WHO IS SANDRA K. SKIPPER?

July 6, 2011

by

 

Sandi, as she preferred to be called, is a woman of extraordinary character and today July 6 is her birthday. She's was my wife and partner of over 47 years and the light and joy of my life. She died prematurely on 2/14/2011 at age 64 after a relatively punishing fight with cancer. I tried so hard to save her but just couldn't. For most of Sandi's life this simply outstanding person was content by choice to live mostly in my shadow supporting me. She was a giver, not a taker. She was also my love, my partner, my best friend, my soul mate, and by far the most important thing in my life.

Now her light has moved on from this time and place leaving me behind to deal with the grief of her loss. It comes to me that Sandi continuing to live in obscurity and chance being forgotten is just really wrong and not acceptable. It may have been her choice but it doesn't have to be mine. So I'm going to attempt to define her story and character here as revealed to me by her over the years along with some story of my own since our paths crossed and joined so deeply.

Sandi was the middle of three sisters and they were the only children of Jack and Myrtice Kemp. All were born in Monticello, Florida which is a small rural town located in north central Florida and very much like the old South, at least in the early days of the 1950s and 1960s when we were all growing up. As a kid, her father Jack had to quit school and plow with a mule all day long from daylight to dark for a dollar a day to help support his parental family. When he married and started his own family, Jack started working driving a milk truck to military bases during World War II and his new wife Myrtice was a home maker. This was a very typical marriage arrangement in those times and in this area.

One of Sandi's fondest childhood memories was a routine the little girls had of waiting with their mother on the front porch of their home for their father to come home after work in the milk truck, then all the little girls would stampede across the yard to him yelling and screaming with glee and he would scoop all three up in his strong arms and twirl them around before their mother got there and joined in. Sandi remembers her father to have been strong, handsome, and a very committed family man. I can in my later contact with her family attest that Sandi's parents were very good solid people.

Then Jack got a better job working at a electric power plant and soon bought a home where they would live for the rest of their lives and where Sandi grew up in the 1950s. When the girls were teens and could operate on their own at home, Myrtice got a job at a local drug store in retail sales and keeping the books to add to the family income. Jack also took a correspondence course, which he was proud to pass with flying colors, and became certified to work on electronic equipment as a second paying job.

Another fond memory that Sandi cherished was when the family went for a ride together in the country or went on a fishing trip. In the early 1950s before so much entertainment was available to common folks as it is now, the family in the car sang songs and cut the fool together with much laughter and displays of affection for each other. I remember her telling me that her father Jack loved the song "Red River Valley" and they sang it a lot. Let's face it, Sandi was daddy's little girl and his pet name for her was "Dink." Ah yes the wonderful memories of a simpler time in the old rural South.

Sandi as a very young teen almost died from spinal meningitis which left her with impaired vision the rest of her life and so she had to wear glasses most of her teenage youth. She was slender and with increasing good looks but was also the tom boy type who did not try to capitalize on her increasing looks, if she was even aware of it at all. Rather, she played a sax in the school band and got into full fledged fights with boys often trying to protect her younger sister Ann from their abuse.

This mind set and behavior along with her mother's influence helped shape her appearance of looking mostly like a geek with horn rimed glasses chosen by her mother all through high school as you can see in the awful high school photo of her below. Her parents were the over protective controlling types and this appearance diminishing her looks and in theory limiting her options fit right in with their over controlling psychology.

On the other hand, before you judge her from the above unflattering high school public photo, take a look at her in the below private photo of her while kidding around posing for her sister in a swim suit along about the same time and again with the horrible horn rimed glasses. Quite a bit different look isn't she. It represents just the beginnings of her soon to be good looks and her independence of her parent's control. Sandi would likely be upset if she knew that I released either of these two photos of her. However, I want you to get to know her as she evolved and these visuals help define her personal journey.

During this awkward teen growth time she tells me that she saw me just off the high school grounds and said to herself that she was going to marry that guy one day. It was always a humorous memory between us since that is precisely what she did. Now I was just under 4 years older than Sandi and at that time did not know of her existence because young people at high school level did not take notice of even younger lower classmen and particularly not females so young that they might be considered jail bait.

Now Jack and Myrtice were both products of an old fashioned rural southern culture. In their case that meant that they were not just very family oriented but also very protective and control oriented. Remember that raising three daughters did not come with a instruction manual and neither Jack or Myrtice had good parental role models in their families to go by. With three vulnerable girls to look after and no sons in the 1950s, they were shall we say a bit overly protective.

A result was that in one event Jack ran off the older sister Faye's out of town boyfriend at gun point and even in the presence of cops when it became clear that serious things were coming in sight between the couple. It was before my entry into the family picture but I will say that the guy was very likely the shifty type looking for a safe harbor and so it was probably just as well.

...

These good people had a lot to contend with and developed patterns of behavior geared to dealing with three vulnerable daughters. The older sister by several years with the put on the go boyfriend wasn't the real problem, it was the here-too-fore cooperative and supportive Sandi who started working with her mother at the drug store when she was only 12 years old. Despite her geeky looking beginnings, with some increasing maturity, Sandi was turning into a looker on the outside and beginning to attract the boys. Further and worse from the parents point of view, she was showing definite signs of intelligent independence after so many years of parental domination which of course the control minded parents interpreted as her going wild.

For example, she wanted to go off to a new nearby small town junior college that I had gone to some 30 miles from our small town. It made sense because this more economical solution for middle American families like ours with limited funds would have been to allow her (as it did me) to commute and continue to live at home with and help the family for the first two years. However, too much steeped in control and Sandi being their first real learning trial, they were against it no doubt fearing that Sandi would become even more independent of their control with the influence of a more liberalizing higher education.

So they sadly attempted to deny it to her. Knowing at least what she didn't want, she countered by moving out on them to live at the YWCA in the big city of Jacksonville, Florida on the Florida Atlantic coast. There she attended a technical college to learn computers and thereby a trade to hopefully later support herself alone if need be. By now she was also really coming into her own looks wise, so she also attended modeling school and even did do some fashion modeling in New York. The fact is that Sandi was very intelligent and she also had a lot of natural acting/performing/dancing talent that never saw use in her life with me. Why? Because, much to my regret, I was too serious and focused elsewhere for that sort of thing. The fact is that Sandi taught me to stop being so grim and smile and laugh again in my life with her.

Later she moved from the YWCA into an upstairs garage apartment on the suburban south side across the river from down town Jacksonville. There she lived a fairly normal life for a while going out with guys occasionally but apparently not finding the right one. Sandy was like that in knowing what she wanted when she saw it and not wasting time on less than what she wanted. For example, in later years when she went shopping, she was in and out very quickly. She was all about high performance and efficiency and did not like wasting her time. She was also low maintenance and often too cheap with herself although generous with those that she loved. She also liked things to be clean and organized, a trait we both shared.

Now Jacksonville in those days was primarily an industrial city with the heart of it divided by a river. Sandi lived alone in that small garage apartment on the more residential south side of the river. With no means of vehicle transportation, she often walked alone every where she went. That included walking across the bridge north to the main downtown area on weekdays to and from her classes and incredibly did so without getting harmed. No girl in their right mind would want to try that today in Jacksonville I can tell you. That took guts and of course a certain amount of brash youthful foolishness.

On one of her bus trips back home, she and her two sisters were riding around one evening. As they were passing through the A&W drive-in, she apparently spied me sitting there alone in my parent's car contemplating college books as I was planning on going back to Florida State University (FSU) after taking a break to help my father in his bee/honey business that I grew up in. Recognizing me from years earlier, she stopped, came over to the passenger's window of my car, introduced herself, and ask bold as brass if she could sit down and talk to me. Girls in the old South just did not do that kind of thing in the early 1960s.

By now I distantly knew of her as I did the presence of any pretty girl living in this rural small town but did not know her directly. Still, I knew enough that she was a conservative girl from a conservative family with a reputation for over protective parents and not given to such bold behavior. I knew what it must have cost her inside to do this and risk potential rejection from someone over 3+ years her senior. I could also hear her sisters threatening her saying that they were going to go home and tell their daddy about this if she didn't come back to their car immediately.

She of course ignored that threat and stayed obviously willing to pay the price. I instinctively knew it was really determination and courage that motivated her in spite of fear of rejection or her parent's anticipated anger and not so much any real boldness. For example, in comparison, I can tell you in all honesty that fear of rejection would have prevented me in those days from doing what she did and I can only imagine what it must have been like for her at that time.

By this time 18-19 year old Sandi as you can see in the above photo was wearing contacts, had lost the horn rimed glasses, and was coming into her own in looks. Let's see, a pretty girl that bold and determined wants to sit down and be with you and you're alone. What to do? I was immediately impressed at her courage and of course I invited her on in. Our life together started right there on the spot and lasted almost half a century more. They were the best years and decades of my life I can tell you and a prize absolutely beyond measure from my point of view.

We then dated in Jacksonville in secret and I quickly knew she was the one for me and she felt the same about me. Now before Sandi came along I was dating another very nice good looking girl that I also liked very much. I liked her so much that I just couldn't string her along and so I quickly ended it. It was among the hardest things I've ever done because I did like her a lot and had no wish to hurt her. However, I knew quickly where my relationship with Sandi was going and so did Sandi. She never made an issue of the other girl. So it had to be done as cleanly and swiftly as possible. Doing that bothered me for many years though as acting the jerk from the other girl's point of view is just not who I saw myself to be and the girl deserved better.

When I visited Sandi in Jacksonville, we stayed together at her place with all that this suggests but, considering the disposition of her parents, it had to of course remain a secret. Once when her parents made a surprise weekend morning visit with me there, I had to quickly jump out of the upper story bedroom window landing on the ground on a work injured leg and reinjured it. That was okay because I would never want to be the source of pain for Sandi with her parents and it was a close call.

Sandi and I wanted to get married but her parent's over control psychology was a real problem. I remember swearing myself to her and she to me at the Atlantic ocean one night on the Jacksonville jetties and that meant the most to me throughout the rest of our life together. At the time I was 23 and old enough to get married without parental permission but Sandi was only 19 and underage by the laws of that time and would have needed her parent's consent here in Florida in 1965. I'm sure you can imagine what our concern was in relation to that reality.

We had heard rumors that others had done it, so we went north across the state line into south Georgia and applied for a marriage license there intending to lie our way into marriage if possible. This process required a minor medical exam including a blood test for communicable diseases. Although it probably would not have worked out any way, being young and inexperienced in such matters of stealth, I didn't anticipate that the results of the blood test would be mailed to my home where I lived at that time with my parents or that my mother would open my mail. Of course my mother intercepted it and opened it much to my anger.

Some how my mother got the medical test results mixed up with the idea of Sandi possibly being pregnant and so she confronted Sandi's mother at work about both that and our trying to get married, again much to my anger. Caught by surprise, this resulted in a confrontation between Sandi and her parents where Sandi stood firm when they of course attempted to put a stop to our plans. Sandi was like that. She wasn't meek by any stretch of the imagination but was normally sweet, very cooperative, and not confrontational (sometimes to her detriment) and that could be confused by some who did not really know her with being meek. However, once she zeroed in on something or got mad, she was a real hard head ready to be very confrontational and ready to physically fight if need be.

This conflict scenario came to a head one night when I lost track of the time (typical of me) and brought Sandi home only slightly later than usual and when she was expected. It resulted in a big confrontation with her parents who were already freaked out about loosing control of her yet again and her overloaded father struck her in the face hard knocking her to the floor. It was something he had never done before or since but she was undeterred. She called crying and told me about it. In those days I had a reputation as potentially a very dangerous man. I started to rush over intending to teach her father what he could and could not do to the person I loved but a friend more rational than I at that moment talked some sense into me and so I had a pointed chat with her father the next day in a bit calmer temperament.

In the face of all this, her parents knew better than to push their most independent acting daughter or now me too far and I was not the kind that anyone would attempt to run off, so they agreed to the marriage. That is if they had something to say about how it would go down in giving their daughter away. Sandi and I agreed as was only right but with my having more reservations about controlling parent involvement than she.

For me the delay and her parental thing was irritating but for Sandi I think it was more of a relief to no longer be operating in secret or in conflict with parents that she dearly loved. We were married in her parent's Baptist church on 9/26/1965 and the above photo depicts the happy couple right afterwards. Not being able to afford it and with no honeymoon, we went off to live in Sandi's garage apartment in Jacksonville. Just being with her was honeymoon enough for me. Even though this seemed to be just fine with her as well, I always felt guilty about not giving her more but she never once made an issue of it.

Also, after graduating from the technical college and modeling school along about this time, Sandi almost immediately went to work in the IT department with a large insurance company with a complex on the Jacksonville south side at the river within close walking distance of where we lived in her garage apartment. She was there only a few days when the local in house self styled ladies man approached her from behind while she was bent over the water fountain and grabbed her from behind. BIG MISTAKE!

What he didn't know at that time was that Sandi did not allow anyone to touch her in a familiar way without her permission. It was a rule of her's. She instantly got mad, whirled around, struck him a huge haymaker blow on the side of the head knocking him into the wall where he went down. He had a blow imprint shining prominently on the side of his head and then she began to loudly tell him off for all to hear even though I suspect he was a bit too addled to know exactly what was going on.

It was a big open area of many desks and machines with many female employees witnessing the event. All of the machines in the room went immediately silent and then there was this massive applause supporting her action even with some men joining in. It turns out that this idiot had been hitting on all the good looking women and making a real revolting pest of himself at work. This was in the days before anyone pursued formal sexual harassment complaints. Her supervisor told her that the guy got just what he had been looking for. Since no one had any pity for him, she did not get in trouble over this.

After setting back down at her desk for a while, she apparently wasn't quite done with the poor guy and approached him an hour or so later in his section with other male peers and loudly told him off again in front of them. That was my Sandi, normally not confrontational when she really should have been and ultra nice but get her cranked up and she was a firebrand. We fondly kidded her about getting the Indian up in her simply because she had some native American blood. I showed up on her floor at work the next day looking grim and making out like I was looking for this fool even though I was of the opinion that he had already suffered enough for his offense. In those days I was 6'4" tall, around 250+ pounds, on the grim side, and he apparently ran for it.

On another occasion when we were eating at a Jacksonville Burger King, some young low life toughs jumped on this older guy in the parking lot beating him up in his car right in front of his wife and small child. It was all over this older guy politely asking these young toughs parked next to his vehicle to close their car door just enough to allow him to open his car door and get in his car to leave. When I got out there to try and put a stop to it, the man was covered in his own blood because one of these low life types had nearly bitten one of the man's ears nearly off and it was just dangling by only a flap of skin.

My intent was to tell them that the law had been called thinking that this might scare guys like this into leaving but of course three of them then jumped me. Fortunately anticipating this possibility, I had positioned myself between the vehicles and only one at a time could get at me very well with such poor footing. So I was able to defend myself and teach them not to do that including causing one of them to throw up his previously eaten burger(s) all over me.

However, when Sandi saw these guys trying to jump me, she instantly got mad and came rushing out of the restaurant trying to attack them using her purse as the only weapon she had before I could get her back inside. That was my Sandi! She was soft spoken, ultra nice, the sweetest girl in the world, calm, pleasant, compassionate, the voice of reason, not normally confrontational even to her own detriment, but always quick and ready to put herself at risk without hesitation to defend those that she loved with the odds not mattering to her at all.

The point being that from my point of view she was not just a very independent individual in her own right due respect and my wife, she was my full partner standing beside me in life fighting our battles together and we were an inseparable team of soul mates for almost half a century. As a team, my responsibility was to look out for her and her welfare in my way and her responsibility was to look out for me and my welfare in her way. In all of the years of our lives together, I'm proud to confirm that we never once wavered from this commitment to each other and it was tested many times.

You should know that Sandi was a bit of a psychic. She wasn't exactly uncomfortable with it but she wasn't that comfortable with it either. For example, she lived with insubstantial people and creatures attracted to her presence and hanging around her. My more aggressive presence tended to dampen this and a few times it resulted in psychic battles to get them cleared out and away from her.

Once before we were married, and this is going to sound strange to some of you, she was alone in her garage apartment in Jacksonville and I was at my parent's home 84 miles away. Deep in the night that evening I started getting this clear psychic feedback that there was something dark and very bad trying to attack Sandi in her apartment causing her much fear. I proceeded to do psychic battle with this dark horror and finally defeated it sending it packing. The next day Sandi called me on the phone and without any prior discussion on the subject amazingly described her experiencing the same event.

From that point on we both knew that there was going to be more than a bond of love between us. So our teamwork thing had even more added value during the decades we were together that followed.

Our financial life together was lean in those early Jacksonville days. There was no money for restaurants and a splurge for us was to buy a Whopper hamburger for the half price sale of .50¢ each. Also, on the hour-and-a-half drive from Jacksonville back to the home town, we sometimes splurged sharing a bag of potato chips but holding back anticipating eating a big meal by her mother when we got to her parent's home. In other words, our needs beyond simply being together and sharing were very simple.

Also, Sandi and I had a healthy sex life. When we would go home on the weekends to stay for a couple of days with her parents as we often did, we tried not to have sex in their home out of respect for them but alone in the car on the way back to Jacksonville way in the night at the end of the weekend was a different matter. With pent up urges, it sometimes happened in the car beside the road and once late at night we sneaked into the local country club pool by moonlight making a daring memorable time of it there. As the tears fall from my eyes at these memories, they were some of our fondest memories of shared intimacy. Sandi even mentioned this several times not long before she passed and while she was suffering. So it was clear that those memories were very important to her as well.

When we were first married, I was about to take a tub bath one evening and she insisted on bathing me. It was her way of showing her love for me and that she was of value and sex wasn't part of it. I had to sit her down afterwards for a talk explaining that I was already much impressed with her and that we couldn't be doing that very much because if it continued I would soon be so psychologically sorry that I wouldn't even be able to get of bed in the mornings. She grudgingly accepted it but still offered to do that many times over the years. She was the best of the best and, as you can plainly see, I'm by far her biggest fan.

After we were married, I finally returned to Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida to complete my education, some of it with my parents financial help but mostly Sandi going to work as well to help. When we moved to Tallahassee, it was later in the school season and there was nothing decent available to rent. We were so desperate that we were finally down to looking at a garage apartment that was going to be condemned due to some serious structural problems. For example, a tennis ball dropped to the floor would roll over the floor (due to its tilt) to the outside wall and fall down to the garage level below.

Disheartened, I sat down on a small chair in the middle of the living room sad and wondering what I had brought us into? Seeing this stress, Sandi came over, sat down in my lap putting her arms around my neck hugging me and telling me that there was plenty that she could do with the place and she delivered this in a reassuring tone. The impossibility of that statement against such glaringly bad structural problems was funny and so we hugged and laughed at it all. Yet, that is exactly what she subsequently did masking over the flaws. Sandi was as solid as a rock and a real trooper. We stayed there several months before finding and moving to a better place after which that garage apartment was condemned and the place shortly after that simply fell down.

What I will simply never forget is that moment of needed reassurance. Instead of being upset as she had right to be and blindly making frustrated demands of me that I almost certainly could not meet at that time under those circumstances as many would have done, she recognized that we were a team having to make compromises and quickly made the realistic transition with patient kindness and support. That was my girl, simply priceless to the core and the best of the best!

In Tallahassee, Sandi's employment was with the State in a building on the south side of town and we lived several miles away on the north side of town. When our vehicle was wrecked by another responsible party requiring weeks of work to fix it at the other party's expense, we were afoot for those weeks. So Sandi and I walked to her work in the morning and I walked back to pick her up in the afternoon bringing better walking shoes and returned home accompanying her after work. There is no way that I would have gone along with her walking alone.

Upon hindsight, it seems really stupid to have not insisted on rental reimbursement from the responsible and liable third party's insurance company but that's the way we inexplicably did it in the latter 1960s. The point I'm trying to make here is to offer some insight that, although she had a clear right to complain and baulk at this arrangement and my poor decision making, Sandi never once complained in light of this foolishness except to say that her feet hurt her after a while. All I can say is what a trooper she was in reinforcing the sense that we were a inseparable team. Tears now come to my eyes at the mere thought of her uncomplaining sacrifice that I should not have but of course did take for granted and she never complained about that bit of my stupidity either.

Rather, she could still see the humor in things. For example, during this time her friend Connie at work went off to lunch wearing a nice and familiar outfit of her's but came back from lunch wearing an entirely new unfamiliar looking outfit including her purse. When asked about this, Connie told an incredible story. It seems she was in a local Sears department store and she had to go to the bathroom. While sitting there on the throne the door to her bathroom stall crashed open despite the lock and a woman with hiked up clothes and her bare bottom pointed at Connie backed into the stall on a personal emergency bases letting fly before getting anywhere near the toilet.

The only trouble was that Connie was sitting there between her and the toilet and the recipient of all that #2. Connie was the rough and tough hard living type not given to much humor and especially not at her expense. However, the so embarrassed woman with the emergency bought Connie an entirely new outfit and tried to pay her money as well to compensate, the latter which Connie would not accept. The offending woman was so embarrassed and the episode was so ridiculous that even Connie in the end thought it was funny and she and Sandi had many a laugh off of it. Ask anyone who knew Sandi. she was always perceived as a trusted confidant and just a super nice always helpful person quick to see the positive and humor in the things of life.

When I graduated from college with honors in part as a result of her invaluable support, I started a full time suit and tie business managerial work life supporting us and she worked occasionally to supplement our income or sometimes out of boredom. In those days when she was still a looker, many men found Sandi desirable but mostly restrained themselves rather than chance getting crossed up with me and my reputation. I wasn't really the jealous type but then I never had cause to be either from anything Sandi ever did. From my point of view, I saw no reason to blame men for desiring the same woman that I found so desirable as long as she could handle them. Trouble happened only rarely when the knot head types crossed the line trying for more than she allowed.

For example, before I went back to FSU, my high school best friend Tommy came home on leave from the meat grinder that was Vietnam. He was a combat photographer whose unit had been over run by the Vietcong forcing him as a non combatant into hand to hand combat for his life and seeing many of his friends killed. By the time of his second tour Tommy had become an alcoholic from the stress and was desperate to return to some form of normalcy. As were most men, he was of course much taken with Sandi and her understanding kindness and reluctant to go home and leave her the one evening we were out together. I felt so sorry for him but no jealousy.

I understood the plight of other guys because I was the same way about her. Not only was she lovely on the outside, she was outright beautiful all the way deep inside and that really drew people to her. She was and is the light of my life that has now gone out except for some private memories, a few of which I share with you here. Her departure from this time and place has left me devastated at her loss after so many years together being inseparable. Not only do I love her oh so much, I always respected and trusted her without reservation. She never once let me or my trust down either.

Our lives went on during the working years with both of us gradually moving from being physically fit to getting older and increasingly over weight and out of shape. Sandi's mother Myrtice was a wonderful old fashioned cook that loved to cook for crowds and family. Sandi was an even better cook, so the good food and office life style gradually showed up on both of us.

Even though she did want them, we never had children. This was mostly because I was in the beginning too overly cautious about this and too often against it. She loved me, swallowed her personal desire, and did not push it. Originally I was an only child both spoiled and selfish with personal aspirations that the responsibilities of children would have interfered with. Upon reflection, I'm not proud of this but it in part admittedly influenced my thinking. Further, after years together, Sandi was the most important thing in my life and I was also perhaps irrationally afraid of the risk of loosing her later in childbirth.

Now I'm living with the result of such selfish decision making by being both without Sandi in extreme grief as well as alone without any of her issue. Sad doesn't begin to describe it.

During my suit and tie work life working for an employer, we lived in Sarasota and St. Petersburg, Florida where I managed insurance claims offices. Not long after I started this, Sandi's father Jack died in 1973 prematurely at the age of 54 of a tumor on his heart sack. This left Sandi's mother a widow living alone because both of Sandi's two sisters had by that time married, moved out, and were having children of their own. Since her sisters at the time were living nearby, we saw no reason to pull up stakes and move back home to look out after her mother. Myrtice loved to be around children and both Faye and Ann had children.

In this time, we did take our only two vacations and both were in the Florida Keys. Finally, trying to escape the disillusioning rat race of the cities and employers, we moved to the Keys. There I created a independent insurance claims business of my own named Florida Keys Claims Service simply because we liked it there. We stayed for ten years eventually selling the business at a profit upon leaving in 1985. While there Sandi worked for a local bank and then worked with me. Then my father became ill and died in 1983. That left my mother living alone but with no one to look out after her since I was an only child. That meant selling out and leaving the Keys returning to our north Florida home base area where we looked after both widowed mothers for many years.

Upon moving back to north Florida, a now older tiring heavier Sandi went to work for Suwannee River Water Management District down the highway from our home and she retired from there after 15 years. She had many friends there and her fellow employees appreciated her helpful, reliable, organized, quickness and she quickly won the Employee of the Year award as per the copy of a newspaper clipping below.

Toward the end of her 15 years with the District, Sandi became more and more frustrated with a management who was happy to make full use of her services to solve their IT management problems but misused her recognition and pay wise as is often the case for women in such positions. Against my advise (I was for confrontation), a tired and worn Sandi's non confrontational solution was to do even better on her job on the hope management would be able to see it and respond accordingly. Since she was already the best they ever had and they were now accustom to that, of course this did not work and she continued to be very unhappy.

Then her mother became terminally ill with cancer with Sandi trying her best to save her. She worked overtime exhausting herself to make her job essential as well as look out for her mother well beyond the contribution of her sisters. Eventually her mother died slowly and suffering at home with Hospice present on the same day 9/11/2001 that the World Trade Center twin towers were attacked. The combination of poor treatment at work as well as grief and exhaustion over her mother's care sent her into a tailspin of depression. Knowing that only confrontation would work with her employer, which she was too tired to go through, I couldn't stand to see her this way and insisted that she retire. She did so much to the consternation and I suspect regret of her bosses.

The following years until her passing we survived on our savings, our minimal early Social Security, her Florida Retirement, and our love. Sandi was raised Christian and Baptist but not nailed to that exclusively. Rather she was a bit disillusioned with formal religion in general and preferred to communicate with God in a natural spiritual way from our home and property. Along with that, she surrounded herself with native American things since she shared that same general type of spiritualism with them.

Also, and this is so typical of Sandi's character, wanting to contribute she became a tutor for young students and a mentor for disadvantaged high school students quickly developing a well deserved reputation as one of the best. The last two students she mentored appeared to be impossible to get turned around and that's why they were assigned to her. However, that is exactly what she did in the end, get them turned around. That was her, a giver accomplishing goals and solving problems rather than a taker.

Since the year 2000 I have been involved using my investigative experience in space exploration in the form of online satellite imaging and have reported on a great deal of anomalous planetary evidence including Mars, the Moon, and even Earth via my website at www.marsanomalyresearch.com. In fact, my first book "The Hidden Truth: Water & Life on Mars" that I have written and published has substantial image evidence drawn right from the official science data indicating that Mars is a place of surface water, flourishing biological life, and much milder temperatures than has been officially depicted and that extreme secrecy conceals this reality. As a result, I have achieved quite a bit of notoriety online in the field of space exploration.

A great deal of support and the technical work on this first book was enabled via Sandi's invaluable help. Although she wasn't as interested in this subject as I was, she believed strongly in anything that I was doing and considered it for the good of mankind. Some of her last words to me before her passing was not to give up on my work and "don't let them beat you."

However, in August 2010 she experienced sudden onset of pain in her lower abdomen. Because of its sudden onset, we thought it was a strain injury because at our ages as she was at 64 and in general more healthy than I was at 68. Over my objections she kept doing things that were too heavy for her in order to take load off of me. That was Sandi after almost a half century of trying to take care of me as was her way.

Unfortunately, the pain did not go away and nausea increasingly started being a part of it soon putting us at the doctors. She passed all the tests including cancer screenings with flying colors and so it took the medical profession about two months of her not eating and loosing too much weight too quickly to diagnose her with cancer. In her now really run down physical condition, she endured an operation removing her ovaries trying but failing to get all of the cancer and immediately started going through accelerated deadly chemo while still in the hospital for post operative care. Her post operative care in the hospital was mistake prone, very poor, and she came home with many more problems as a result of that which inhibited her recovery. The combination of the poor post operative care and the accelerated deadly chemo ran her further down and finally took her life.

During the meantime, my mother who I had looked after for many years and was close to also came down with terminal cancer. At one point, she and Sandi were both on the same floor of the same hospital at the same time and I would alternate between them. However, my mother at over 90 years old did not have the reserve strength and she died in my arms in a relatively short time on 11/22/2010 at Hospice just a few days before my birthday. After a valiant brave fight so typical of her always present courage, Sandi also died in my arms on 2/14/2011 on Valentine's Day and my whole world fell out from under me with her passing and I'm left with all of the horrible memories of her suffering.

It's hard to explain how one is a affected by the loss of a loved one after so many years of living together and finishing each other's sentences. It's like loosing the majority of yourself. You're just hollowed out and empty of what you previously thought was important. Now you're just filled to the brim with emotional pain that wants to overwhelm. However, above all there is the questioning of how this could happen to such a good, sweet, kind, innocent person who never harmed anyone or anything in their entire life. Yes, intellectually one knows that bad things happen to good people and we can't know God's purpose but in human emotion it just makes no sense and seems so very wrong.

During the course of her fight with cancer, Sandi suffered terribly and could not catch a single offsetting break, not one! Everything that happened to her was all 100% negative and so much so that I became suspicious that this wasn't natural and the work of an outside agency working against her and my mother to get at me. Frankly I am still suspicious of this and that someone was trying to get at me through those I love most and who are less able to defend themselves than I.

Sandi obviously suspected this as well because her last words to me were that I should not let "them" beat me. This was something that she had repeated a number of times earlier. However, I will not go into that any deeper here as it would only be interpreted by many as paranoia on my part.

The above photo is how I would prefer to remember this extraordinary woman, my love, my soul mate, and by far my best friend that deserved so much better than she got out of life with me. My sweetheart, at peace, not suffering, and languishing at rest soon to wake and ask why my eyes are so full of tears. Oh it's nothing sweetheart, it was just a horrible nightmare I had but it's over now and we're back together again. Sugar I just missed you so!

If only that were true! If so, with that new found center anchored in her living presence, I would be unstoppable and could set the world on fire burning the truths I've discovered on this space exploration journey into the world human consciousness. As it is I may have lost some of my enthusiasm for life but Sandi, thank you so much Sweetheart for being so bold that evening at the A&W drive-in and for sharing the rest of your life with me after that and thank you God so much for allowing it to happen.

I may be suffering but I have sense enough to know that she was and is a prize beyond measure for me and I celebrate that I was in the presence of real character. Yes, this is who Sandi is, the best of the best, and the love of my life.