The New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow ruminated this week about finding himself “fully entrenched in the second phase of adulthood.” He is 50 years old, divorced, the father of three. His three children have graduated from college, the oldest now in medical school.

He recognizes that their relationship has changed. No longer simply parent, he is fellow adult, and, if fortunate, can evolve into friend and equal. He understands this stage is “a form of releasing [his children] to keep them, of elevating them and respecting them.”

Intruding on this new paradigm, however, is a realization of death increasingly around him. The pandemic in which we find ourselves may contribute to the feeling, but in fact time itself is harbinger of the change come to Mr. Blow’s life. He knows that statistically his life is “nearly two-thirds over,” that more summers lie behind him than ahead.

Death seems dawned on Mr. Blow in a way heretofore unrecognized, having “attended his second funeral in about six months,” the first being his oldest brother’s. I, on the other hand, have known death’s cold hand—personally and professionally—from early on in first stage adulthood, which, for me, extends from college to age 45. Though too often I do not feel adult at all, I am third-stage—last—to Mr. Blow’s second.

Whereas Mr. Blow does not feel he has “grown fatalistic or even that [he] feels particularly old,” I am reminded with saddening consistency of these things. That’s the difference being in the third stage of adulthood, 25 years beyond Mr. Blow, makes.

A recent Facebook post by childhood friend Don Hutton—he will always be Donnie—reminded me of this. He was offering condolences upon the death of another of our classmates. There have been many. No name accompanied the photo but I recognized her in heartbeat—Sherry Inman Diamond. (I did verify her death on the website of the Benjamin Funeral Service in Nowata, Oklahoma, because my younger heart often proved more easily fooled than even my old eyes and head are these days.)

In the first grade, Sherry Inman was my first girlfriend. The photo Donnie posted must come from our years at Nowata Elementary School—a great old building now gone—but after first grade. By the time of the photo I recognized, Sherry had moved on from the boyfriend she chose when she was too young to know better. Sherry taught little Stevie Love one of his earliest lessons about women. She was first one to dump me.

After that, it seemed that for years little girls, then the women they grew into, stood in line for the opportunity to follow Sherry’s example. Funny thing is, Sherry was as sweet and kind—not to mention cute—as any person I’ve ever known. Others thought so, too.

Another former classmate Richard Haynes admitted on Facebook: “In the fourth grade, I had a crush on Sherry.” Classmate Judy Jones, nee Gillespy, was not surprised: “I think most, if not all, the guys, had a crush on her.” All for naught. Jerry Diamond, An older guy, early on won Sherry’s heart. They married shortly after she graduated in 1964.

As I lament in my book Football, Fast Friends, and Small Towns: A Memoir Straight from a Broken Oklahoma Heart, circumstances beyond my control forced me to leave Nowata in the middle of my sophomore year in high school. That served only to drive the place where I was born and loved deeper into that broken heart. I never forgot Sherry. I never forgot any of my friends—girl or otherwise—in all the years since.

“I think the title of your book is quite apt,” wrote Karolyn Pettingell Ainsworth, a classmate at Mira Loma, the Sacramento, California high school to which I moved. “And while you call it a memoir, it also seems to me an appreciation of a town and time that you never relinquished, even when physically apart.” Karolyn got it. She always did.

I could not let go. Still can’t.

Others may have some of the same feelings for their place. When Stuart Warner, as talented a writer/editor as I’ve ever known, read the book, he, like Karolyn, understood. “Don’t be fooled into thinking this is just a book about sports or small towns,” he wrote in a review for Amazon.com and which I wrote about on my website blog. “It is a book about life told through the eyes of a writer who traveled far from Nowata, Oklahoma, but always kept the lessons he learned there close to his heart, broken or otherwise.”

Even if I had wanted to do so, the lessons are impossible to outrun. They overtook me again with Sherry’s death and the realization that today (April 21, 2021) she will join Mama, Colleen Hawkins Love, in the Nowata Memorial Park Cemetery. I don’t know if Sherry, 74, still remembered me, much less my mother, but Mama knew Sherry. Mama was a constant homeroom mother for our shared class at Nowata Elementary School. She loved that class and everyone in it, and Sherry was one of those who stayed in Nowata.

After attending beauty college—she could have taught a thing or two about how to be a beautiful person—Sherri was a self-employed hairdresser in Nowata for 56 years. I have often wondered whether or not I would have returned to Nowata and made a life in Nowata. All I know is that Sherry Inman did, and by the accounts I know it was a good one. I didn’t see or speak with Sherry often—class reunions—but she was and always will be with me. What Charles Blow will learn is that each death takes a piece of you, but the memory of the one you cared about or even loved lives on as long as you do.

What are we if not our memories of those who have touched our lives, no matter what the phase, even if long ago and begun in the first grade? Sherry Inman is a good and lasting memory, and now she is with Mama, and while I do not know what that means, I do know is that if there is a path to be lit and Little Stevie’s first love to be guided on it, Sherry is with the homeroom mother from all those years ago who would care about her for all eternity—the phase past understanding and beyond even Mr. Blow’s phases.