Sheryl Strobel-Brown

You should meet my sisters-in-law.

Sheryl and Tom

Every last one is gorgeous. And smart and strong and funny. As well, they're hopelessly devoted to my brothers. To be fair, they didn't have to grow up with them like my sisters and I did. They never endured underwear shoved over their heads or being pinned to the floor forced to swallow brother spit. Just the same, they manage my brothers very well, and they welcome with open arms the rest of our enormous and hugely dysfunctional family.

My sister-in-law Sheryl and my brother Tom usually host Christmas. All 60 of us tumble into their big beautiful home. We read the tender story of the Nativity aloud, sing carols - the three we remember all the words to, exchange with hilarity white elephant gifts, and eat and drink much more than we really should. Mostly we enjoy each other.

Tom and Sheryl, who never worry about spills or small house fires, make it look easy. Even as we sing and laugh, though, I am drawn to the sweet girl in the picture frame across the room. She is caught in time - a laughing, eager teenager with her brilliant smile and eyes that brim with fun. Only 15-years-old, she is a joyous extension of my sister-in-law.

She is Frankie.

I have never met her, but I feel close to her. Sheryl tells me stories. About Frankie's reluctance to be a cheerleader for her high school in the village of Clarks.  "Mom," Frankie rolls her eyes, "I'm not a shake-your-poms-fake-kind-of-smile-girl."

About how Frankie excels in volleyball, basketball, track, and does, after all, love being a cheerleader.

About her devotion to her younger brothers, especially her baby brother Ace. "Boo Boo!" she croons.

And about the time Sheryl asks for a good place to hide a pair of leather gloves she has purchased as a gift for Frankie's stepfather.  "Hide 'em in my underwear drawer," Frankie suggests. "If he finds them, we'll know he's a pervert."

Frankie loves to help her mother with projects around the house. She helps Sheryl remodel their kitchen. She loves to bake and meticulously copies a recipe for monster cookies. "Walnuts optional," she prints carefully on paper.

She thinks about going into the field of advertising someday like her mother. In fact, she wants more than anything for her mother to be proud of her.

One November day, Frankie drives to basketball practice, her school driving permit in hand, but turns right back around to collect gas money.

"I've got just 11 bucks!" Sheryl hands her a fistful of cash.

Frankie throws a brilliant smile over her shoulder and dashes back out the door again. From the window, Sheryl watches her daughter drive away.

Sheryl and Frankie

"God, I love that kid," she sends a prayer of gratitude to the heavens.

It is the last moment she and Frankie will ever share.

On her way home from practice, Frankie loses control of her vehicle, rolls down into a ravine, and is thrown 200 yards. It is Sheryl's brother who tells her over the phone that Frankie is dead.

Sheryl remembers only that she drops to her knees. The words are incomprehensible and have to be a mistake. Later, at the funeral home, she stares down at her daughter's body. Frankie is wearing her blue Hyvee shirt. She is unchanged. Suddenly, a small mucous bubble erupts from Frankie's nose, and for one wild second, Sheryl believes her daughter is alive.

"It's just the body shutting down," a funeral home attendant tells her as kindly as possible. The day her daughter leaves this earth is at once the end and the beginning of everything. All the rest of Sheryl's life will be divided into two parts - before and after Frankie. She cannot know on that terrible day that her marriage will fall apart. That even as she can hardly breathe, some friends will fail to understand her seemingly endless grief and others will tell her that Frankie's death is part of God's plan.

Frankie and her dog.

Sheryl cannot fathom a God who would allow her child to be taken. Even so, she cannot live the rest of her life without the belief that somewhere, Frankie's spirit exists, understands, loves and waits for her.

As a single mother, she has two small boys to raise. When the grief threatens to overwhelm her, she shuts her eyes and tries to talk to Frankie. Making an appointment with a counselor, she begins the long process of working through the pain and making a life for herself and her boys. She learns to find comfort and strength in the wisdom and words of others.

"The only kind of courage that matters is the kind that gets you from one moment to the next" becomes one of her mantras.

When Frankie's anniversary rolls around, Sheryl leaves her world for a day and takes a solitary road trip. "I try to have no expectations," she says, "except to think about Frankie all I want, write, and just be with my sadness by myself."

Eventually she is hired by NTV as an account executive. It is 2007, three years after Frankie's death. Sheryl is at the Grand Island Conestoga Mall working on a Christmas ad when she meets my brother Tom, the head of security.

"Sheryl," her friend Melissa, part of the mall management, slides up next to her, "Tom Brown thinks you're kind of cute."

Sheryl blinks. "Who? That guy with the short pants?"

Sheryl isn't sure after two marriages and the loss of Frankie that she's ready for Tom. But Tom is no stranger to grief. He is ten-years-old when our mother dies. I remember at Mom's funeral the way Tommy sits next to our heartbroken grandmother and softly pats her back as she sobs. He will not be put off by Sheryl's own grief.  My little brother is as good and gentle as a spring rain.

"You know, Mom," Sheryl's son Jake says one day after she and Tom are married, "I think Tom saved you."

Maybe they have saved each other.

Frankie has been gone 11 years now. Five years ago, Sheryl and her nieces instituted the "Frankie Lyn Anderson Volleyball Tournament." More than 300 people arrive in Clarks to play sand volleyball each year. Sheryl's brothers build the court, and even Sheryl's mother, who deeply loves her lost granddaughter, helps with the day. The money raised is donated to Frankie's high school in Clarks for band camp, athletic camp, science camp or any kind of school camp scholarships.

Fifth annual Frankie Lyn Anderson Volleyball Tournament

Sheryl forges ahead with other dreams, too. Although Tom and she have combined Tom's three children - Karley, Casey and Kelsey - with Sheryl's two, they decide to take in foster children. Two years ago, 16-year-old Alyssa arrives followed by brother and sister duo Chris and Kaitlynn, 9 and 7. This last summer, they load everybody in the car and head to the Lake of the Ozarks for a family vacation.

Tom, Sheryl and the whole crew at Lake of the Ozarks.

Their house overflowing with eight children is all because of a bright, beautiful girl called Frankie. On the outside, her mother Sheryl's life seems happy, full and busy. If it is, it's because Sheryl's made a conscious choice that it should be that way.

Even after 11 years, however, there is still the fresh and piercing pain that takes Sheryl by surprise. This Christmas, she finds Frankie's carefully copied recipe for monster cookies.  "Walnuts optional" she reads in her daughter's handwriting through a sting of tears.

These last 11 years, she has tried to be the mother Frankie would be proud of. She tries, in fact, to be the person Frankie was. On Frankie's grave marker, Sheryl has the following words set in stone to describe her daughter:

  "To value God's creations, to find the best in others, to give one's self, to leave the world a little better, to have smiled and laughed with enthusiasm, to have shed tears with a tender heart, to know that even one life has breathed easier because you have lived...This is to have succeeded."

Frankie's marker.

Perhaps it is only Frankie herself who truly understands her mother's heart and the monumental courage it's taken for Sheryl to travel this long road without her.

Sometimes Sheryl thinks about a particular date - April 10th, 2020. That will be the day, Sheryl says, that Frankie will have been gone from this earth longer than she inhabited it. She doesn't know why the day has become such a significant milestone.

"Perhaps it's because I have always, as long as I can remember, been Frankie's mom - from the time I was a kid myself, really," Sheryl ponders. "Maybe on that day I am going to climb a mountain. And maybe," she smiles, "it will be just a mole hill. I will figure it out as I go - one moment to the next."