Rest in Peace Alesia Newman-Breen 1961-2023

The love of my life, my wife of 33 years, Alesia Newman-Breen, passed away Friday, December 29, 2023 after a very long illness. I need financial assistance to pay for her final expenses, and to assist me through this tragic time.

More than my wife and the mother of our son Corey. My muse and my collaborator as an artist. A beautiful, brilliant, talented woman. A long-time member of the Screen Actors Guild, Alesia appeared in many films and TV shows, including a regular job as a uniformed extra on NBC-TV's "HOMICIDE: Life on the Street".

In a second career as a well-known doll artist, Alesia was profiled in the November2002 issue of "DOLLS" Magazine. Her handmade celebrity dolls became world-famous. The uncanny likenesses she achieved often were mistaken for photographs of the actual people.

We also collaborated for decades on other projects, including a graphic novel depicting the career of a fictional diva called "CoCo Flambe", told through dozens of photographs, posters, collages and other artifacts illustrating CoCo's legendary career.

Sadly, Alesia's health started mysteriously deteriorating about 15 years ago. Difficulty walking, breathing and eating resulted in her becoming bedridden and unable to make dolls by 2012. Finally, she started having seizures.

2 hospitalizations at a very bad local hospital (later taken over by the State) resulted in a diagnosis of "laziness"!

In 2014, a better hospital discovered that Alesia has a brain hernia (tonsillar herniation) caused by a congenital skull defect (Chiari malformation). It had remained undiagnosed her entire life. Poor Alesia had been cursed from the start.

After emergency brain surgery in May 2014, Alesia almost died. Doctors said she would never recover and would require permanent nursing home care.

Miraculously, Alesia recovered completely for a couple of years. She was even able to resume her dollmaking, with all of her incredible skill.

But by the summer of 2017, she began a long, inexorable decline.

Alesia had periodic medical crises and hospitalizations. Her ability to walk and eat got progressively worse. She became completely bedridden and helpless. After a prolonged stay at Sinai Hospital in 2021 for a serious infection, she was sent to Autumn Lake Homewood nursing home, never to return home again. She now became almost totally paralyzed and needed to be fed through a stomach tube.

During late 2021, due to COVID precautions, we could only visit her a couple of times a week, by appointment. It tore me up emotionally to think she might feel we abandoned her.

I resolved to visit her every day, except when impossible, so that she would know we loved her.

She had periodic hospitalizations for recurring infections. We also had financial difficulties, due to the disruption in our lives, made worse by COVID preventing me from being able to draw party caricatures for over a year. Alesia now had trouble comprehending speech, so I had to communicate with note cards. Through it all, despite the beginnings of dementia, Alesia retained a sense of humor and optimism.

Late this past year, things were looking up. I made progress in catching up with past-due bills. Alesia seemed to be regaining her mental faculties and her ability to conversate.

Then tragedy struck. On November 1, 2023, a botched operation to replace her stomach feeding tube caused medical complications from which she never recovered.

Mercifully, Alesia never realized just how incapacitated she was. She would tell me about meals that she thought she had eaten, and claimed she was able to walk. To the end, she always recognized us and knew we loved her. She told me she loved me, right up to 2 days before her passing.

I always held out hope that somehow she could recover. Her death crushed me and has broken my heart.

I will dedicate the rest of my life to finishing our almost complete "CoCo Flambe" art project. I want Alesia to achieve the acclaim that her medical problems denied her in life.

In return for donations, if you like, I would like to give you an 11" by 14" print of any artwork of Alesia or our fictional diva "CoCo".

Thanks, Jerry Breen