The Rose of Sharon

“October 8th dawned clear and bright but it was a very sad day,
It started out so normally and then a big change came our way.”

This is the first line of a poem that Anna Mae Burkholder wrote way back in 1982. The poem was inspired by the death of her eldest daughter, Sharon.

Sharon was my Amish babysitter. But she was not just a babysitter, she was a second mother to me. She started working for my family 2 weeks before I was born when she was seventeen years old. My mom worked every day, but Wednesday and Sunday, so Sharon was my caretaker, our house cleaner and meal maker. She would come in the morning before I woke up and leave after my parents were off work around 5:30pm, sometimes she would ride her bike in from her country home or if the weather was bad my parents would pick her up.

I grew up spending more time with her than with almost anyone else. I would sometimes go to her parents home, they became an extension of my family. She never married or had children, my sister and I were her children. She was a simple, stout, Christian woman. She was loving and attentive.

I loved her. I have memories of not wanting her to leave when my parents came home at night. I remember she kept Dentyne gum in her purse and would offer me some in exchange for letting her leave for the night.

That October 8th when I was 10 years old it was chilly in the morning just like it is now. My dad left to go pick her up, but she had already left her house on her bike. On the way to pick her up my dad saw an accident ahead. Just minutes before he arrived on the scene a bread truck, the driver blinded by the morning sun, had struck her. She died of a broken neck. My dad saw her bike on the road, he recognized it because we had given it to her as a present. He pulled over and was there as the paramedics tried fruitlessly to revive her.
He came back home without her, I remember hearing whispering and shocked cries in my mothers voice. They told me that Sharon had been in an accident and that she had been taken to the hospital. They sent me to school anyway…I knew when my dad was there to pick me up instead of letting me take the bus home that something was terribly wrong. I opened the door to my house and looked at my mom, the way she looked at me I knew that Sharon was dead. I dropped to the floor wailing not even getting in the door.

I can not tell you how fresh this memory is for me 26 years later.

The days that followed were odd and a bit of a blur. The Amish have different customs for mourning the dead. She was laid out in her own room at her parents house. Her coffin was wooden and to my 10 year senses looked like a Dracula coffin. Her funeral was in a large barn. It was a huge turn out, with hundreds of Amish coming from miles around. My family and I sat in front with the Burkholder family. We joined the caravan of buggies, driving our van slowly along a little dirt road sandwiched between buggies, to the cemetery where I watched her be put into the ground.

It was only a couple years later when I moved to Arizona so the sights and scenes of that day were burried in my mind. Often when I pass the little dirt road that runs parallel to US 6 I crane my neck searching for those cloudy 10 year old memories, trying to piece together which barn or which road we were on.

To this day there is nothing that can bring me to tears quicker than talking about Sharon. Even now, that I know and rejoice that she is in heaven with her King, my heart still burns with an empty spot for her.

Another poem that Sharon’s mother wrote is the story of the Heavenly Father walking through his garden in search of a perfect rose. He picks the rose from the garden. And although our garden seems bare in the place that the rose used to be we can be sure that the rose is blooming in Heaven.