Until Thursday.
I signed onto Facebook and saw I had a message from my lifelong friend Mick Curran. We had a dialogue going recently and I figured this was his latest response.
I opened the message.
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| Cheryl and son Sean |
I don't know if I was ever more shocked by something that probably shouldn't have been that shocking. Mick's wife had been in poor health for many years and had been hospitalized recently, although she had returned home and posted on Facebook that things were looking up.
"Sick for two months now. I am done with this. Unfortunately, it is not done with me. Yes, I am still thankful for so much!"
That was Saturday.
She died five days later.
I didn't realize it at the time, but Mick told me I had known Cheryl longer than any of his other friends. We met in the summer of 1978 when my first wife and I visited Mick in Los Angeles.
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| Mick and Cheryl pre-1980 |
Cheryl told me she and Lisa had enjoyed some long and wonderful phone conversations. I was happy for both of them.
Aside from a vacation in Los Angeles in May 1986, I didn't have any contact with her until my last stop before moving to California myself in 1990. I worked in Reno from the fall of '88 to the spring of '90, and there were five or six times I made the 1,000-mile round trip for long weekends.
She and Mick had two children by then, and her health was starting to slip by then. They had tried for a long time to have children, and Sean (1983) and Kelsey (1985) were turning out to be two wonderful ones. I don't think there was anything in her life she took more pride in than being a mother, and sometimes it made her react to certain things.
In 1990, there was a TV commercial for a convenience store that talked about the challenges modern mothers face. The joke was that the two "mothers" in the advert were Mr. Moms. She was upset by that because she thought it was making fun of mothers.
When I moved down to Southern California, I stayed with them for a few months while looking for a place of my own. Kelsey was 4 that year and adorable, and I taught her a sequence of "high five, low five. baby five and goofus five (hands backward)" that we would joke about.
Kelsey grew up to be a wonderful, unselfish person who spent the last couple of years taking care of her mother 24/7. Just last Friday, Cheryl voiced her appreciation on Facebook.
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| Easter 2016 |
"My Kelsey has taken such good care of me through all this hospital and sicky stuff. So grateful for her."
Of course Sean and Kelsey weren't Cheryl's only joys. She and Mick had a third child -- Shannon -- in 1999, and Shannon brought much pleasure to her mother's life.
Through all her health problems, Cheryl remained wonderfully upbeat on Facebook. She was thankful for what she had, not what she lacked. She wasn't able to go to church, but she thought it was wonderful she could "attend" through streaming video on the Internet.
When you're retired, as I have been for nearly 11 years, it's easy to lose track of people. Mick has been my closest friend for more than 50 years, but the only time I've spent with him the last eight years was when we both attended a dear friend's funeral in Colorado in 2016.
It had been too many years since I last saw Cheryl, and there is so much I don't know about her situation. Close friend or no, Mick keeps his cards very close to his chest these days.
I know Cheryl spent her adult life loving Jesus, loving her husband and her children. I know that for all she went though, it didn't cause her faith to falter.
I know beyond any doubt that when she passed from our world on Thursday and stood before the Lord, she had only one word to say.
"Hallelujah."
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