Sheryl Ann Thomasson

Sheryl Thomasson was born in Ohio in 1944. She did not see her father until she was two years old, after he was discharged from Army service during World War II.

She enjoyed ice skating across the town lake in Richwood, OH in the winter when she was young, helped with the family’s apple orchard, and would sometimes ride a horse into town with a friend.

She was the piano accompanist for the productions at her high school, and went to college in Columbus, pursuing a piano performance degree.

She married James Edward Thomasson and supported him through medical school with cottage seamstress work.

She moved to Arizona to the Tohono O’odham nation where her husband was an intern physician for the Indian Health Service. She considered Arizona as her home after that.

She had two sons in Tucson, James Edward (Jet) Thomasson II and Joseph Eric Thomasson, and taught them to love music while supporting them in sports and other things that caught their interest.

She went back to college at the University of Arizona to get a degree in Anthropology, writing her thesis about the spreading of Micronesian people and culture.

She worked for The Parent Connection in Tucson, writing grant requests and helping with parenting classes and loved her time working there.

She “adopted” a number of “daughters” (and one “son”) as a Host Mom for the six-week Up with People staging camp every summer for more than a decade.

She was a world traveler, hiking through the Alps in Austria and Germany, staying on a sheep station in Australia, and shopping in a flea market in Shanghai, among many other places she visited.

She was a grandmother to three grandsons, Eric William Thomasson, Casey James Thomasson, and Cole Michael Robert Thomasson.

She lived independently in Tucson throughout her 60s and 70s after her husband died in 2003, finding a group of friends at a Starbucks she frequented, being fascinated with how the weather made the mountains turn different colors, and spending time at the Desert Museum and the Reid Park Zoo.

For the past two years she fought a valiant fight against time and Amyotrophic Lateral Scerosis (ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease). She travelled as much as she was able, enjoying time spent with beloved friends and family. In April, she celebrated her 80th birthday in Tucson, and felt that her heart was so full after that day. The ALS began to really take its toll thereafter, and she passed away peacefully in Gilbert on May 25, 2024.

Sheryl is survived by her brother Terry Erwin and his wife Donna Erwin; son James (Jet) Thomasson and his wife Kristen Thomasson and their sons Casey James Thomasson and Cole Michael Robert Thomasson; son Joseph Eric Thomasson and his son Eric William Thomasson.