Sharon Keegan, Team Supervisor, Team Leader, Basic Attender
The seeds of being at Windhorse Elder Care now, were planted many years ago, when I was 24.
My mother died six weeks after receiving a lung cancer diagnosis. I was with her alone during her final breaths, while my father was asleep. It felt like a transmission of sorts… the vast space after the final breath of someone you love. Just prior, I had formally entered upon the Buddhist path and promptly went into a month long group meditation retreat, to allow the truth of impermanence to deeply penetrate. Four years later, my father died, after experiencing an unexpectedly longer dying process of two years, with leukemia and Alzheimer’s. I served as his sole caregiver during that time and was with him when his final breaths took place. As a result of these two very personal deaths early on, joined with meditation and study, I realized a natural ease with the sacred transitions of dying, death, letting go and the potent raw “grace and grit”.
Things continued to unfold including private work with elders, interspersed between extensive meditation retreats at Gampo Abbey in Nova Scotia. I was then asked to serve as the lay director for 3 yrs, which infused my heart and mind with spiritual leadership. Eventually, initiated a seedling hospice program in Halifax, NS, moved to Burlington, VT and served as the director (very hands-on) of a hospice residence for 16 years. I moved to Boulder 3yrs ago and began my journey with WEC shortly afterwards, for which I am very grateful!
I take pleasure in ordinary things and frequently relate with apparent inanimate objects as “friends”, enjoying a sense of humor and tears in living and riding the waves.