This month our essays are in tribute to my sister Dolores Jackson who passed away on April 30, 2011 after a short battle with T-cell Lymphoma. I wrote this essay shortly after visiting her with the rest of the family a week before her death. This was read at her service.

There is a sequence of photos of Dolores in her teens, her hair in a pony tail and wearing an old sweatshirt and pedal pusher pants. She is in the act of pitching a horseshoe. In a fluid and coordinated movement, she steps forward, swinging her left arm back and then forward to the point of release. She continues into a full and graceful arm extension in her follow-through.

We can imagine that horseshoe spinning through the air on an arcing trajectory toward a metal stake. From her careful and focused delivery we can almost hear the clang of metal on metal as the horseshoe rings the stake.

The horseshoe came from a horse on the small farm where Dolores was raised. She was the only girl, the seventh child of eight. Her brothers called her “Toots”. It was our way of showing her special affection in a family not big on terms of endearment.

Dolores would never have bragged about the ringer, nor that she could hit and throw a baseball as well or better than her brothers. One older brother Delmar, very wise and greatly adored, had impressed upon his sister and two younger brothers, the life lessons of modesty, humility and unpretentiousness as best learned by pitching cow manure. 

Under his direction, Dolores learned “population control” of gophers and cottontail rabbits. She participated in his relentless efforts to make extinct the sparrow that had invaded the space of “good” birds. This was before the time of politically correct euphemisms. Delmar would have scorned them in their pretentiousness. His instructions were clear and graphic.

Dolores moved with cheerful ease from a .22 rifle and a .410 shotgun to a piccolo in the high school marching band, to waving at the crowd from the back of a convertible in a formal dress and crown as Homecoming Queen and then back to driving a tractor on the farm.

Cheerfulness and ease have been as natural to her as hitting and throwing a baseball. She was always a very nice person but not in the way that people are nice because they have little self-definition. Her demeanor was guided by a strong sense of personal values and the backbone to live up to them. She was once referred to in her teen years as a “solid little miss” and indeed she was, both physically and in her character.

Personal values usually come from the family of origin and one in particular was never to be late. More specifically, it might be stated as, “If you can’t be on time, be early.” Not surprising that Dolores’ co-workers listed among what they missed, her early arrival at the office to make coffee and to offer a cheerful good morning as others arrived, along with the ever present bowl of candy. Little things can say so much about a person.

Dolores always seemed to have a clear sense of what was important and what really did not matter. She said once she didn’t care where dishes went in the cupboard as long as they clean and out of sight. That is probably one of the reasons we have been so comfortable around her. She has always had room for people. If she had any expectation, it was that you feel at home, just being who you are, without needless worry about what didn’t matter to her.

For all of us who have known and loved Dolores over the years, it has been unbelievable to see a person so competent, vigorous and fully into of life be so quickly devastated by a force beyond control; and so long before we would ever have been prepared for it. It leaves us raw in our sorrow and reminds of our own vulnerabilities and the uncertainty of life.

It encourages us to pause from the activities of our day-to-day lives that sometimes become so routine and without awareness of conscious choice. We are reminded that we too need to re-visit what is important and what does not really matter. The lessons we learn from Dolores’ life will ensure her continued presence in our own lives. We can continue to be inspired by her example as we have been in her lifetime.

Family has always been important to Dolores. How fitting that her children, brothers and their spouses, grandchildren, and niece should be together with her near the end doing what families do. We watched baseball, talked, laughed, cried, ate, drank wine and beer and went down memory lane viewing slide photography with a slide projector older than her children. We had a wonderful time, as families should, and Dolores had to have felt a little like at home.  

Dolores spoke of her end of life as a journey and one that she had learned about from the passing of our brother Delmar several years before. She said she was at peace. She had done her own preparation through the practices of her strong religious faith.  

We talked with her about all of the lives she has so greatly influenced. She was, not surprisingly, reluctant to take too much credit. We reminded her of the many physical therapists, occupational therapists, speech therapists and teachers who had benefited from working with her; most, it seemed, who came visit her each day as irrepressible as the tide, with large quantities of food and caring.

We reminded her of the many young children with special needs and their families for whom she was a special person beyond her professional expertise as a physical therapist in early intervention. Well, yes, she did admit to one child eventually earning a Ph.D. We wondered how many other successes there were.

We talked about her children and how wonderful it was to spend time with them and to see them being with each other in caring for her. And for her grandchildren, the name “Grandma D” will be full of meaning from their experience of her and the stories that will be told about her in the years to come.

We commented on how different each of her children was from the others. Dolores said she let them be who they were. Given how well they seem to have turned out, no doubt she has provided a bit of guidance from time to time. And we know she would not have forced them to her will.

It seemed that her way with her children, and those she has influenced in other ways, was like pitching a horseshoe. With care, and gracefulness in release and follow-through, she determined the arc of the trajectory. Having done her part, she could watch with satisfaction and confidence that like the horseshoe, she had a good idea of where they would land.