Sheridan's Story

Long before there was The Sheridan Gorman Foundation, long before there was Sheridan's Bench, there was a very chatty, very high-energy, very joyful little girl who, at only five years old, had absolutely no idea she was already showing us exactly who she was going to be.

Sheridan was one of those children who seemed to arrive everywhere at full volume and full heart. She was always smiling, always laughing, always asking questions. So many questions, lol.

Sheridan was curious about absolutely everything — and absolutely everyone. She talked to adults. She talked to children. She talked to strangers. She talked to the person in front of us in line at the grocery store and the person behind us. I'm fairly certain there were occasions when I walked away knowing less about the stranger than Sheridan did.

If you stood still near her long enough, chances were pretty good Sheridan was going to introduce herself, ask you six questions, tell you three stories, compliment something you were wearing, explain something completely unrelated, and somehow know your life history before you walked away.

She was happy. She was funny. She was loving. She was joyful. She was our bright, busy little bee, buzzing from one person to the next with approximately seventeen things to say at all times.

The Buddy Bench

Told by her mother

Our bright, busy little bee.

The conference

Which is why, when it came time for her kindergarten parent-teacher conference, I was nervous. Actually, that is not entirely accurate. I was very nervous.

Every mother knows the particular anxiety of walking into a parent-teacher conference when you have a child with a very big personality. You love every single thing about that enormous personality, but you are also quietly praying the teacher loves it too.

And there was another layer to this one. Sheridan's kindergarten teacher was a longtime friend of my husband Tom from high school. She was — and remains — one of the sweetest, kindest people you could ever know. Over the years, she and I became very close friends, and we still are today. She is truly a treasure in our lives and in the lives of every child lucky enough to have been in her classroom.

But at that particular moment, the fact that she had known my husband since high school somehow added a completely irrational amount of pressure. Because now I wasn't simply representing myself as Sheridan's mother. Somehow, in my mind, Sheridan was representing the entire Gorman family.

My silent maternal prayer was basically: She represents Tom. Please, please, please let our child be behaving.

Because I knew my kid.

There was at least a reasonable chance I was about to hear that my daughter spent too much time talking, asking questions, making friends, laughing, socializing, helping somebody with something they had not asked her to help with, or doing just about anything other than sitting quietly when she was supposed to.

Quiet was never really Sheridan's spiritual gift.

So I sat down across from her teacher at one of those teeny-tiny kindergarten tables that no adult human body was ever intended to occupy. You know the ones. Your knees are practically beside your ears, you are sitting on a chair designed for a person who weighs forty pounds, and somehow this is the setting where another grown woman is about to evaluate your parenting.

I asked, with bated breath, "So… how's my Sheridan?"

Her teacher paused.

She had these beautiful, bright, flashing eyes, and she looked at me for what was probably only ten seconds. But when you are a nervous mother waiting to hear what your five-year-old has been up to, ten seconds is approximately nine and a half seconds too long.

She had this funny little half-smile on her face, and I thought, Well, that doesn't look too promising.

Here it comes. Your Sheridan talks too much. Your Sheridan has too much energy. Your Sheridan asks too many questions. Your Sheridan has apparently decided kindergarten is primarily a social organization with occasional academic interruptions.

Instead, she looked at me and said, "I only have one thing to say to you."

My stomach fell. Because no mother in the history of parent-teacher conferences has ever heard I only have one thing to say to you and thought, Oh good. This is definitely going somewhere wonderful.

"Your Sheridan stalks the buddy bench."

I just blankly stared at her, totally confused. There were several words in that sentence I understood individually. Together, not so much.

And I certainly did not love that the verb describing my kindergartner's playground behavior was stalks.

So I asked, "What is a buddy bench?" And then, because again — stalks — I followed up with the question I thought any reasonable mother would ask: "And… is this a good thing or a bad thing?"

Her teacher laughed and said, "It is a BEAUTIFUL thing."

What she was really doing

And then she explained. There was a bench in the play yard where a child could sit if they were feeling lonely, left out, shy, or simply had no one to play with. The children had been taught that if they saw someone sitting there, they should go over, say hello, invite them to play, and make sure they weren't alone.

It was such a simple idea.

And apparently, Sheridan had taken this assignment with the seriousness of a five-year-old Secret Service agent.

Her teacher told me Sheridan had essentially become the guardian of that bench. She watched it. Constantly. If someone sat down, Sheridan noticed. Immediately.

Apparently there was no leisurely finishing whatever game she was playing first. No committee meeting. No thoughtful period of observation.

Someone was on the bench. Sheridan was moving.

She would bee-line over to them and she would talk to them — because of course she talked to them, lol. This was Sheridan. Silence was not going to be part of the rescue operation.

She asked questions. She made them laugh. She grabbed them by the hand and pulled them over to the swings or brought them into whatever she and her friends were doing. Again and again and again.

She watched that bench because she understood what it meant when someone was sitting there. Someone needed somebody. And Sheridan wanted to be that somebody.

If someone felt invisible,

Sheridan saw them.

And sitting there at that ridiculous miniature table, something shifted in me. All the things I had occasionally worried might be "too much" about my daughter suddenly looked completely different.

All that talking. All those questions. All that energy. That enormous personality. That inability to enter a room quietly. That instinct to know everybody, talk to everybody, and somehow become emotionally involved in the lives of people she had known for eleven minutes.

She was using every bit of it to make sure another little child did not feel alone.

The qualities I sometimes wondered whether the world might ask her to tone down were the exact qualities she was using to brighten someone else's world.

That was Sheridan.

She never stopped

And the truth is, that little girl who stalked the buddy bench was exactly who Sheridan remained until the day she died.

She was not a perfect person. She was a teenager, after all! And I was her mother, so I can personally provide supporting documentation.

There were eye rolls. There were teenage moods. There were clothes on floors that apparently became invisible the moment they left her body. There were moments when I wondered whether the same child who could detect a lonely kindergarten student from fifty yards away had somehow lost the ability to detect a cereal bowl sitting six inches from the dishwasher.

She was wonderfully, maddeningly, beautifully human.

But she had an almost perfect heart.

She cared deeply. She noticed people. She loved hard. And she cheered for them even harder. She had an instinct for the person who needed a friend, the person who needed cheering up, the person who needed to be included. And that never left her.

Even during the very short time she was at Loyola University Chicago — less than one year — Sheridan had already made an extraordinary impact. She had built friendships and become part of a community. She made people laugh. She made people feel loved. She left an imprint on people in a matter of months.

That was Sheridan's gift. She made people feel seen.

And when she loved you, you knew it.