Musings of a Restless Mind

Sharon with her coffee and her caretaker, Pirate

Sharon was the best woman who ever lived, the love of my life, and my wife for 41 years until she went to her reward in 2021. She was S. T. Gaffney as an author, Sharon to her college students, Mrs. G. to her high school students, and the Apostle to the Lost Souls to everyone. Her novel China Harbor: Out of Time, short story collection Facets, and…, something else, are available on Amazon here.

I’ve reserved this category for her correspondence. She was a prolific letter writer (via email), so I’ve decided to share it as I come across it in my archaeological digs of her email and her computer. My memory is not nearly good enough to transcribe or even remember all the conversations she had with random strangers who needed a little emotional help, but for letters, I don’t have to rely on my memory in our digital age. I’ve taken the precaution of removing or changing any names when I publish these letters. If it’s a common name, I tend to leave the whole first name. If the individual referenced has a rarer name, I’ve changed it to an initial for further anonymity. Being letters, they may refer to specific things that her correspondent had written to her, but the context Sharon provides should make any important things clear.

We were both raised Roman Catholic, and, if you’re not religious or spiritual, feel free to skip over the rest of this message. Sharon never proclaimed her spiritual and religious beliefs as if they somehow justified anything she had to say. The things I say about her here were never things she said about herself. She never needed to proclaim any credentials. The questions she asked of others, and the advice she gave to others spoke for themselves, and those with open hearts recognized them as truth and wisdom. As her atheist acupuncturist said of her to me, “Sharon’s in there doing whatever it is she does.” She was talking to one of the acupuncture students who worked for him. I found out later, that the student interns used to argue over who would get to remove her needles, so they could get to talk to her.

Labels and titles that I relate here are ones that others gave her. Sharon was a scholar, as one of her friends in Chinatown called her, recognizing her vast knowledge of Oriental philosophies and ways of life in addition to her knowledge of science. She was a prophet in the Old Testament tradition. Not one who preached fire and brimstone, rather one who talked to God as if he was sitting across from her drinking tea, one who bargained with God as Abraham did about Sodom and Gomorrah, one who protested like Jonah being sent to Nineveh, one who said what she knew was true without fear and sought no favor. An elderly priest told her she had the gift of discernment. An Episcopal priest who had expressed skepticism about the wisdom of the Episcopal Church allowing women to become priests, eventually asked her to decide if being a priest might be her calling. Apostle to the Lost Souls was what God told me she was when I prayed for us to have clarity about her calling, so blame Him, or me, if you prefer, for that one. When she was asked for a quote to put in the yearbook the year she taught high school (to pay my way through graduate school), she responded. “Always seek to know the truth, not just the answer to the question.” Many of her students both in high school and in college called her the best teacher they had ever had.

Sharon’s patron saint was St. Therese of Lisieux, whose short life was engaged in the humblest of tasks, and who, at the insistence of her Reverend Mother, wrote one short book, The Story of a Soul and, on the basis of that one modest volume, was proclaimed a Doctor of the Church, a title given to only 3 dozen people in the 2,000 year history of the Catholic Church. Sharon and I read many lives of the saints, and Sharon synthesized their biographies into, “None of the saints were perfect, but they all had one thing in common. They always said yes to God.” That was what she did, though not necessarily without grumbling. All that is to say, she would never give herself any of the titles I or others give her. They were things others told her about herself, and that she would only quietly and grudgingly admit about herself if backed into a corner about it.

The letters I publish here were written as correspondence to some of her lost souls that she never met in person. I have corrected the occasional typo I’ve found and, in some cases, split her long paragraphs into shorter ones to make them easier to read on a screen. I share my own “wisdom” everywhere else on this website, but this category is for Sharon’s. As someone who cared for a prophet, I only hope to attain a prophet’s reward as the Bible says.

Postscript: You’re probably wondering how I ever got so lucky as to land such a brilliant, wise, and hot woman. All I can say is it was divine intervention. If you don’t believe me, read it for yourself.