The Sunrise Project

March 27, 1963, was a sunny Wednesday, with a daytime high of 72 degrees. Nowadays, you can discover anything about a day in the distant past, from the No. 1 song (“He’s So Fine” by The Chiffons), to the popular movie (“Bye Bye Birdie” starring Dick Van Dyke), to the news that would make the next morning’s headlines (President John F. Kennedy and his wife, Jacqueline, parade in Washington, D.C.)

But I didn’t know any of that 52 years ago today. I was in a nursery at the old DePaul Hospital in north St. Louis, in the same room as the remarkable Mary Ellen Block. She was Mary Ellen Meyerpeter then, and, despite the fact we both grew up in Florissant, it would take us 51 years to reconnect.

Mary Ellen is my husband Tom’s second cousin, once removed — or something like that. She and Tom have the same great grandfather on the McCarthy side — good Irish bloodlines. So while we crossed paths at family funerals over the years, we didn’t really sit down and talk until earlier this year. Instant rapport, but then again we have seen the exact same number of days on this Earth — 18,993 to be exact.

Mary Ellen Block with her husband, Larry.

And then, because of Facebook, Twitter and other ways that social media connects us, I knew Mary Ellen wasn’t the only one whose date of birth I shared. My Incarnate Word Academy classmate, Kay Conroy Lenberg, was born that same day in the old St. John’s hospital, and Angela Shkodriani Sykora, a fellow St. Louis University High football mom, was making her debut in the old St. Mary’s hospital in south St. Louis.

All accomplished, strong women whose paths I had once crossed. It was time to cross them again and connect with the women who had seen, along with me, the same number of sunrises since that day in March 1963.

Women who were old enough to remember Neil Armstrong landing on the moon; whose first crush was Bobby Sherman or Donny Osmond; who bought 45s of The Partridge Family; who were taught typing on manual typewriters and for whom home economics was still a thing; who graduated from high school just as Ronald Reagan was starting his presidency.

Kay Conroy Lenberg with her husband, Butch.

We talked a lot, about the joys and struggles that have met us these 52 years. Among us four women are 18,993 days spent simply living life. We have successes and failures, achievements and setbacks, a lifetime of love and loss. Yet every single one of us lights up when talking about our children and grandchildren, more focused on the future than the past. The word that kept coming to me was resilience.

I called it the Sunrise Project, because it’s a blessing to connect with these women who have seen the same 18,992 sunrises as I have. I asked if they could recall their most memorable one. They could, in detail:

Mary Ellen, mother of twin girls and grandmother of one, remembers watching the sun rise over the Grand Canyon one summer day 2006, on a family vacation before the twins started high school. She and her daughters walked to the rim one morning, and saw a moose on the horizon. “It was beautiful,” she said, “and I kept wishing (my husband) Larry, who was sleeping, was here to see it with us.”

Angie Shkodriani Sykora with son Nick.

Angie, mother of two daughters and one son, was on a trip with her daughter Nina to Italy in 2007. She was in the town of Assisi and said she got up early to walk and remembers walking past a field of sunflowers that glowed in the early morning light. “It was like a postcard,” she said.

Kay, mother of two, stepmother of two more, and grandmother of three, was in Maine in June of 2012 at the home of now-husband Butch Lenberg when she got up early to watch the sun rise from his front porch. “I was freezing, but I just felt like all was right with the world.”

And me? I saw a whole week of sunrises last summer on North Carolina’s Outer Banks, but the one that stands out the most to me was that day in June 2008 when I saw the sunrise over Ireland’s horizon from the window of a plane, about to embark on a 10-day spirit-enriching journey.

Today, we add one more. As we will tomorrow, and the next day. Going on living, laughing, and loving because really, what more do you need?

An early morning on Ireland’s Ring of Kerry in June 2008.

 A version of this story was published in the South County Times on March 27, 2015.