By Alison Brooks, February, 2021:

Sherry and I were very good friends in junior high, but drifted apart in high school. Years later, around the time we were both turning 60, we began to correspond -- perhaps thanks to the miracle of Facebook? -- and I learned that she had come out as gay very late in life, leaving her husband and eventually finding a wonderful partner who cared for her until her death. She had been suffering from Alzheimer’s for the past ten years or so. I visited her twice in Maine, the second time while she was living in a memory care facility. Despite her diminished mental capacities, she absolutely loved the WHS DVD that you made of our 7th grade biology class and was able to identify a couple of people even I wasn’t sure about. As is clear from the obit, she led a wonderful and full life, sadly cut short by this cruel disease.

Sherry was my best friend in junior high school in Madison, WI. She was full of mischief and a true ring leader. She used to take a small group of us 7th graders to the top floor of the UW Chemistry Building, late at night, past some incredulous grad students, through a low door and down a spiral tubular fire escape, laughing and screaming, all the way out of the building. What a thrill! Or we would be drinking cherry cokes at a soda fountain downtown and she would blow the paper covers off the straws at complete strangers, then look the picture of innocence, so no one knew who was doing it. “Fun to be with,” didn’t even begin to describe it. I once went on a school ski trip with Sherry, and of course she would go off piste at the first opportunity. I remember gliding into a woods through deep snow. We were having trouble slowing down, and Sherry had the idea of “embracing“ a tree with her skis, pushing off against it with her arms. I still remember the “snap” of her nose breaking and the expanding pool of blood in the snow. Of course she survived and thrived. I’m so glad I had a chance to visit her in Maine, more than 50 years later, and to meet Kathy, Mali, and Seth, to whom I send my heartfelt condolences.