The Star Dedic

Funerals can often feel like camp singalongs — all glow, no shadows. The nice things are all said out loud, the rest brims in people’s bowed heads.

What were Shelagh’s human failings? What advice, had she had the chance, might she have doled out from her deathbed?

I walked through her home looking for signs. I wanted to meet Shelagh quietly, on my own.

Three years ago, Shelagh bought a duplex with her sister Heather five blocks from their childhood home. Shelagh lived in a two-bedroom apartment on the top floor. Cullimore and her husband Jay lived downstairs, often with one of their four children.

Shelagh no longer had to leave her door open; her family just walked upstairs.

Stepping inside, I was surprised to see a dangling crystal chandelier above an antique wood piano-turned-dining room table. I had assumed Shelagh’s klutziness would translate to a sloppy home. I was wrong.

Her living room was lush and creamy, her kitchen warm with wood floors, and treasures were scattered everywhere — a wooden birdhouse and rusted bell in her kitchen, two heart-shaped stones on the radiator by her bath, an angel-shaped knob above her mirror. Wedged into one corner of her bathroom, where the wainscoting of two walls meets, I found a small white stone with the word “strength” on it.

They seemed like totems, reminding Shelagh to not save life for the weekends, but delight in it here and now.

Two wishbones sat on her kitchen sill, and I found a bunch of laminated four leaf clovers in a pile on her desk. Shelagh believed in luck. She bought a lottery ticket every week without fail. What was she hoping for?

Her closets were disasters — hats, scarves, a scuffed-up pair of Blundstones and old silk kimonos all thrown together. Shelagh didn’t spend much time on how she looked, I could see. There wasn’t a tube of mascara or cover-up in sight. Her favourite shoes, her sisters told me, were a hideous pair of black Crocs.

While the front three rooms were warm and beautiful — perfect for entertaining — the back two rooms felt different. Shelagh’s bedroom is a museum piece from the 1940s — old wooden furniture dotted with antique photos, a “Home Sweet Home” needlepoint above her high metal bed, green hospital-like curtains.

Who could love in a room like this?

Her study next door felt like a university dorm room— cold white walls, ugly stained carpet, a black computer chair ripped in the seat. The temperature was five degrees colder than the rest of the place.

This is Shelagh’s office. Clearly she didn’t love her job.

After she lost her position selling wine, Shelagh went to work at the same place her sister Heather did, Trader Media Corp., selling ads in theResale Home & Condo Guide to real estate agents. Colleagues say she was a natural salesperson, building friendships with clients. And she enjoyed the freedom of working from home with her front door open and her dog by her feet. But over the past few years, the job had lost its lustre.

A company takeover resulted in mass firings — former colleagues called it a “bloodbath” — continual territory changes and increased pressure to bump up sales, particularly online. A corporate culture replaced the casual, family-like ambience. Suddenly, Shelagh was the oldest sales agent by more than a decade, and the only one who didn’t arrive to client meetings in a suit.

Two years ago, she started taking “happy pills” — antidepressants and anti-anxiety medication. Last summer, she took a three-month stress leave from her job.

It couldn’t have been easy being the one unmarried Gordon sister. Two of her sisters stayed at home; their husbands’ jobs were lucrative. All three owned cottages. Shelagh, meanwhile, struggled with bills and her mortgage.

Standing in her cold study, I could hear Shelagh thinking in panic: “Who is going to hire a 55-year-old woman?” And: “What happened to my rich husband?”

Why didn’t Shelagh, who loved so much, ever get married? She had the chance. Three chances, in fact. Shelagh ended all three of her great love affairs. In one case, she had moved all her furniture into her boyfriend’s house before abruptly leaving him. Later, she explained it was because he hadn’t wanted children, but to her friends and family, that seems a hollow excuse.

Why did the ultimate lover hide from making the ultimate commitment?

Her mother thinks “part of her was closed.” Her oldest friend, Ellen Kaju, puts it down to bad luck — Mr. Right never arrived. Her sister Heather says it was one of Shelagh’s enigmas — “I don’t think she understood that either.” Andy Schulz, the gay costume designer Shelagh called her soulmate, thinks Shelagh was just born different. She knew her path was neither straight nor narrow.

The story of Shelagh and Schulz is a beautiful one. They met 19 years ago in a park, walking their puppies. Within a week, Shelagh hit him in the head with a stick she’d impossibly thrown from in front of him. They became, in the words of Anne Shirley, bosom friends. They vacationed together, dined together, called and text-messaged daily, hosted one another’s birthday parties. They crawled into bed together with their dogs and read books. Their families came to see them as a unit — a married couple without the sex, although Schulz says their relationship was more special than marriage.

They planned to retire together.

“This is such a shock and a tragedy,” he said during her funeral. “I don’t know how anybody or anything is going to fill this void that I have.”

Thinking of Shelagh’s life, a line from an Adrienne Rich poem comes to mind: “These are the materials.”

Whether she worked with what she’d been given or sought out alternative fabrics, the quilt of love Shelagh stitched was luminescent.

The night before she died, Shelagh organized her family to go to Emma McCormick’s photography exhibit and fundraiser, called Hearts and Arts. McCormick is dating Shelagh’s nephew Evan Cullimore.

Typically, Shelagh had emailed and texted and phoned every family member, cajoling most to come out and sharing plans for dinner before.

The family — 11 of them — squeezed into a corner booth at Fran’s, a downtown diner a block from the fundraiser. Shelagh sat in the middle, loudly ordering cheap glasses of wine, sweet potato fries, onion rings (her favourite), fish and chips, and of course, a “healthy” Caesar salad to compensate for the grease. They all shared.

The next morning, Shelagh woke up early as usual to walk her Polish lowland sheepdog, Jerzy. She read the Star, section by section, charged through the crossword, checked in with Heather downstairs and with Schulz, who had missed the fundraiser for a work function and was feeling hungover. She texted some friends about the CP24 interview she’d done on the street the night before.

Jessica was meeting with her florist — an old family friend — to go over the wedding flowers, and Shelagh’s presence was demanded. Some time between noon and 12:30, Shelagh was in her bedroom, getting ready to go, when a rush of blood flooded her brainstem.

At 12:39, Heather was outside their shared house waiting for her. “Where are you?” she typed in a text message. They had planned to leave at 12:40 and Shelagh was normally early.

She found her sister upstairs on her bed. Her face had already turned blue.

Shelagh’s family and friends gathered at Sunnybrook Hospital, where doctors worked to revive her

Her diagnosis changed from a heart attack to aneurysm. Her mother, Sue, alerted staff that Shelagh had wanted to donate her organs. The critical-care nurse with the Trillium Gift of Life Network commented that most of the Gordon clan gathered in the waiting room had red hearts drawn on their hands. Had they drawn them as a tribute to Shelagh?

“No,” Sue told him. “She has one too.”

The hearts were from McCormick’s fundraiser — a sign for the people at the door that they’d each paid the cover.

But in reflection, the hearts seemed like another one of Shelagh’s scattered totems, to remind them all of her love and life’s joys.

Each plan to get it tattooed on their body in her memory.

Four weeks since her death, Shelagh’s friends and family are still gasping at the hole she’s left in their lives. She was such a constant, they didn’t understand the breadth of her caretaking until it disappeared. Each has made small promises for change — to treasure this moment, to be more open, to love more fully.

Shelagh’s niece Caitlin has moved into her house, wrapping herself in her aunt’s molecules and memories. In a speech at her sister Jessica’s wedding three weeks after Shelagh’s death, she promised “to be your Shelagh.”

I’m mourning Shelagh too. She’s consumed me since her death — her quirks, her kindness, her mysteries. I have never met anyone as abundantly generous as Shelagh. I aspire be like that.

Wandering around her house one recent afternoon, I fished one of her mud-caked Blundstones from the closet and slipped it on, wondering “What is a life worth?”

In the past, I have often answered this question with achievements — campaigns, masterpieces, spiritual or literal changes to humankind and the world. The measure, I’ve thought, is Sophie Scholl or Charles Darwin or Nelson Mandela.

Shelagh’s life offers another lens. She didn’t change the world forcibly, but she changed many people in it. She lightened them. She inspired them, though she likely didn’t realize it. She touched them in simple ways most of us don’t because we are too caught-up and lazy.

Her life reveals that it doesn’t take much to make a difference every day — just deep, full love —and that can be sewn with many different kinds of stitches.

Some of Shelagh’s friends feel terrible they didn’t get a chance to say goodbye and tell her how much she meant to them. There is a lesson there.

For, as I see it, Shelagh herself didn’t need to say how much they meant to her. Her daily life was a kiss of love.

With files from Valerie Hauch, Ashante Infantry, Paul Irish, Nancy White, Leslie Ferenc, Emily Jackson, Laura Stone, Kenyon Wallace, Leslie Scrivener, Oakland Ross, Mary Ormsby, Antonia Zerbisias, Joseph Hall and Paul Hunter.