150th post, and some very sad news

This is my 150th post on BrentWord.blogspot.com.

I have been thinking about and anticipating it for days. What should I write about, I've asked myself. Guns in parks? Why I love Brentwood? How just like Maria says in The Sound of Music, where God shuts one door he opens a window?

Today, however, I got news that broke my heart. In fact, I got a double-whammy of sad news. And so instead of boring you about what happened at tonight's City Commission meeting (guns in parks, no way; guns in city buildings, no way; abandoned construction zones, will be taken care of), I'd like to tell you about Sara Jane Shell Moore Underwood.

Readers of my former Brentwood Journal column may remember a year ago today reading about a reunion weekend at Hilton Head, S.C. with friends and peers from my first newspaper, The Lenoir News-Topic. I'd like to say we gathered because we just wanted to see each other and had stayed in touch for say, 25-plus years.

The truth is while we had stayed in touch, we had not all gotten together in many years. Sara's fight against lymphoma had taken a new turn, however, and we felt that we needed to get together while we still could.

It was the weekend of best friend Eve's 49th birthday. Over that long weekend, we toasted over and over on the beach and later in the Sea Pines house where we had held several News-Topic reunions over a quarter of a century.

This past weekend. Eve and I and several Emory & Henry College sorority sisters celebrated her 50th at the alumni house on the southwest Virginia college campus.

We didn't know that Sara was in an Albany, Ga. hospital dying.

Monday I talked with Sara's oldest daughter, Lauren, who had just graduated from the University of South Carolina at Beaufort. Sara, just months after undergoing her second stem-cell transplant, had made the graduation ceremony. It was just one of her goals. Sara had an amazing resilience to do whatever she set her mind to, whether it was to reconnect with the love of her life, Chip Underwood, who was to become her second husband, or to see that her daughters reached adulthood and became amazing young women.

She could shag with the best of them. I'm not talking Austin Powers shagging. I'm talking about dancing. In fact, she and her former husband, John, relocated to Myrtle Beach, S.C. primarily to be at the epicenter of Beach Music (read that with capital letters).

Just minutes before I learned that Sara was on life support, I had emailed city communications queen Linda Lynch about The Tams' Sunday night concert at Crockett Park and was listening to an Embers' CD -- a gift from Sara several years ago. I'm telling you, the man upstairs has a wicked sense of humor.

When I got home from the City Commission meeting tonight, Eve called to tell me the news. I called Lauren, who said she, her younger sister Paige, 19, and their step-siblings were out drinking milkshakes and toasting the amazing life of one Sara Jane Shell Moore Underwood. Instead of tears there was a celebration of the amazing life of an amazing woman.

I said I would contact all of our former Lenoir, N.C. friends. I contacted Todd Sumlin, an award-winning photographer with The Charlotte Observer whose father, Steve, had hired us all and taught us amazing lessons about journalism at our first newspaper jobs. Then I Googled Anne Honeycutt, the woman who taught me how to make fettuccine Alfredo with real Parmesan cheese and heavy cream and how to drink espresso and red wine with a cork. She had lived in New York City before returning to her hometown of Lenoir and was the most cosmopolitan woman I ever met. I wore her pearl earrings at my wedding almost 24 years ago in Alabama.

The Google search led me to her obituary, dated in April of this year.

The tears that had not fallen for Sara, because I knew she was finally at peace, fell uncontained over Anne. Here was a woman who had housed me, loved me, taught me and mentored me at the start of my career who I had lost touch with. She died alone with only one surviving brother.

All the headlines this past week about Steve McNair, Michael Jackson and the rest can't touch the headlines that will probably never be written about Sara Jane Shell Moore Underwood or Anne Gilliam Honeycutt.

But these were two women who deserve headlines plated in gold and a special place in Heaven.

No doubt they are already there.

And for my 150th post, this is the best I can do.

The Brentwood City Commission seems so insignificant right now. But I do thank God that they unanimously voted against guns in parks. It's fitting. And right.

Now, I'm ready for an espresso (with Kahlua and lemon rind, of course) for Anne and a cold beer for Sara. OK, make that many cold beers.

And I'll see you at the 151st post, when I stop crying.