Brenda Moscarella
Brenda Moscarella passed away from advanced dementia on June 1. She was 81.
Moscarella was born on Apr. 1, 1939 and raised in Spring Valley, Rockland County. Her parents were Margaret Duncan, a housewife, and Alfred Moscarella, a noted surgeon at Suffern’s Good Samaritan Hospital. From a very young age she studied piano, and at 12, worked for several years with one of the world’s very teachers Claudio Arrau.
Raised Catholic, she graduated high school with the highest of honors from the Holy Child School in Rockland County. After a year or so at Oberlin Conservatory of Music, she left school for New York City to pursue acting and a bohemian lifestyle somewhat rebelling against her strict Catholic upbringing.
While working as a waitress in a Greenwich village café around 1959, Moscarella was introduced by actor David Margulies to Paul Resika, a painter. They were married in 1960 and lived in his apartment and art studio in the village. She gave birth to a son, Nathan, later that year. They divorced about four years later and she lived in the East Village with her son for a year before taking her first trip to her beloved adopted country of Greece.
After returning, she lived from 1966 to 1971, in New City and then Monsey, Rockland County. At that time, Moscarella worked several jobs, notably as a piano teacher and bank teller with her soon-to-be-famous co-worker, Lily Tomlin. In 1971, she fell in love with a man from Greece, and moved to Mykonos, one of the most beautiful places in the world. She broke up with the man but stayed on the island she loved for about seven years, working in translation, writing, photography and giving small private concerts. She also worked as an editor for the Athens Daily Post, an English language daily, as well as the Hellenic Broadcast Corporation.
Moscarella returned to New York City in the late 1970s and early ‘80s and worked in charity and goodwill for the religious organization Covenant House, helping drug addicts and wayward youth get back on the right track, and served as executive director. She then traveled to a succession of places, including Cambridge, Mass. and Portland, Maine, helping others through the church mostly, wherever she was based. She lived as far away as Anchorage, and even the Aleutian Islands, as both a pastoral administrator and a newscaster on Alaskan television.
In the 1990s, Moscarella moved to Taos, N.M., where her brother, Alfred, lives to help care for her ailing mother until her passing after several years. She then continued to travel, to Greece and Maine, before returning to New Mexico. When her grandchildren were born, she relocated to New York’s Washington Heights to be near her grandchildren who meant everything to her.
After developing advanced dementia, Moscarella spent her last two and a half years at Skyview Rehabilitation & Health Care in Croton-on-Hudson, where family visited her often and which she liked very much.
She leaves behind her brother, Alfred Moscarella, and his former wife Linda and current wife Joanne, and her niece and nephew, Raphael and Rachel Moscarella, all of Taos, N.M.; her only son, Nathan Resika, and his wife, Judit; and her grandchildren, Fabian and Flora, all of Valhalla.
An open casket memorial was held at Pleasant Manor Funeral Home in Thornwood on June 5, where family members recounted memories of her as her favorite recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, was played by Glen Gould. She was laid to rest next to her parents at St. Anthony’s Cemetery in Nanuet. Rest in Peace, Mom. I wished you’d lived longer than just 81 years, but you had a very full life!
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