Sheila Marie Denton

Sheila was born on January 21st, 1949 in Long Island New York. She was an extraordinary person who led an extraordinary life from the very beginning. Her mother was undergoing a hysterectomy when the surgeon discovered she was pregnant. Due to complications of the partial hysterectomy, Sheila’s mother was ordered to stay on bedrest for the last trimester and ultimately, her birth was written up in a medical journal. At the hospital where she was born there was a salmonella outbreak that killed several newborn babies, but Sheila escaped unharmed because her three nurse aunts were able to care for her at home away from danger.

During her childhood, Sheila loved to write, ride horses, and play in the woods behind her home hiking by the stream and eating wild berries. Little did she know that these woods were being contaminated with toxic benzene and this chemical exposure would lead to the development of a rare cancer later in her life.

Sheila was extremely smart and started reading when she was only three years old. She excelled in school and won many awards. Her academic future was filled with promise, but when she was only 16 her father died very unexpectedly. This loss was devastating to her and her mother, but despite that she started college a year later at 17 years old. Unfortunately, her time at the University of Massachusetts was not a great success because she was directionless having not yet decided what she was doing there. However, by the time she was 19 she had a job as a secretary at the Hudson Institute where she quickly became a favorite of its founder Herman Kahn and was promoted to an editorial assistant and proofreader on the basis of sheer intellect, not having any formal qualifications for the position. This was the first of many such jobs as Sheila was brilliant and incredibly charismatic. She could talk to anyone about almost anything and therefore met and worked with a number of fascinating people over the years.

When she was 24, Sheila moved to Dallas Texas where she met her husband, Jere. They fell in love at first sight and were married less than four months later. While still her fiancé he discovered that Sheila sometimes had accurate premonitions. As they were walking into a restaurant where he planned on proposing she said she really didn’t like that restaurant because the last time she was there someone proposed to her. Needless to say, Jere proposed to her at a different venue. After, Jere met Sheila’s mother in New Jersey as they were driving away she asked him to pull the car over and started crying saying she would never see her mother alive again. That turned out to be true. A little over a year later the phone rang in the newlywed’s Dallas apartment and she told her husband “don’t answer that, it’s bad news”. He did answer it and it was her older brother calling to say that her mother had died in an accident. About a year after that they were listening to the presidential debates with Jimmy Carter when she said “the sound is going to go” about 10 seconds before it died right in the middle of that debate because someone apparently cut a cable. Sheila had many premonitions like these over the years.

The first eight years of Jere and Sheila’s marriage were an extraordinary adventure because Sheila made them that way. Then in 1982 when their first daughter was born, children became the intense overriding focus of Sheila’s life. Four years later they had a second daughter and just a year after she was born, Sheila was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. She was devastated but within a week she rallied and vowed that her one objective was to be alive long enough to help them grow up. In 1992, she was diagnosed with a “rare bone marrow failure disorder” that she was told would kill her in three months. Undaunted Sheila renewed her vow to stay alive long enough to see her children grow up. For the next thirty-three years despite being seriously handicapped by MS, and continuously threatened with complications from an incredibly rare disease she fought to stay alive for her family. It turned out that the most extraordinary thing about Sheila was not her intellect, premonitions, or her ability to talk anyone about anything. It was her extraordinary courageousness. All who knew her will remember her for her playfulness, wit, and spontaneity.

Sheila is survived by her husband Jere; her daughters, Christina and Alexa; her older brothers, Robert and Richard; and four grandchildren.