With Bernie Mac's memorial service plotted for Saturday in Chicago, his wife, Rhonda McCullough, opened up to People magazine well-nigh the red ink of her husband, world Health Organization died on August 9 of complications from pneumonia.
She had hoped that when Mac, 50, was admitted to the hospital last month, he would receive treatment and be back at menage. But, she remembered, "he didn't search good to me and I knew this could be it.
"I said, 'Hey, Bernard. How are you?' and I kissed his os frontale," she continued, "He shrugged his shoulders, like 'I'm tired,' and I said, 'I know you're tired.' Later on that night, it took a turn for the worse."
Not long after, Mac's doctor took both Rhonda and their daughter, Je'Niece, 30, away and stony-broke it to them that Mac had passed. "[The doctor] came in and I aforesaid, 'He's gone, isn't he?' and she said, 'Yes,' " she remembered.
She recalled meeting Mac when she was a 16-year-old jnr and he was a 17-year-old senior at Chicago Vocational High School.
"He aforesaid, 'You never seen a black man as pretty as me.' And I aforesaid, 'No, I sure haven't.' And he aforementioned, 'Girl, you know I'm so beautiful,' " she recalled.
Later, on Valentine's Day, he asked her to come to his shop class so he could give her something. When she got there, "I said, 'What do you have for me?' And he kissed me. That was our first kiss." The couple wed in 1977, when both were 19, and Je'Niece was born the following year.
Mac's friends, colleagues and other family members
