Jerry Brandow
I will miss her presence. I will miss simply knowing that she is amongst us in this world. I have no doubt that she is still amongst us, only now veiled from our eyes in yet another world of God.
This is the prayer I will be offering up for our dear departed Sheila
A Prayer for the Departed
O my God! O Thou forgiver of sins, Bestower of gifts, dispeller of afflictions!
Verily, I beseech Thee to forgive the sins of such as have abandoned the physical garment
and have ascended to the spiritual world.
O my Lord! Purify them from trespasses, dispel their sorrows, and change their darkness into light.
Cause them to enter the garden of happiness, cleanse them with the most pure water, and grant them to behold Thy splendors on the loftiest mount.
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Craig Lockwood
In Requiem: Sheila Allen's Passing
On Friday night, 06 January, the alumni of Hollywood Professional School lost a wonderful sister, Sheila Allen, to uterine cancer.
Many of you who didn't know her personally met her through the various HPS sites, and some of you got to know her through her tireless efforts along with her dear friend Terry Fricon, in helping to put on all the HPS Reunions. Most recently, it was Sheila's unceasing and unstinting effort that made the 2005 Reunion the event that it was.
If HPS had had cheerleaders, Sheila would have been the Grand Damme of them all. Sheila was an original Big Bertha's Riders mascot, and over the years she never missed a Rally. Sheila never married, never had children, and over the years she became the Rider's ipso facto den mother.
When it came to her friends, and to keeping the flame of HPS alive, there was no task too big or too small, she'd take all of them on and put her little foot down hard when somebody needed to put on the brakes or deserved a swift kick in the gitalong.
Sheila was a brilliant woman, an accomplished author of at least 13 books, a tireless writer and wonderful editor. She had served as a political speech writer for Senator Jim Toomy, and as an editor and writer for Aaron Spelling, among others. Of Irish heritage, she carried the storyteller's gene in her blood, and there was nobody Sheila's equal in being able to take a complex idea or storyline and log-line it in ten words or less.
These words feel inadequate as an attempt to fully express my personal sorrow, first of all because like the rest of us, I never suspected, let alone knew, despite being a good and close friend, that she was terminally ill, and that she had chosen to bear this burden of anguish and pain alone.
Thus the news hit hard. And keeps hitting hard. And our collective grief at Sheila's loss is born with a large share of unexpressed dismay that whatever we might have done to help, whatever resources we could have supplied or helped to marshal in her behalf, were never called upon. Irish pride also ran in her veins, and unbeknown to most of us, Sheila had no health insurance, and was too young for Medicare.
I'll miss her, as a dear, sweet pal, a voice of fairness and reason, as a literary friend to whom I could bare my soul and from whom I had no secrets. Obviously I won't be alone in my grief, and I know I speak for many when I say that there is simply no one who could begin to replace her.
I suppose, as I think about it, that the finality of death, the absolute vacuum it leaves, is brought home more acutely by a sudden, and in this case, what seems to be an absurdly unnecessary death. Sheila's passing reminds me that our years are so precious, and in the end, so very, very few.
John Donne's words seem appropriate here: "...And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee."
Craig Lockwood
President
Hollywood Professional School
Alumni Association
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