Kent and Pegi Bernard

My parents were awesome.

Kent and Pegi Bernard were two of the most incredible people you could hope to meet. Smart, kind, generous, and witty, their love for each other was evident to all who knew them.

Sadly, their story came to a tragic conclusion following a car accident on May 29th, 2025 while they were on vacation in their home away from home, Jackson Hole, WY.

Pegi passed away on impact (age 73), while Kent fought like a warrior for nearly ten months before succumbing to his injuries on March 20th, 2026 (age 75).

The duo spent over half a century together, 49 of which in wedded bliss.

Their lives, however, began on wildly different paths.

Kent was born in New York City to parents who were WWII veterans that had returned to civilian life. An only child, music was one of his passions, and even though the family moved to Westport, CT when he was just nine, he nearly ended up back in NYC when he was accepted at Julliard for opera.

A baritone with a gorgeous voice, upon discovering his allergies were so bad he’d essentially never be able to go outside if he were to continue as a singer, he opted to go another route, and enrolled at Colgate University to begin his pursuit of a legal career.

Pegi was also from a military family, but her father was still active, so while she was born in Richmond, VA, she was well traveled before she could walk, including a short stint in Japan.

Her family eventually made their way back to Virginia, which is where Pegi began to pursue equestrian dreams. In her teen years she was riding, and show jumping horses at a near Olympic level, but a devastating ankle injury would cause her to rethink her path.

She did, quite literally, get back on the horse, graduating from the esteemed Morven Park International Equestrian Institute in 1973, but at that point she was also a student at LeMoyne College in upstate New York.

With Colgate and LeMoyne being less than 40 miles apart, and Colgate being an all-male school at the time, Kent and his friends often made their way to where they could find women.

One day he met Pegi.

With each of them having a razor sharp wit, and an incredible sense of humor, the attraction was immediate, and they fell in love.

Kent earned his degree from Colgate, then attended the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where he graduated magna cum laude in 1975.

After Pegi earned her degree from LeMoyne she joined him in Pennsylvania, and the two were married in August of 1975 (dad did not act slowly after graduation!).

In October of 1978 they had a son, Adam. After initially wanting three kids, Pegi decided one was enough (for the record, I was a delight, so it wasn’t because of me!), and in 1980 they moved to Kent’s old hometown of Westport, CT.

Kent joined the legal division of Pfizer Inc., and held a series of increasingly responsible in-house legal positions, ultimately retiring as Vice President & Assistant General Counsel in 2007.

Pegi never took a job that wouldn’t allow her to pick Adam up from school, and see to it that he was doing his homework. She made sure the household ran, and that her son wouldn’t be a latchkey kid like so many of his peers.

When Adam was old enough, Kent would give Pegi a reprieve by taking him on business trips to cities that also had baseball stadiums. At one point, the two of them, diehard Mets fans – as Pegi would become, as well – had attended games at half the MLB ballparks.

Their stadium journeys led to one particularly memorable exchange when after Kent and Adam arrived home from Yankee Stadium one evening Pegi asked about the game, and Kent replied that the weather was colder than expected, and he had to go find hot chocolate and coffee. She then exclaimed, as only a loving mother could, “You left our son alone in Yankee Stadium?!?!” Kent, a master litigator at this point, replied very matter of factly, “He wasn’t alone. There were 40,000 people there.”

This did not go over as well as he had hoped, but it would be quoted by them every baseball season.

While many ballgames were done as a father-son duo, more often than not the Bernards did things as a trio, because the emphasis on family was a theme for them.

When Adam began taking martial arts classes, Kent and Pegi joined shortly thereafter, and the three of them became three of the highest ranking black belts in the state of Connecticut.

Every weekend, as a family, they would eat together at the dinner table. Kent and Pegi enjoyed cooking, and the soundtrack would be the oldies station, followed by selections from their extensive record collection, as they gave their son an education in music that no school could possibly match.

An aspect of the tradition continued even after Adam grew up, as he returned each Sunday to have dinner with his parents.

Their dining table also expanded every Thanksgiving with their open door policy for any friends who didn’t have a place to go for the holiday.

After Kent retired from Pfizer he joined the faculty at Fordham University School of Law as an adjunct professor beginning in 2010, and spent a decade both teaching, and mentoring the future leaders of the legal world.

Mentoring wasn’t the only way in which the Bernards gave back. Kent and Pegi supported a litany of charitable organizations. There’s a scholarship at Fairfield College Preparatory School in their family name, and Pegi was on the advisory board at Jackson Hole Therapeutic Riding.

In their later years they continued to do everything together – vacations, meals, even trips to the grocery store. They were a true pair, and their love for each other was obvious to everyone who saw them. This is why as painful as it was for those of us who loved them, it was tragically poetic that they essentially passed away together. One simply could not live without the other.

Kent and Pegi Bernard leave behind a legacy of wit, humor, kindness, and generosity.

They are survived by their son Adam (who wrote this), and one very opinionated Norwegian forest cat named Bragi, who greatly misses his two favorite humans.