Carol

My friend Carol Schuldt was a strong and fiercely independent woman. While her life was colored by multiple tragedies (the loss of her two daughters to mental illness and addiction, and an accident that left her son profoundly disabled), until her death at 85, Carol loved life more than any other person I have known. Her weathered body housed a youthful spirit that was energized and sustained by her intense connection to the sun and the ocean, and to the many people she loved. Most days, after working in her wild garden, she rode her bicycle to the beach where she body surfed naked in the frigid Pacific Ocean. On days when the beach was shrouded in fog, Carol jumped into her trinket-festooned pickup and raced across the Golden Gate Bridge to hike on sunny Mount Tamalpais and bathe in a sun-dappled spring. It was not long after we met that she told me she wanted to die in a wild place, beneath or near a tree, where she’d be left alone for the elements and the animals to feed on her — coyotes and pumas, insects and snakes and birds of prey — until her bones were polished and bleached, and her twin titanium hips glistened in the sun. In December of 2018 Carol died after a brief period of illness. Until just a few weeks before her death, she had been cycling up and down Ocean Beach and delighting in her afternoon swims. Carol died at home, not under the shade of a tree as she desired. But her body was laid to rest in a wild place, not far from the ocean she loved. At the