My Aunt Sherrie
I started writing this a few years ago when my Aunt Sherrie’s health began to decline. I knew I would finish it someday—although maybe not—she had already outlived two people we thought she wouldn’t. This will never capture my relationship with her; it is a snapshot of us and her as a person but what is a eulogy, except a small declaration of love, inadequate though it may be.
Shortly after I became Sherrie’s guardian ( I was technically never her guardian, guardian is a legal term but I am using it as a catchall here), I started recording her when we would run errands. I don’t know why, other than she often said hilarious things. But re-watching the videos now, it’s obvious why I did. Even though I knew I would never get the full responses I would have gotten from my mom or my mammaw, it is clear I was attempting to capture some history that I thought I’d lost with their deaths. And in the process, I got to know my aunt better. She told me about dreams she had ( her “psychics” she calls them in one video); one where my mom, her mom, and her grandma were all together in a church. One “psychic” is clearly a memory, a time she ran away as a teenager. She told me about seeing her grandma have a stroke and how she ran to a neighbors house to get help—her grandma, my great-grandma, whom everyone called Grandma Koons and whom about I grew up hearing you are so much like her, died a few months before I was born. In this video, we are sitting in a booth at Hoss’s ( for all of you Non-Pennsylvanians, this is the gold standard of buffets), and she points towards me, “Do you see them?” she asks. It freaked me out at the time, is she seeing them now?! But I see them, Sherrie, I do.
I would be lying if I said I was happy about taking over Sherrie’s care when my mom died. The oldest daughter/sibling conundrum—being resentful you’re the one that does All. The. Things. and also being a people pleaser that wants to do All. The. Things. But at an age where I was still constantly fighting the internal battle of Do I want to be a mom? Sherrie helped me scratch that itch. I have cleaned up her vomit, she has peed on my hand when I had to assist her with a urine sample at the doctor’s office, she has told me I’m mean and in response, I have said: “Well I still love you”. I have taken her shopping and held her hand when she cried. I have thrown her birthday parties and watched her carve her first pumpkin. She stumbled over rocks in a parking lot once and fell flat on her face and I thought my heart was going to leap out of my chest, a panic that I didn’t even know I was capable of possessing, rising. I don’t mean to imply I know what it is like to be a parent because I don’t, but I do know what it feels like to love someone so much you feel like your heart doesn’t belong to you anymore.
She was born on December 11, 1955, the eldest of my Mammaw’s three kids. She loved birthdays; memorizing everyone from Tom Cruise’s to neighbors she had growing up to my ex’s. Whenever I’d ask her who had the best birthday, she’d giggle and say “We do”. Us December babies, the best of the bunch.
December Babies!
While everyone in my family has a favorite “Sherrie Story”, I am her favorite person (technically, my ex-girlfriend and friend Keesha is her real favorite person but we never asked her to choose so I still pretend to claim the title even though we all know the truth).
Sherrie with her maybe, probably, favorite
No one knows why this is except possibly because my younger brother and sister would often fight and this got on her nerves. “Matthew and Rebecca stop fighting”, she would say with disgust in her voice. By default, I was the only one left. Or it could be because I was just there first.
When I was a teenager I briefly moved into her and Mammaw’s house. At least once a week I would find the portion of the newspaper that had house listings in the spare room where I was staying. “This is a nice house Lecia,” she’d say, pointing to a large home approximately $200,000 over the budget of an eighteen-year-old looking for a cheap place to rent. Whether this was because she wanted me to leave or she was genuinely trying to be helpful, I’ll never know.
The second time I lived with her was much more difficult.
Mammaw was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2011. The day she died, I sat on Sherrie’s bed, put my arm around her and told her it would be ok— even though I wasn’t sure it would be.
“I can’t believe she’s gone,” she said. It seems morbid, but this will always be my favorite Sherrie story even though I have a plethora of funny ones to choose from. We were just two grieving family members sharing a “normal” human moment. Two adults thinking about what they would do next without the person they loved most.
What we did was live together. Our cohabitation was a small disaster. There was the time she completely flooded the bathroom. The times I didn’t make her dinner the right way. And my favorite — the time she threw my 90 calorie brownies in the bushes behind the house while I was at work because she didn’t like how they tasted ( In retrospect, she was absolutely correct and those cardboard “brownies” belonged in the bushes). When it was finally established a few months later that she would move in with my mom and stepdad, I was relieved.
She eventually went to live in a group home, where she flourished. She made a best friend, the first of her life. She did activities and went on outings and became someone I couldn’t have ever imagined.
Sherrie with her best friend Jessie
And then three years later, to the month, I had to tell her my mom, her sister, was gone too. After I told her Barbie had been killed ( How? she asked. Shit. I told her it was an accident, even though it was the exact opposite of an accident.) she said she was going to the bathroom, which was located right outside her bedroom. I have never heard a human wail in the way that she did and I hope I never hear a sound like that again. I hadn’t thought about it until now as I write this but she was so good at adequately expressing loss — she couldn’t always communicate her needs, and “loving” is certainly not anything you would describe her as; but loss, she understood that clearly, fully. Perhaps that is also why she chose me as her favorite— she saw that same quality in me.
Sherrie with her siblings, my Uncle Rick & my mom
She briefly lived with me for a third time when her group home closed and before I found her a new one. We were both older then, and although challenging, it went better than the first or second time. Even towards the end, when she was in a nursing home and her physical needs were mostly being handled on-site, it was always humbling to get the call and have someone say “Alecia? I’m calling about your Aunt Sharon, we have you down as her contact”. I was her person, for seven hard, wonderful, and sometimes hilarious years.
I have had to sign paperwork for her to do art classes, to visit local markets, to receive government assistance, and to decide whether or not, she gets to continue existing here on Earth. A shout out to doctors and nurses who constantly have to decipher what medical staff have assured me many people say as I sobbed “Don’t want her to suffer…quality of life..you understand right…machines…” as I signed my name on a DNR.
My mammaw went into hospice when she was dying, the specifics I recall of that were the pamphlets that sat on her dining room table, how I’d picked one up one day walking through and read something like “they might stop being interested in the world” and the next day mammaw asked me to stop reading the newspaper to her.
I knew for months I would eventually receive the paperwork that Sherrie would head down this similar path, that I would have to witness something I had been shielded from a decade ago. Six pages of jargon that boil down to “your loved one is dying and now we wait”.
I am looking at a photo of my Mammaw as I finish writing this and for so many years I was worried she would think I fucked it all up, that I didn’t do the right thing by her kid, but I feel like she’s telling me it’s going to be ok. “It’s alright, Lecia, you did good” the three most important women of my life, who are together now, say—and for once, I believe it.
Sharon Lynn Robinson died at the age of 66, living 30 years past her initial life expectancy. She loved Tom Cruise, Elvis, the color blue, country music, and decorating her room for every holiday. She was incredibly funny. She liked going out to eat and bus trips with her mom. She was silly and had an attitude and was adept at sneaking snack foods she wasn’t supposed to have. She enjoyed secret walks around her neighborhood, which her family discovered many years after she took them. She was quick to laughter, quick to anger, and loved a good party. She loved her best friend Jessica and Ollie’s Bargain Outlet. She is survived by her brother Rick, her nieces Alecia and Becky, her nephew Matt and her favorite person, Keesha. She was loved and we will miss her.