Page 29 - WilmU Spring Summer 2013

Sharon Arlene ‘Shae’ Cannon-Thompson
1967-2012
With some help from her family, she completed every
assignment on time, and when she was done, she took
a deep breath and said, “I made it.”
A few weeks later, she was gone. Sharon Thompson
was 44 years old.
Kietel, his sister Ashley, and grandmother Emma
sat in the front row of Wilmington Hall at the Chase
Center on that brisk January morning. Before the
ceremony started, Kietel and Ashley held hands and
prayed.
“We could feel her presence,” said Ashley, 29.
Kietel is a quiet young man. He didn’t speak as
he stood in line behind his late mom’s classmates.
In a room full of fist-pumping and high-fiving, Kietel
remained stoic. Seventeen years old is too young to
lose a mother, and 44 is too young to die.
To get through the day, he decided to look at the
experience in a different way.
“This is good practice for him,” his grandmother
Emma said. “He’s about to graduate from high school
himself.” WU
“Ijust wanted to get it over with.”
It’s the common a itude of most teenag-
ers when they are forced to do something
against their will.
For 17-year-old Kietel Tarrant, it wasn’t
cleaning his room, going to church or taking an exam
that le himwith that age-old feeling.
It was accepting a B.S. degree in Early Childhood
Education for his mother, who died before she could
accept it herself.
Sharon Thompson had been running a home-
based daycare, Comforts of Home, inWilmington
for many years. She wanted to turn it into a licensed
Early Care and Education Center, so she enrolled at
Wilmington University to get a bachelor’s degree.
When she got sick, she knew she might not get to
accomplish her business goal. But she went ahead
anyway, and completed her degree while ba ling
lung cancer. When she became too sick to come to
campus, her professors worked with her to finish
her classes online. She did her assignments in her
sick bed, right up until she could no longer type.
SPRING/SUMMER