NORTHAMPTON — Well-known photographer, artist and poet Jonathan Sherrill of Leverett died April 25 at Cooley Dickinson Hospital of a heart attack. He was 63.
A one-time photojournalist for the Gazette who was known for his talent and hustle, Sherrill later took to nature photography after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease at the young age of 44.
“I’m still driven, but not in the same way,” he said in a 2003 interview that was published in Hampshire Life. “Now I’m driven to find what’s beautiful and remarkable in nature and to share that with other people.”
Sherrill is survived by his three children, Kiernan, Sasha and Emma, his two older sisters, Amanda and Elisabeth, and his three grandchildren, Bruce, Maddy and Amari.
“We’re managing,” Kiernan Gulick-Sherrill, Jonathan’s 31-year-old-son, told the Gazette on Thursday. “He went peacefully.”’
Gulick-Sherrill was speaking inside his business, Green Earth Computers in Northampton, with his father’s serene nature photos hanging on the wall above him.
Gulick-Sherrill said both he and his brother Sasha were by their father’s side when he passed away, and their sister Emma was on the phone from Ireland, where she is studying.
“I am dealing with the fact that the world needs me, and us, to make lots of decisions quickly, while I also need to emotionally process this,” Gulick-Sherrill said, referring to the difficult and often bureaucratic work that inevitably follows a death.
Sherrill was born in Atlanta on Dec. 30, 1953, and moved to Cincinnati when he was young. After a stint in Aspen, Colorado, Sherrill and his former wife, Heidi Gulick, eventually found their way to western Massachusetts to attend the region’s colleges; Sherrill studied photography at the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s University Without Walls.
Sherrill joined the Gazette in the mid-1980s and left in 1993, when he put his focus into Lightworks, the commercial photography business he founded with business partner and former Gazette photographer Richard Carpenter. He left Lightworks after he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, and started a new business, Windcircle, for his nature photography.
Despite having a degenerative illness for around 20 years, Gulick-Sherrill said, his father never fully stopped doing the things he loved; in the past week, he said his dad was snapping photos on a digital camera of his newest grandson, and cooked a big steak dinner for a friend.
“He loved his art, he loved his family,” Gulick-Sherrill said, shrugging and struggling for words.
Gulick-Sherrill moved in with his father more than three years ago to help out with things like doctor visits and the house. He said he’s grateful his father got to meet his two youngest grandchildren, both less than a year old.
Also living with Sherrill for some six nights a week, working 60-hour weeks, was 66-year-old friend and caregiver Rob Zilin.
“I’m pretty shaken. I was with Jonathan when he had his heart attack,” Zilin said, adding that he performed CPR until emergency crews showed up.
That morning, Zilin said, he and Sherrill went for a hike in the woods, where Sherrill told him stories about his childhood and about the various bird sounds they were hearing.
“He was very happy and content living in the woods,” Zilin said. “Jonathan knew the species of all the birds, he knew all their habits.”
After their walk, Sherrill went to his acupuncturist and herbalist, Verena Smith, who treated him free of charge weekly for the 20 years following his diagnosis.
“I knew him because he had come to my office actually as a photographer of the Gazette, to photograph a treatment of a woman who wanted to stop smoking,” she said.
Smith said that every time she would go to a professional seminar, her first question was always about how to treat Parkinson’s.
“Jonathan has been on my mind for all these years,” she said. “I think he was really heroic in how he managed.”
Thinking about Sherrill now, Smith said she humorously pictures him as an angelic bird flying around with a big photo lens.
There will likely be a memorial at the New England Peace Pagoda in Leverett, which Sherrill loved to visit, but the event has not yet been planned, Gulick-Sherrill said.
When asked to describe Sherrill, Zilin, his friend and caregiver, found a bio in St. Michael’s College’s literary journal, the Onion River Review, to be most accurate:
“Jonathan Sherrill has been a ragamuffin in Cincinnati, a chef in Colorado, a carpenter in Nova Scotia, and a photographer in western Massachusetts. He has sat in a hunter’s blind for hours waiting (with a camera, not a gun) for the perfect heron moment. And he has apparently been a poet for years without knowing it.”
Some of that poetry was published in the Onion River Review, including one poem published this year titled “In The Family,” which features a fictional character named Max:
“One of us died last night. Max/
isn’t sure anymore. Is it his/
son/
or/
his dog?/
His sorrow is for all of us.”