Six years ago today, I received a phone call from a Texas number. I normally wouldn’t answer an unidentified number from anyone, but my ex-wife was living in Texas, so maybe she was calling from a different number? I couldn’t have been more wrong. Yes, it was regarding Sheila, but not in a good way. I was given the news meant for my daughter, who was in Bahrain, but nobody could get hold of her, and they figured I might be able to get in touch. I was drawn into the most difficult call I ever had to make. My daughter’s mom had died in a car accident only a few hours before. As much as the call crushed Jessica, it gripped my gut deeply to have to convey the grim message. At only 50 years old with a ton of unrealized dreams, my ex-wife and mother to my daughter was no more.
Sheila Darlene Clark became Sheila Wise back in 1986, and by 1989, our marriage was over. It took a few years of quiet between the two of us before she reached out to me to remind me of the importance of Jessica needing me in her life. With that nod that Sheila and I could talk and do so easily, Jessica and I started to write one another, and when I moved back to the United States, we made arrangements for her to come out to Phoenix, Arizona, to see each other face to face for the first time in over five years.
Sheila had remarried well before my return and, sadly, was with a very controlling and jealous spouse. While this complicated the two of us talking about the welfare of our daughter, Sheila would arrange to reach out while she was at work, and Jessica’s step-siblings knew to identify the caller as a fellow student instead of her father. Through Jessica’s occasional medical and dental emergencies, a difficult husband, and a daughter starting to rebel, Sheila was always upbeat, remaining positive that things could only get better. In our phone calls, we maintained the same goofy banter we’d always had from the day we started dating through the first few years of Jessica’s life. One thing was obvious through all of this: Sheila enjoyed being a mom, and nothing could diminish her enthusiasm to dream of what was yet to come.
The day she died, I felt horrible for the things she’d never know, and worse, my daughter had to respond from thousands of miles away to the devastating reality that her mom had passed far too young. Sheila is never far from my thoughts as our travels to Paris, Amsterdam, Athens, Madrid, Innsbruck, Cologne, and various points in between, along with bringing a child into the world, forever cemented our connection to each other’s lives. It truly is sad that this important part of my past is now gone in all but memory.