Vivian Sheppard Hercules

Vivian was born the third daughter of five to William Sheppard and Kathryn Skolfield. She spent her early life in and around the San Francisco Bay Area, graduating San Mateo High School in 1969. She began college at UC Davis before leaving early to spend most of the 1970s in São Paulo, Brazil, working as a data analyst for the US Internal Revenue Service.

After returning to the US in 1979, she returned to college at Cal State Hayward, graduating in 1982 with a degree in Latin American Studies. While learning to fly, she met another pilot, Richard Hercules, whom she married in 1985.

They welcomed their first son, Jake, in 1986 and their second, Spencer, in 1989. Vivian wanted nothing more than her boys to be happy and be prepared to take on the world; she taught them the importance of helping the people around you. If someone might benefit from her knowledge or her lived experience, she was always happy to send tips, tricks, and advice along to whomever she hoped it could be of use.

She was the administrator of the UC San Diego School of Medicine’s Professional Development Center. There, she helped train countless future doctors how to assess and diagnose patient illnesses and to get feedback to develop their bedside manner.

With her family, she lived in Northern California, Kansas, Virginia, Southern California, until ultimately returning to Northern California in 2017. In her 7 years in Foresthill, she made an abundance of great friends, participated in the local Lions Club, and was proudly one of the “Six Musketeers” in the Foresthill Friendship Club.

Vivian also traveled to all corners of the country. Even as her boys left California, in recent years Vivian made frequent trips to Nashville, TN, to make sure her first grandson had all the support and love a grandma could give and even went as far as New York City to meet her future daughter-in-law and ensure her son was settling in well. Her final trip – in Spring 2024 – took her and her four sisters to Newfoundland, Canada, to learn more about their family’s history after immigrating to the New World.

In August of 2024, Vivian was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Her earlier career in training doctors kept her physicians at the UC Davis Cancer Center on their toes; she made sure they completely explained all the planned procedures in detail – with a liberal amount follow up questions – so that she always knew what was going on. After many major ups and downs over the course of multiple months of chemotherapy, Vivian ultimately decided it was time to “let nature take its course” and returned home from the hospital on February 7th.

She died, at home, surrounded by her husband and her two boys, on February 10th, 2025. Vivian is survived by her husband, Richard, her sisters, Nita, Nadya, Verna, and Judy, her sons, Jacob and Spencer, and her grandson, Harry.