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held at First Presbyterian Church, Cape May, on Friday morning, March 17, at 10:00 a.m. He is survived by a sister, Bernice, and a nephew. He was a resident of the Victorian Cottages active senior residence, which will hold a reception in his honor following the service.
Throughout his life, he expressed his love and devotion for Emily Thornhill, his one true love. Although she left him and married another, he held on to his undying love and respect for her, refusing all other romantic entreaties. He kept a picture of her on his wall, and talked often to his friends and relatives of just how much her love had meant to him. Although his life was lonely and sometimes sad, the memory of his beloved carried him through his many trials.
Sheldon often said that he would love Emily until he died, and it was his one wish that his dear Emily attend his funeral after he passed away. “I know that she doesn’t love me as I love her,” he once said. “That has been a sad and painful part of my life. I only hope that when I pass on from this vale of tears, that she will remember me and want to come to my funeral, to honor the love that we once felt for each other, so long ago.”
In lieu of flowers, the family requests that donations be sent to the American Society for Model Aircraft.
     
    Maybe I should have screamed. Maybe I should have cried. But all I did when I finished reading poor Sheldon’s final message was laugh—a high, desperate cackle that was part relief and part manic ecstasy. Oh, Sheldon , I thought. Poor, sad, deluded Sheldon, whose biggest mistake in life, so far as I could tell, was to fall in love with my mother.
     

Chapter 6
     
    The Curtains article wasn’t much more than a recap of the obituary, with a bit of snarky commentary about wanting to give poor sad Sheldon a big hug and a bowl of tomato soup, were it not for the inconvenient fact of his recent demise. The problem was in the comments section. Compared to the deep, swirling pit of semisolid waste that is the comments section of most Internet sites, it wasn’t all that bad. It would have been unobjectionable if it hadn’t been about me.
    One person had asked the obvious question about who Emily Thornhill was, and that led to questions about whether she was still around, and if it could be ascertained as to whether she would attend the funeral. Mother had kept her maiden name, and she’d had a long career with the Camden County Democratic apparatus, so it wasn’t that hard to find her basic information on Google. Someone had cross-referenced her name against my name (Gwendolyn Gail Jarrett, “Wendy” unless you want me to hurt you) and had come up with Grandfather Thornhill’s obituary from seven years ago from the Inquirer . If the research had ended there, it wouldn’t have been a problem, but someone had posted links to my LinkedIn and Facebook profiles in the comments. That made it easy for whoever-it-was at Gawker to come up with the bright idea of calling me at work and endangering my future employment.
    The rest of the comments were a series of cutting and snarky insults about my personal life and romantic prospects. People who waste their lives commenting on websites are about as sharp as a sack of marbles.
     
    I spent the next hour or so wading through my e-mail and Facebook in-boxes, which mostly involved deleting crap from people I didn’t know and telling the people I did know to mind their own business. I got halfway through before I gave it up as a bad job. The one positive I saw was that there didn’t seem to be any inquiries from legitimate media outlets, which—as I devoutly hoped—meant that there likely wouldn’t be any TV cameras at the funeral. The other good news was that it didn’t look as though anyone had thought to contact my brother or my sister about the story. Greg was too busy to care, anyway, and Pacey didn’t use social media for anything except posting pictures of her twins and whatever thing they had