Her family got the call that she had been in an accident early on a Sunday morning in March. It appeared she had fallen, they were told by someone at the hospital, and had suffered a subdural hematoma. That’s a traumatic brain injury in which blood collects between the outer and middle layers of the covering of the brain. It is caused by the tearing of blood vessels. Sheila was in a coma, but she was stable and doctors believed she would recover.
Mrs. Walsh flew to Chicago, and when she got to the hospital, Sheila was in bed. There was no visible injury from the fall. She looked peaceful, like she was sleeping. Doctors said she still had brain activity.
“Has she said anything?” Mrs. Walsh asked a nurse.
“She spoke just once,” the nurse said. “The only thing she has said was ‘My dad is coming to get me.’ ”
The nurse didn’t know anything about the family history, or that Sheila’s father had died four years earlier. Sheila had arrived at the hospital unconscious.
Mrs. Walsh was stunned to hear what Sheila had said. But over time, the family has taken comfort in knowing those were Sheila’s last words. “I believe our dad was coming to her to say it’s OK, it’s time to go,” said Susan. “It helps us to think they are together.”
Sheila lived for another two days, never regaining consciousness. By the end, when the family was told she had no brain activity and wouldn’t recover, they decided to donate her organs. Sheila had never mentioned that she’d want to be an organ donor, but given who she was, how she loved people, and how she always had this urge to help others, well, it was clear to the family that she’d agree with their decision. Her liver went to a dentist’s wife, which Mrs. Walsh felt was a fitting nod to her husband’s profession. Liver transplants were often unsuccessful in the 1980s, however, and the woman didn’t survive.
The family was told that Sheila’s organs went to seven people, but they were given no names. They read in the newspaper about a woman who was a teacher in Iowa City and received a heart/lung transplant the day after Sheila died. They assume that Sheila was the donor. This woman also didn’t survive long.
Someone received Sheila’s corneas, and the family likes to think that the recipient is still living and enjoying the view. “Sheila had beautiful eyes,” Susan said. “Really beautiful eyes.”
After Susan arrived in Chicago on the Monday Sheila died, she and her mother tried to learn what had led to the accident. They talked to her friend Bud Man, who was understandably distraught. He said he and Sheila had been downtown in a bar, drinking. They had met some people there. Sheila and Bud Man got in a little argument and she said she was leaving.
The people she met in the bar invited her to go to a party at a two-story brownstone elsewhere in the city, and she left with them.
Mrs. Walsh and Susan went to look at the house and talked to people in the neighborhood who had heard about the incident. The story the neighbors told was this:
Something happened at a party inside that house that made Sheila uncomfortable or upset. She got a little freaked out, the Walshes were told, felt she needed to get away and decided to go out on the balcony and then jump the short distance to the roof of the garage next door. She made it to the garage roof fine, but then she tried to climb onto the fence adjacent to it so she could get to the ground. She slipped and hit her head when she fell to the ground.
She was always kind of clumsy, Susan said, and it certainly didn’t help that it was dark, about 2 A.M. on a Saturday night, and that she’d been drinking.
When Mrs. Walsh and Susan stood by that fence, they could still see blood from where Sheila had hit her head. The police report was bare bones: A young woman slipped climbing off a fence, hit her head, and was taken to the hospital.
The Walshes were never able to find and talk to anyone who was actually inside that house that night. In their grief, they didn’t really try too hard. It was hard even to concentrate on the specifics of the incident.
And so the mystery of what made Sheila leave that gathering—and by the balcony, not the front door—was never solved. Perhaps it wasn’t as sinister as people might think, said Mark. “It wouldn’t have taken much for her to go off. Someone might have just said something and she got upset.” Susan’s take: “I don’t think she was being chased. I just think she realized she was in a situation she shouldn’t be in and she was trying to leave.”
Bud Man felt terribly guilty that he’d let Sheila leave him that night. The Walshes were understanding. They said Sheila could be impulsive. “Once Sheila made up her mind,” said Mrs. Walsh, “there wasn’t much you could do.” The fall and the way her head hit the ground “was bad luck, basically,” Susan added.
For years, the family found it hard to talk about the details of how Sheila died. That’s why the Ames girls, and most everyone else in town, never really heard the full story.
Just as the Ames girls speculate about what Sheila might be up to now had she lived, her family has also thought through the same what-ifs.
“I’d have been worried about who she’d marry,” said Mrs. Walsh. “She didn’t always make the best choices.” But as Mark sees it: “At the end of the day, she would have found the right guy and she’d be happily married with kids.” Added Susan: “I like to think she’d be living here in Kansas City with us. Maybe it wouldn’t have started out that way, but she’d come to be with us.”
Whether she’d have built a career as a child life specialist, she’d surely be a great presence in the life of her ill nephew Charlie. The family described him as a boy who is spunky, fun-loving, hardheaded and determined. He reminded them of Sheila.
At the North Carolina reunion, the girls are recalling their favorite experiences with Sheila.
One memory: During high school, Sheila drove this little beat-up yellowish/greenish car. At lunchtime, students were allowed to leave school and get something to eat, as long as they were back before the bell rang. They had exactly thirty-five minutes. So some of the girls would run out to Sheila’s car, and she’d speed them over to Taco Time on the other side of the train tracks that cut through Ames. Lunch at Taco Time could be a great risk because if a long train happened to pass through, and they were stuck waiting behind the gate, they’d be late returning to school.
That’s part of what made it exciting going out for lunch; they were at the mercy of traffic lights, passing trains, the lines at Taco Time, Sheila’s driving. “We’d be laughing so hard, trying to eat lunch as we raced down Lincoln Way,” says Cathy. “It was a race against time, always!”
After talking about the fun times, the conversation turns to the fact that they didn’t stay in touch with the Walshes after Sheila died. “They probably think we forgot about her and went on our way,” says Karen. “They don’t know how much she meant to us.”
“We were twenty-two years old when she died,” says Jenny. “It’s not like we were fully functional adults. We thought we were so young and invincible, and when Sheila died, it was such a shock. We didn’t have the life experiences that we have now, the sense of what’s the right thing to do, how to deal with grief. It would be so different if one of us died now. We’d know how to respond. We’d have more understanding.” Jenny says it’s not an exaggeration to say she thinks of Sheila every day.
Each of the girls has her own specific memory of how she learned about Sheila’s death, and of going (or not going) to the funeral.
Karla, who couldn’t afford to fly in from Arizona, recalls that Jenny was mad at her for not coming. Meanwhile, Kelly and Diana recall driving together to the funeral from the University of Iowa in Iowa City. On the ride, they got into a heavy discussion about heaven and hell. “I didn’t have a strong sense of there being a heaven and Diana did,” says Kelly, “and she was so angry at me. For more than an hour on the road, I don’t think we even spoke.”
Sheila leads the Ames girls.
The girls who attended the funeral recall how they stood at the grave site after the memorial service. It was mid-March
, but given Iowa’s weather, it was still extremely cold. “When it was over, everyone left—the family, the adults—and we stood there,” Sally says. “I remember it was a very powerful moment, just standing there. It must have been ten minutes. We didn’t say anything.”
As the girls talk about Sheila, a few of them hatch an idea. What if they pooled some money—they’ve got resources now that they didn’t have when they were younger—and established a scholarship at Ames High in Sheila’s memory? It could be given to a female student who was kind to everyone, who was well liked—someone who was a good friend to other girls.
The winner shouldn’t be selected by teachers or administrators, the girls decide. “She ought to be nominated by her friends,” Karen says.
The girls are completely enthusiastic about creating a Sheila Walsh Scholarship. They picture this new generation of Ames girls thinking about the qualities that define a good friend.
They say they’d love to meet the winner of the scholarship: what a terrific and giving girl she’d likely be. No doubt someone just like Sheila.
18
North of Forty
On the way back from dinner in Raleigh, the girls are traveling in two cars, one following the other. Suddenly, the first car makes an abrupt U-turn. Did they take a wrong turn? Did someone forget something back at the restaurant?
“What’s going on?” Marilyn wonders in the second car.
A cell phone rings in car number two. A few of the girls in the first car, driven by Angela, are calling to say they have made a decision. They’ve spotted a sexy lingerie store on the side of the highway and they’re pulling into the parking lot. They want to look around. Maybe they’ll find something fun.
There are a few groans in the second car. Some of the girls are tired. Some are just feeling their age. They have no great urge to go browsing in a lingerie store.
The two cars pull side by side into the store’s parking lot and the girls talk to each other through open windows. Kelly, Diana and a few others say they’re up for going in. But the rest aren’t especially interested. The majority vote no.
“OK,” says Angela. “We’ll just go back to my house.”
The tobacco fi eld behind Angela’s house, 2007 (left to right): Diana, Jane, Karen, Marilyn, Karla, Sally, Kelly, Jenny, Angela
The cars drive away, and Kelly says something about “wet blankets” and “party poopers.” Even the girls who were intrigued by the idea of going inside this naughty store surrendered awfully easily. “You’re big talkers,” Kelly says, “with granny underwear in your suitcases.”
The days of piling into cars and going to cornfield keggers feel long ago for these women. They can’t picture themselves exactly in that same party-time, adventure-seeking frame of mind they had back in high school. Some of what’s at play here is just maturity. A woman in her forties doesn’t have the same sense of fun as a girl in her teens. But much of it, of course, is also the result of where life has taken them. The laughs still come in huge bursts. But in adulthood, there have been a lot of sobering moments, too—a lot of emotion-stirring places they’ve been together. Those images are often clearest in the girls’ heads.
Two years after Christie died, for instance, Diana flew into Minnesota, and she and Kelly stayed at Karla’s house on a night Bruce was out of town. Diana and Kelly slept in Christie’s room, which had remained little changed from the day she last slept in it. Her doctors had allowed her to come home for her fourteenth birthday, so she could be with her family, and that was her final night in the bedroom.
Karla had preserved the room pretty much as it was; she hadn’t rearranged anything. She told Kelly and Diana that there was no comfort in seeing that empty bedroom every day, but she couldn’t bring herself to alter it.
Diana and Kelly didn’t talk much about Christie in the bedroom that night. Each of them wondered if they’d feel Christie’s presence, but they didn’t articulate this. “I was both afraid and honored to be staying in her room,” Kelly told Diana the next morning. “I guess I wanted Christie’s spirit to visit me, to tell me she was OK.”
On a different trip, Cathy and Sally slept in Christie’s room when visiting Karla, and they had that same sense of wanting to feel a connection to her. The room was dominated by a large and lovely poster-sized photo of Christie with her best friend, Jessie. The poster, a gift from Jessie, hung over the bed and included the words “Friends Forever” in big type. And so the room spoke about both loss and friendship.
Karla confided in the other girls about her “sad time”—starting with the Christmas holidays and continuing through Christie’s birthday on January 9 and the anniversary of her death, February 20. Karla explained how her family tried to remember Christie in upbeat ways. They had taken her to P. F. Chang’s, a Chinese restaurant, for her last birthday. So Bruce, Karla, Ben and Jackie returned to the restaurant on the January 9 after Christie died. They had dinner and then went back to their house for homemade Funfetti cupcakes, which were Christie’s favorite, just as they had on her birthday.
The Ames girls continued to be impressed and moved by how supportive Bruce was of their friend Karla. Karen couldn’t get out of her mind the day of the funeral, when Jane held Bruce’s hands and said to him, “This must be the hardest day of your life.” Bruce paused, then responded, “No, the hardest day was the day Christie was diagnosed.” In his answer, the girls felt as if they’d gotten a look into the depth of his pain and his love for Karla. The hardest day of his life had been ongoing.
The girls considered Bruce to be one of the most giving husbands they had ever observed, and that was well before Christie was sick. There was one gathering years earlier at Karla’s house. Bruce volunteered to sack out on the family’s boat with the kids for a couple of days so the Ames girls could have the full run of the house. Then he spent a day driving them all around in the boat—pointing out landmarks, making everyone lunch, getting them all drinks. “He’s a one-in-a-million guy,” Karen liked to say.
Bruce, while nursing his own grief, also knew to give Karla space and time, and to support her as she struggled to find coping rituals. For a long while, Karla would touch Christie’s ashes on the mantel before going to bed, just to say good night. She said she liked talking about Christie, but struggled to focus on “the happy years.” Too many harder memories crowded things out. There were too many reminders around the house, on the street, around the community.
People would nonchalantly ask, “How many children do you have?” and Karla would usually say “three,” and explain. To avoid questions, a few times she said, “two,” and then felt too guilty afterward. “It’s not fair to Christie not to mention her,” she told the other girls.
The decision to move out of Minnesota crystallized for Karla when she was in bed one February morning, three years after Christie’s death. It was President’s Day, the kids had off from school and Bruce was at work. Their daughter Jackie crawled into bed with Karla and started talking about one of the horses that the family owned. They kept horses in a stable thirty-five minutes from their house. “Wouldn’t it be great if I could wake up every morning and kiss my horse on the nose?” Jackie said to Karla. “I could just roll out of bed in my pajamas and go give a big kiss.”
Bruce’s family had land in Bozeman, Montana. His great-grandfather was the homesteader there in the late 1800s, and there was a barn right on the property. Karla figured the time had finally come: Why not just move there?
“Call your dad,” Karla told Jackie. She dialed Bruce, he voted yes also, Ben did the same, and the decision was made. Yes, it would be painful to leave Christie’s bedroom, and all those memories, good and bad, behind. But it could be the best thing for Karla, Bruce, Jackie and Ben. And the horse might just like being kissed first thing in the morning.
“Part of me can’t imagine leaving Minnesota, and living in a place where people never knew Christie,” Karla admitted to Marilyn and Sally one day when they came to visit. She told them of a brace
let Jackie wore with Christie’s initials: CRB. Jackie had the bracelet on one day when she was at a medical appointment, and a woman working in the office asked, “What does CRB stand for?”
“It’s for my sister,” Jackie told her.
And the woman said, “Oh, yeah. That’s right. You had a sister who died.” The woman said nothing else, just moved on to the next item of business. “A lot of people are nervous or don’t know what to say,” Karla later told her friends. “But I really felt for Jackie in that moment. It’s hard for kids, when people just gloss it over, when they don’t really acknowledge her loss.”
In Montana, where no one knew Christie, there might be even more glossing over, Karla said. Moving there could be hard for the family in ways they couldn’t even fathom. And yet a strong part of Karla knew the decision to go was the right one for her and her family. And in her heart she knew: Christie would understand.
“After losing her,” Karla said, “we’ve been learning not to wait until tomorrow to do anything.”
In their forties, several of the other girls also opted to take an inventory of their lives and to embark on new journeys. Cathy made plans to cut back on her work as a makeup artist and to focus more on screenwriting. Marilyn thought she’d get into singing and acting in community theater, tapping back into talents she’d nurtured earlier in her life. Karen felt herself getting closer to a return to teaching, and that wasn’t all that was new for her. As she liked to put it, jokingly: “If tomorrow’s Monday, I’m starting a new diet!”
In middle age, the Ames girls’ interests took turns they never would have predicted earlier in their lives. Angela, for instance, who had built a successful public relations business in North Carolina, decided to start a second business, Finality Events.
The Girls from Ames Page 29
