Obituary: Cheryl Byers

Cheryl Byers passed into eternal life on Sept. 25, 2018. She was born in Freeport, Illinois, on March 2, 1937.

Cheryl grew up in Woodstock, Illinois, attending St. Mary’s schools. She earned a BA in English from Marygrove College and an MA in English from Marquette University. Cheryl began her teaching career in Illinois and Wisconsin, but in 1969, told by a doctor, “If you want to live, get out of this climate.” Cheryl moved, sight-unseen, to Phoenix with no job and no place to live. Gradually regaining her health, she started on a long career teaching in the Phoenix Union High School District, where she taught Christine Lytle Knuckles, who became “like a daughter” to her.

In Woodstock, Cheryl developed a talent for acting with the McHenry County Junior Theatre Guild, her own “wonder years.” After retirement, she returned to the theatre, performing at the Hergerger in Phoenix and with the Pine Lakes Readers’ Theatre in Prescott, her summer home.

For many years after her retirement, Cheryl endured a rare vision disorder, retinitis pigmentosa, but continued to attend acting classes, theatre, movies, lifelong learning classes and political (liberal, of course) discussion groups and taking tours as long as possible. Very few close friends ever knew of her disability. In the late 1990s she spearheaded a group of neighborhood activists who were the first ever to defeat a developer who wished to build high-density apartments in the neighborhood.

For 20 years in the 1970s and ’80s, Cheryl was an active member of First Church of Religious Science, serving as a Practitioner and Board President, and later Unity of Phoenix. In 2000, during a time of acute suffering, Cheryl suddenly felt called to return to the church of her birth, the Catholic Church. At the time of her death, she was a member of Our Lady of the Angels at the Franciscan Renewal Center.

No one would describe Cheryl as “the sweetest person who ever lived” or “loved by everyone with whom she came in contact.” And, although she had several pets, she refused to have them listed as having “preceded her in death.” She always threatened to write a very sarcastic obituary lampooning such tributes. She used to say, “If everyone who dies was the sweetest, most loving person in the world, why don’t I meet more of these people?” Ever the realist, her wry and sometimes sardonic humor deflated pretentiousness and arrogance in all who were her target. She said, “I won’t suffer fools, gladly or otherwise.”

Above all, Cheryl was a “seeker of wisdom” from the time she first used that phrase in her mind in deciding to go to a women’s college (“men would just distract me”), interested in a myriad of things, avid reader and watcher of news and information on television, she often wondered if she had ever really found the wisdom sought for a lifetime. Her friends would be the best judges of that.

Services will be held at Sunland Mortuary, Sun City, Arizona, at 10 a.m. Monday, Oct. 1.

Information provided by Cheryl Byers.