Sherry Diane Bumgardner

Sherry Diane Bumgardner
08/03/1944 ‚ 01/29/2021

Eulogy for our sister Sherry, (our Rose)
2021-01-29

My brother Rick Bumgardner, my sister Beverly Leach, and I (Sandi Ault) are sad to inform our great wonderful family and community of friends that our sister Sherry has passed beyond the ridge. Guided by the luminous Wolf Moon— the first full moon of this year—our sister packed her spirit bag in the middle of this night and began her journey to join the ancestors who await her with open arms and hearts.

Sherry was the first grandchild to our grandparents, and therefore she was welcomed into this world with great joy and was especially beloved. Because she was the eldest of the four of us siblings, we younger three grew up with Sherry’s arms around us and frequently under her care. She helped raise us. As we grew into adults and began our own families, she embraced our children as her own. And their children as her own grandchildren. She was the well that flowed with love in the center of our family village, and we all drank from that well time and again—in happiness and in heartache and all points in between—and were healed and sustained.

Rich in creativity and gifted with an artistic eye despite limited sight, she created beauty. Fiercely determined, she overcame hardships and disablement and managed to stay active in her church, her community, her neighborhood, and her job working to help the legally blind (like herself) to the last. Strong-willed and courageous, she lived independently even with physical challenges that might have prevented others from doing so.

As the sun rises, Sherry’s journey beyond the ridge will lead her home to another loving community who cherishes her—and there will be rejoicing. She is now free of the darkness of failing eyesight and the pain and struggle of a failing body. Here on this plane, we siblings and all our relations will remember her for as long as we have memories. She and we will always be together in the grassy field where we played behind our home in our nation’s capital making snowmen in winter and clover bracelets in spring; the sandy beaches of the island where we ran barefoot and sunburned together—our sea-salt-laced yellow hair stuck to our foreheads for four years of endless summer; the family farm situated smack in the center of our country where chickens and pigs and cows befriended us on vacations as we played on tractors and in the barn and in broken down sheds, the air thick with the smell of dried manure, tomatoes ripening in the garden, and green growing grain, while our grandmother’s homemade pies and cinnamon rolls and a real dinner bell beside the kitchen door summoned us to farm-style meals. We will always be together in the pine forested valleys of the northwest, in the mountain lakes we swam in, sunning and giggling on small floating docks in the middle of coldwater bays; in the sunbaked reservoir off the Snake River where we skied and boated and picnicked; in the songs three sisters sang while doing the evening dishes together as our baby brother played nearby; in the drive-in movies in jammies with homemade popcorn in paper bags we brought with us; in the sweet innocent music we danced to in our youth; by the boat ramp on Grand Lake where we floated while schools of water moccasins swam by and I called Sherry Rose (and the name stuck!). We will always be together in our memories of all the the car trips and plane trips, the near misses, the warm kisses, the devastating losses and the joyous celebrations, the graduations and the concerts and the book launches and the theater openings, the beautiful beginnings and the sorrowful endings, the births and the deaths and all the moments in-between. Sherry was always there for us, celebrating and supporting our successes and sharing and shouldering our defeats and losses.

To all who knew her or who knows one of us, feel the sun rise on us this day filled with the warmth and radiance of her strong and generous spirit as we remember and mourn our Sherry together. Yes, if you knew her, let us share great joy and gratitude to have basked in the light of her too-short life. But if you were not blessed to know her, then know her now through this joy and gratitude we share with you now. And be all the richer for it, as we are.