Sharon Schuenke

Sharon Schuenke (née: Corcoran) died on May 31, 2025, at the age of 88.

She grew up in Elmwood Park in a family that valued steadiness over spectacle. She graduated from the University of Dayton, taught in Glen Ellyn, and later moved to Wisconsin for post-graduate work at UW–Madison.

In 1963, she walked into a Milwaukee gallery owned by a young artist named Robert “Bob” Schuenke. She was beautiful, composed, and — as Bob would later recall — entirely uninterested. He asked her to sign the guest ledger. She declined. He asked again. She again declined. He persisted.

They married in 1964, settled in Milwaukee, and spent 60 years together. They raised three children — Roberta, Rachel, and Damian — and built a life threaded with oil paint, books, laughter, and intimacy. She became mother-in-law to Kevin McDonough, and grandmother to Zachary, Maxwell, and Claudia Beyer, and Maeve, and Conor McDonough. She valued relationships above all else.

She moved through life like punctuation—precise, deliberate, never wasted. The kind of woman who made silence feel like a choice. Who could stop a room with a glance. Her heart was kind, her humor effortless, and her nature gentle. Equanimous in moments that would flatten others, Sharon modeled the subtle, undeniable power of composure.

She kept an open mind and never judged. Her children could not recall a single unkind word spoken about another human being. She never swore. She never raised her voice. She cultivated style and elegance. Though she never enjoyed being photographed; she believed beauty lived in how one moved through the world, not in how one appeared on camera.

Sharon taught students from grade school through university. She taught English, yes, but only in the way a siren sings for navigation. At core, her lessons were on timing, on tone, on how to move through the world in heels without apology. Many claimed her. Every year, a few fragile students — the ones who wrote in the margins, who couldn’t breathe in their own homes — found themselves devastatingly seen. Sharon kept in touch with the hard ones — the runaways, the relapsers, the quiet ones. She mailed them books they never asked for. She remembered birthdays and obscure lines from classroom essays. She gave poetry to people who didn’t know they needed it.

Sharon buried her heart in Dickinson. She kept a poem in her wallet, a weathered recitation of “Because I could not stop for Death,” a small, private reminder that life is finite, and that endings, too, can be gentle. The poem is a meditation on mortality, time, and eternity, describing death as an inevitability so gentle and familiar that it almost feels like courtship. She walked calmly with the mysteries that most of us spend our lives trying to outrun. But no one ever saw Sharon run. No one ever saw her undone. And no one ever heard her yell.

She wrote letters and notes with the devotion others reserve for prayer, tending to nieces and nephews with the same steady warmth she gave her own children. Her handwriting appeared in mailboxes across decades, carrying encouragement, consolation, or a poem clipped from something she could not quite part with.

She loved lilacs and peonies, babies and dogs, 1960s folk music, and an ever-rotating assortment of candy and lemonade. She took her coffee with four sugars. She never cooked a meal. Elegance is refusal.

She wasn’t tech literate, but she enjoyed her computer, forever protesting, “Mine doesn’t do that!” And although Bob was often the center of attention, Sharon’s comedic retorts were devastating. Her son-in-law tells a story of a stubborn Bob refusing to go to the hospital, protesting, “If I go to the hospital, I’ll never come back home.” Sharon looked at him, then to Kevin. “Start the car.”

She believed that to be human is to appear before others. To speak. To risk. To get it wrong, and try again with more grace.

And she lived exactly that way.

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