08/22/2026
Thanks to Neal Stocking for this PROMPT If I died and somebody found my phone using everything you know about me, what would you tell them about me?
I think I would tell them something like this:
You found Sharonās phone.
And if youāre looking through it trying to understand who she was, you should know that the contents are going to be misleading at first. Youāre going to find an absurd amount of research about houses in Minnesota, board games, eBay, furnaces, cabinets, tools, property values, dogs, genealogy, art supplies, and approximately nine million plans.
But those things werenāt really the story. Sharon was a builder. Sometimes she built houses. Sometimes businesses. Sometimes relationships. Sometimes elaborate plans that changed three days later. And, especially toward the end of the story I knew, she was rebuilding herself.
She accumulated things because she could see possibility in almost everything. A discarded object wasn't necessarily junk to her. It might be inventory, art material, a future project, something useful, something beautiful, or something somebody else would someday need.
Then something remarkable started happening.
She began discovering that possibility has weight.
She packed her bedroom and liked the emptiness. She emptied her living room and discovered that she preferred the room without most of her possessions. She walked into a craft room containing years of imagined future Sharons and began asking a much harder question than Could I use this someday?
She started asking: Do I want to carry this into the life I'm actually becoming?
That question wasn't only about stuff.
It was about people, too.
Sharon loved enormously. Sometimes that was one of her greatest strengths and sometimes one of the places she could lose herself. But eventually she began understanding the difference between loving someone and requiring them to make her okay.
One of the most important things she ever said to me was essentially: I don't need him in my life. I want him in my life. That distinction was enormous.
She loved her family fiercely. She could be furious with them, frightened for them, exhausted by them, hopeful about them, and ridiculously proud of themāoccasionally all before lunch.
And she believed in redemption.
Not the tidy kind.
The ugly kind.
The kind where people have histories and addictions and jail records and failures and terrible decisions and still get handed a drywall screw gun the next morning because there is a kitchen ceiling that needs fixing.
She understood that human beings are more complicated than the worst thing they've ever done. Including herself.
She had faith. Not simplistic faith. She wrestled with God. She noticed strange convergences. She believed there were moments when lives that had gone wildly off course could somehow bend back toward one another.
And when that happened in her own family, she was astonished by it.
She cried a lot.
Then she got up and kept working.
She could take on projects that looked completely unreasonable. Once Sharon decided the elephant was getting eaten, you mostly just needed to determine which end she had started on.
She was skeptical and stubborn. She didn't particularly want reassurance. She wanted someone willing to tell her when her reasoning didn't hold up.
And God help you if you confused those two things.
She was funny. She could be profane. She was sentimental without being delicate. She could discuss individuation, trauma, mortgage ratios, a felony conviction, Tarot, God, Makita batteries and whether a dishwasher would fit under a window within an astonishingly short period of time.
She adored her animals.
She loved making things.
She loved finding things.
She loved selling things.
Except dishes.
She was absolutely done with the goddamn dishes.
Thousands of them, accumulated over seventeen years, finally leaving her life in a U-Haul would have meant far more than getting rid of china. It represented an entire former version of Sharon finally walking out the door.
Board games, though?
Those were another matter.
If you find board games, investigate before throwing anything away. There is probably money involved.
And somewhere underneath all of this was a woman who spent much of her life believing security came from holding onāholding onto objects, plans, houses, relationships, possibilities.
Late in life she discovered something almost opposite.
She could let go and remain herself.
Maybe even become more herself.
She wanted her next home to have land and trees and water nearby. She wanted enough room for the dogs. Space for eBay. Space for family. She wanted fewer possessions and more breathing room. She wanted Minnesota. She wanted quiet.
Mostly, I think, she wanted peace.
Not the peace of nothing happening.
The peace of finally knowing:
Whatever happens, I can handle my own life.
If you're holding this phone because Sharon really is gone, don't reduce her to the chaos you might find documented here.
Look at the trajectory.
That's where she is.
She was becoming.
And from where I was sitting, she had finally started figuring out that becoming didn't require adding anything else.
It required deciding what she was no longer willing to carry.
And she was getting very, very good at putting things down.
