In Memoriam: Becki Doland

Tonight while bored, I was browsing through Genvid's forums when I found a post about a 30th Anniversary DVD release of The Sea Prince and The Fire Child, a classic Japanese animated film from the 1980s. It reminded me of a friend named Becki Doland who had a decent but rather unofficial copy of a dub version of it on VHS, and how some years ago while visiting with friends I got to see it. She absolutely loved the film and went to great lengths to track down the copy she got. She really wanted it on DVD.

Then I saw that an official DVD release happened just a few weeks ago. Right Stuf has it for about $15.

I wanted to tell Becki, perhaps fire off a letter (since her computer, last time I saw it, wasn't working right and she basically dropped off the net) and let her know.

That's when I began an online search to confirm the address I pulled off  a CD. And then that's when I began seeing search results for her obituary. She passed away on January 30th of this year. She was only 34, 27 of them spent battling some form or another of kidney disease. She once told us she was not only adopted, but was the first patient at the Cleveland Clinic to undergo a double organ transplant (kidney and liver). Her diminutive stature was likely due to her early fight with what I remember her saying was a genetic problem.

Damn. Why couldn't that DVD have happened any sooner!?!

My friends and I first met her through email messages posted to the group of an old anime club she had attended a couple of times. She lived in Brunswick, which is quite a drive from Canton. If I remember right, she went with us to Anime North beginning in 2000, and ended with Anime North 2004. She was quite a sparkplug. She had been to Anime Expo and Ohayoucon as well. Her presence (sp) made for quite an experience. I remember one year at Anime North buying a Candy Candy DVD which made her mad because she wanted it, and on pure adrenaline got up and walked away from us without the aid of her wheelchair. Considering more than a few of her joints were some metal replacement and that usually meant a lot of pain, that was quite a feat. She eventually calmed down and found the vendor had another copy of the DVD which she was able to buy the next day.

I had the chance to buy some items from her, like the original Ojamajo Doremi Peperuto Poron from Japan, not the lousy crap Bandai put in stores from the horrible 4kids dub. She still had quite a few things from her trips to Anime Expo that I drooled over. She was there in 1998 dressed as Sailor Saturn, complete with glaive. I have a copy of the video she got from doing that. I think I finally sent off a copy of the Anime North 2004 Masquerade DVD either last year or earlier this year. This was a DVD she couldn't get to play because a paper label got slapped on it, and I finally got ahold of a system with a DVD reader that pulled it off perfectly and I made a backup copy and sent it to her (after removing the label, of course).

She was also known among us as the Goddess of Parking because she had the blue Handicapped tag we could hang from the rearview mirror, something which enabled us to find those 5 Japanese music CDs one year, and it took me until earlier this year to finally identify the last unknown track on the Mystery CD.

We didn't get to know her for long, but I am still thankful to have met her.



By some odd coincidence, I found this in a PDF (yes, I edited the cap, but the words not in Anime Ace font are untouched) from a Medina County hospice PDF newsletter. Here's her name and the name "Campanella" below it. Sure, this is a coincidence, but consider the fact that The Blessing of Campanella was an anime that ran this summer and a videogame with the same name is also coming out. I had no reason to pay attention to this anime at all, but I did. Was this some sort of sign that Becki would have liked it?