role in this group, and though the members were around her daughter’s age and younger, she was young at heart and fit right in. She enjoyed that experience.
One thing I admire most is she always knew just how to reach each of her children, who by the way were all of different personalities and interests. Bev, my mom, was an exceptional lady who will always live in my heart forever in memories of those times and is missed. I am who I am because of her and very proud of it. She always wanted to know more about her dad, her childrens’ granddad, and unfortunately I never was able to find out until after her passing. In her memory and love, I am hoping to bring that line together so future generations will know where they came from and who their related to. God willing I can accomplish it.
She had blacked out after seeing her eldest daughter off to work one Sunday morning, and everything seemed well. When her daughter got home, her second daughter said ‘Mom is in the hospital and told what happened.” She was in and out of the hospital after that, and finally transported to Boston Medical Center where they found a blockage in her heart. She was operated on successfully, but the operation took longer than expected as they found she had an aneurysm - thank God they got in the nick of time. `It was not her heart that worried her however, it was the fact that she had glaucoma and could not see and that frightened her. She would say of all your senses, sight is the most important. She survived and lived another five or six years. It was the year of the awful attack at the Twin Towers in New York when thousands of lives were lost. She witnessed that with the rest of us, and later that year she was sitting at the kitchen table after chasing us all to bed so she could read Stephen King's novel that she fell sleep at the table and fell off the chair breaking her hip. She managed to get through Thanksgiving 2001 with us, but unfortunately got an infection and passed on the morning before Christmas of 2001. God bless mom! Thank you for all the great memories you left behind.
