Many Paths, One Heart
A Welcome for Sharon’s 80th Birthday
Good afternoon, everyone.
Indulge me for a moment. Look around this gathering—really look. Take in the faces here today.
What you’re seeing is remarkable. Every single person here arrived by a different road.
Some of you have known Sharon since childhood. Some of you met her only last year. Some of you share her blood, some of you share her memories, and some of you share nothing at all with the person beside you—except the one thing that matters most today.
We’ll come back to that.
But first, let me welcome you.
To Brad, Sharon’s son, and Mitchell, her grandson—you carry her forward. You are, quite literally, her legacy made flesh.
To Laretta, Sharon’s sister, and to Laretta’s children and their partners—Laretta, you’ve known Sharon longer than anyone here. You knew her before she was anyone’s mother or mentor or dear old friend. You knew her when she was simply a girl becoming herself.
To Pam, my sister and Sharon’s sister-in-law, and the mastermind behind several fantastic overseas adventures—marriage is often the fertile ground for those famous family growth experiences that marriages are known for.
And now, to the many communities Sharon has woven through eighty years of living:
To her hospice colleagues—Mary and husband Jim, Ann, Theresa—you stood with her in life’s most tender and difficult moments. That is sacred ground, and few are brave enough to walk it as you did.
To her neighbors—Norma, the hostess of so many unforgettable parties, Dennis and Sue, Galen and Bobbie, Bill and Cathy, Dave—thank you for the waves from the car, the chats at the mailbox, and the quiet companionship of simply living nearby.
To her Hood to Coast teammates—Margie, Marta, Terry, Gary(?) and, well, me—we ran alongside her. So we know what the rest of you only suspect: Sharon is a great teammate, playful, energetic, relentless, and she does not quit.
To her friends from the Empowerment community—Lin, Jeanette, Diane, Nancy, Chip, Jo—you journeyed inward with her. You know the seeker in Sharon, the part that never stopped asking the bigger questions.
To her book club—Bruce, Jeanne and Mike, Caroline, Betsy and Craig—you’ve traveled to a thousand places without leaving your chairs, and cheerfully argued about every one of them.
To her fellow writers at Chrysalis—you watched her put her inner world into words, and launch her profound book, Whose Death Is It Anyway? A Hospice Nurse Remembers, into the world.
To her women’s group—Nancy, Debbie (and husband Jim)—you welcomed her onto your beach trips, and into your hearts.
To her friends from 24 Hour Fitness—Tim and Claudia, Rosario and Corey, Gayle and Dwayne—you kept her strong, kept her moving, and kept her laughing. And Tim and Claudia even kept us cultured, with a recent trip to the Shakespeare festival.
And to her Grateful Gatherings friends—Sophia, Jeanne, Mike, and Gayle again—you gave her yet another place to give thanks for life’s sacred gifts.
We also hold in our hearts the friends who couldn’t be here—those Sharon has loved and lost over the years. Their names live on in her stories, and we send our love to all who miss them today.
Now, here is what I promised we’d return to.
Look again at the roads that brought you here. Temecula, Phoenix, Eugene, North Bend, Grants Pass, Estacada. A hospice ward and a mountain-to-coast relay. A book and a barbell. A childhood home, a writing circle, a table of grateful friends. These are not lives that were ever meant to intersect.
And yet here you all are, under one sky, on one bright afternoon.
Because every one of those paths, however winding, arrived at the very same place: Sharon.
That’s the quiet miracle of a life well lived. It doesn’t gather people who are alike. It gathers people who are entirely different—and shows them, if only for one afternoon, that they were connected all along. Sharon is the thread. She always has been. Eighty years of her, stitched through all these separate stories, holding them together before any of us quite realized it.
So whatever road you took to get here, know this: you belong. You are part of her story. And today, she is the story that belongs to all of us.
Please, raise your glass with me—not to eighty years of time passing, but to eighty years of a heart wide enough to hold every one of us.
To Sharon.
