Shannon in Snow

Shannon Nissa Bailey Powers spent her life, from infancy on, in and out of Cystic Fibrosis treatment at Children’s Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts. She died from complications of Cystic Fibrosis five and a half weeks short of her twenty-fifth birthday. During her last year, she was intermittently an in-patient for more than six months. Shan would go into the hospital for weeks of I.V. antibiotics, physical therapy, and breathing medications and then pop out to make her life full. That last year, she devoted her time to her writing, her art, graduate study at Harvard at night, work at Russell Orchards in Ipswich, Massachusetts, tutoring children in Math and English, and travel to visit her beloveds, Patrick Sweeney ’99 in Kentucky and Amy Barsky ’97, in San Francisco/Oakland, California.

In addition to being a graduate of Exeter and Sarah Lawrence, through her brief life Shan taught at PEA’s summer school, attended the Universities of Santa Barbara and Galway, Ireland, as well as Oxford and Harvard. She toured the United States, by herself, on a Greyhound bus, visited Glacier National Park, Canada, Mexico, and France. She also worked at Starbuck’s and Hutchins Organic Farm in Concord, Massachusetts.

Throughout her last year, Shan watched certain films over and again and read. The movies included Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet, The Hours, Wit, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and for pure fun and laughter, Waking Ned Devine. Her last readings came to One Hundred Years of Solitude, which she would read in Children’s Hospital’s stone-animal-filled garden. Lexi Greenberg of Shan’s Sarah Lawrence days, Ben Bines, a dear friend of Shan’s from early childhood, and PEA beloveds Amy Barsky and Patrick Sweeney all gathered and cared for Shan, at home, as she lay dying through her last breath. Among Shan’s last words came her biddings to all of us: “Provoke a lot of laughter. Love unconditionally. And, read The Brothers Karamazov or One Hundred Years of Solitude. Your choice!” Amy and Lexi read to Shan from Solitude as Shan slipped from her last hours of life. As fate would have it, another of Shan’s beloveds, Zach Iscol ’97, was a Marine deployed in Iraq during Shan’s last days.

He had no way of knowing she was in her last hours, yet simultaneously by chance, a world and a war away, Zach also was reading One Hundred Years of Solitude.