Strattons of Massachusetts Bay
Running Through the Sands of Time
“If Karen hadn’t gotten me to the hospital when she did…”—Wm F Stratton, I Played Anyway
She walked into my office on Guam in June 1978—a blonde Navy nurse with a smile that stretched a mile wide and a rank that didn’t match her face. Lieutenant Commander. I fumbled her quarters assignment, offered her the ground floor with the senior nurses, and she saw right through me in about ten seconds flat. That was Karen. She always saw through me.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Karen Sue Schneider was born July 6, 1945, in Detroit, Michigan—the second daughter of Gordon George Schneider and Verna Mae Clayton. Her sister Sandra Jean had arrived five years earlier, in 1940. Gordon was a Detroit police officer, a man who wore the badge the way good cops do—as a responsibility, not a decoration. Verna was a Kentucky girl, born in Paducah, who’d come north with her family and settled into the life of a Detroit household—church, neighborhood, children, the ordinary grind that holds a city together.
Karen grew up on the east side, in a working-class neighborhood where everybody knew whose kid was whose and nobody locked their doors. She attended Denby High School—a big public school, the kind of place where you learned to hold your own or got lost in the crowd. Karen held her own.
Then October 1962 happened.
Gordon Schneider was working traffic duty on October 2nd when a driverless automobile struck him. Subdural hemorrhage. Skull fracture. He died four days later, on October 6, 1962. Karen was seventeen years old, a senior in high school, and her father was gone—killed not by a criminal’s bullet but by a freak accident that made no more sense then than it does now.
I never met Gordon. But I know what he left behind—two daughters who carried his name and his work ethic, and a wife who had to figure out how to keep going without him. What I also know is that Detroit’s police community didn’t forget. The Detroit Police Fund awarded Karen a scholarship to Wayne State University’s School of Nursing. It was the kind of gesture that changes the trajectory of a life, and Karen grabbed it with both hands.
She graduated from Denby High in June 1963 and enrolled at Wayne State that fall. The police fund scholarship covered most of it, but not all—by her senior year the money was running short. That’s when Karen and her friend Connie Fordyce made the decision that changed everything. The Navy was offering a deal: sign a three-year contract, and they’d pick up the remaining tuition, books, fees, and a small salary for that last year of nursing school. Karen and Connie signed up together. It was the beginning of a friendship that would last a lifetime—Connie and her husband Scottie stayed close to us through all the decades and all the moves, until Scottie died a few years ago. Connie moved with her mother to eastern Indiana, not far from us, and has visited often. The last time was about a month ago. Karen didn’t recognize her. Just another in the constant heartbreak of this disease—taking not just the memories but the people in them, one face at a time.
It was a practical decision—finish the degree without going broke. But practical decisions have a way of turning into something larger. Karen walked out of Wayne State in June 1967 with a Bachelor of Science in Nursing, a three-year obligation to the United States Navy, and no idea that those three years would stretch into twenty.
Her first duty station was Norfolk, Virginia—1967. The Navy’s largest base, crawling with sailors and ships and the organized chaos of a military at war. From Norfolk she went to Yokosuka, Japan, in 1970—the big naval hospital on Tokyo Bay that handled casualties cycling through the Pacific. In 1972 she was reassigned to San Diego.
These weren’t desk jobs. Karen started in critical care—the kind of nursing where you don’t sit down, you don’t look away, and you don’t make mistakes. Coronary ICU. The patients who came through those units were the ones whose hearts had betrayed them, and the nurses who kept them alive had to be smarter and faster than whatever was trying to kill them. Karen was both.
In 1974 she was accepted into the University of California San Diego’s School of Medicine—not as a physician, but as one of the first graduating class of Family Nurse Practitioners. The FNP program was new then, part of a movement to extend healthcare beyond what physicians alone could deliver. Karen was in that first wave. She finished the program in 1975 and graduated as an Advanced Registered Nurse Practitioner, and from that point forward she wasn’t just a nurse—she was a provider, diagnosing and treating patients with an authority and competence that would define the next thirty-five years of her career.
Her first assignment as an FNP took her to Annapolis. From there she shipped out for Guam.
Her next assignment brought her to Naval Hospital Guam in 1978—and to my office, and to that unfortunate business with the cockroaches in the Pinto Bean.
I’ve written about our courtship elsewhere, so I’ll spare the details here except to say that Karen was the first woman I’d met who could match me—in stubbornness, in curiosity, in the willingness to jump into something without knowing how it would end. We went SCUBA diving together, fished together, survived typhoons together. She encouraged me to get certified, and within months we’d explored eighty dive sites around the island and started hopping to other Pacific islands on long weekends—Saipan, Truk, Palau, Yap, Ponape.
The Palau trip was Karen’s idea. I’d been on Guam since late 1977; she’d arrived that June from Annapolis and had only been on the island a few months. But she’d already gotten certified and was diving like she’d been doing it for years. She booked the whole thing without telling me—flights on Air Micronesia, dive boat, everything—and handed it to me as a belated forty-first birthday surprise. We flew out of Guam with a stop on Yap, landing on rain-slicked runways made of cement and crushed coral that turned to ice the moment they got wet. The landings were hair-raising—short runways, heavy rain, and that sickening hydroplane before the brakes caught. Karen took it in stride. She took most things in stride.
Our dive master was a Palauan named Ben who walked with a pronounced limp—a souvenir, he told us cheerfully, from a case of the bends years earlier. Karen noticed the limp before he’d said two words. She was a nurse; she couldn’t help it. “The ocean teaches you,” Ben said. “Sometimes the lesson is expensive.”
The morning drift dive along Palau’s western wall carried us through a cloud of piranha and past sharks we tried not to count. The current was so strong that the pickup boat arrived late—we’d drifted far past the anticipated point. At lunch we ate fish the guides had speared while we were in the water, which explained the company we’d been keeping. The afternoon dive, against the current this time, brought tiger sharks cruising the wall and a giant grouper the size of a small car hovering in a gap in the reef. Karen floated beside me, perfectly still, watching it the way she watched everything that mattered—with complete attention and no fear at all. On the ride back, a curious whale nearly swamped the boat. We bailed water the rest of the way in.
That night Karen summed up the day: piranha, tiger sharks, a grouper the size of a Volkswagen, and a whale that tried to capsize us. All in one Saturday. We flew back to Guam a day early. She called it the best birthday present she’d ever given anyone. I called it the most terrifying.
At Truk Lagoon she nearly gave me a heart attack—or rather, I nearly gave myself one when I dove back down eighty feet without a safety stop to retrieve her Uncle Chuck’s World War II dive knife. I got the bends. She called me an idiot. She was right. She was usually right.
We married on April 4, 1980, at the Guam Sheraton Hotel, overlooking the Pacific. Judge Paul J. Abbate officiated—a Bronx-born federal judge in an aloha shirt who kept the ceremony mercifully short. I wore Birkenstocks. Nothing else I wore that day will ever fit again. Karen wore a smile I can still see when I close my eyes.
In May 1980 we left Guam for Washington State, where Karen had secured an assignment at Naval Hospital Bremerton. We found our way to a five-acre farm on Van de Car Road in Port Orchard—south Kitsap County, across Puget Sound from Seattle, surrounded by Douglas firs and the kind of quiet that takes getting used to after twenty years of Navy bases.
We had two boys. Gordon William Schneider Stratton arrived August 18, 1984, in Bremerton. We named him Gordon after Karen’s father—the Detroit cop she lost at seventeen. Benjamin Clayton Schneider Stratton came along February 25, 1987. Both boys carried the Schneider name in the middle, Karen’s way of making sure her father’s line wasn’t lost.
Karen retired from the Navy in 1987, coincident with Benjamin’s birth. She was looking forward to being home with the kids, and so was I. We heated the farmhouse with a wood stove for six years before finally doing a major remodel—doubling our space and putting in central heat. We had room for visitors at last.
But Karen wasn’t built to stay home forever. She found a new home for her skills at Key Medical Center on the Key Peninsula—Dr. William Roes’s clinic in Lakebay, Washington. The Key Peninsula is one of those places that looks close on a map—just a few miles south of Tacoma as the crow flies—but the geography tells a different story. Water on three sides, one road in and out, and a community that had been medically underserved for decades. Roes had started there through the National Health Service Corps, trading his labor for med school debt, and never left. He built Key Medical Center in 1993 on the hill above Key Center, made house calls to homebound patients, and looked after seniors at a nursing home in the area. Karen worked alongside him three or four days a week, providing largely women’s health care to a population that otherwise would have driven an hour to Tacoma for a routine exam. She spent twenty years there—twenty years of Pap smears and prenatal visits and a warm speculum, and the kind of quiet, steady medicine that doesn’t make headlines but keeps a community whole. She left her footprint on that peninsula as surely as she’d left it in every Navy hospital from Norfolk to Guam.
Karen also threw herself into community theater. It surprised me at first—this woman who had spent her professional life in the most clinical, high-pressure environments imaginable, standing on a stage delivering someone else’s lines for fun. But it made sense when I thought about it. She’d spent decades being competent and controlled. Theater let her be something else entirely.
And Pilates. Three days a week, right up until we left Washington. She eventually got me into the class too—on the advice of my massage therapist, who told me my muscles were tighter than a drum from all those marathons. Karen thought that was hilarious.
The Navy gave Karen a circle of women who became her lifelong friends—the kind of friendships that are forged when you’re young, far from home, working long shifts together, and who stay with you through every assignment and every decade after. Diane Mattern was one of them, eventually settling in Wyoming with her husband Al. Maryanne Hugo was another. And Chris Picchi, who married a Navy pilot who had been a prisoner of war in Vietnam and never fully came back from it—the post-traumatic damage of his captivity stayed with him for the rest of his life. Karen gave Chris a great deal of support over the years, the way nurses do when they understand what they’re looking at, but in the end there was only so much anyone could do. Karen carried those friendships from base to base and into civilian life. They were the through-line of her Navy years.
In 2017, Gordon married his high school sweetheart Siri on a Washington State ferry—the weather cooperated, the ferry carried the whole party to Seattle for the reception, and Karen beamed through the entire thing. That same year Karen and I flew into Detroit and rented a car, drove to Lake Orion to see Connie, then headed to Batavia in upstate New York to chase down traces of my great-grandfather Joel Stratton. Karen was game for all of it—the small-town libraries, the local historians, the hours in the car. Forty-three years in healthcare and she retired to become my research partner. We made a good team.
I have written elsewhere about losing people. It is the common thread of my life, and Karen’s life ran parallel to mine in that regard.
Her sister Sandra died on October 1, 2014, in Wilsonville, Oregon. Small cell carcinoma of the lungs, diagnosed in April at stage four. Six months from diagnosis to death. Sandra was seventy-three. She and Karen had been the only two Schneider girls, bonded by their father’s death and everything that followed it. Now Karen was the last one.
Then January 9, 2016. Our son Ben, twenty-eight years old, took his own life in Seattle.
There are no words for that. I’ve tried. I’ve tried in other writings and I’ll try again someday, but there are no words that fit the shape of that loss. Ben was brilliant and troubled and loved, and he is gone, and nothing I write will change that or explain it or make it hurt less.
What I can say is that Karen and I held each other up through it. That’s what forty-five years together prepares you for, even though you pray it never comes to that. You hold each other up because the alternative is falling, and neither of us could afford to fall.
The disease crept in the way these things do—slowly enough that you explain it away, then fast enough that you can’t.
First it was the car keys. Then the grandchildren’s names. Then the thread of a conversation, lost halfway through a sentence. Then the days themselves became interchangeable, and the calendar meant nothing.
Alzheimer’s. The word sits on the page like a stone.
By 2015 we had moved from Port Orchard to Gig Harbor, downsizing, simplifying. By October 2023 we were in Carmel, Indiana—back near where I’d started, eighty-six years old and helping Karen navigate a world that was shrinking around her. In August 2025, she moved to the memory care unit in our facility. Same building. Five hundred feet away. Two floors apart.
I visit every day. Morning, after tea. Evening, before dinner. I punch in the code on the locked door. I find her wherever she is—the common room, her room, staring at photographs she’ll ask about again and again.
“Oh, there you are, Bill,” she says when I arrive, as though I’d just stepped out for the mail. No recognition that I was here yesterday, and the day before that, and every day for the past year.
She still knows my name. Most days. Some days there’s a pause first, a searching in her eyes. Some days she holds my hand while we watch birds at the feeder outside her window. Some days she seems annoyed—where have I been? Some days she just watches me, waiting for comprehension that doesn’t come.
Twelve years now. Twelve years of watching her disappear in increments. The woman who dove Truk Lagoon with a World War II knife strapped to her calf. The woman who drove me to the Navy hospital on Christmas night 1999, her voice tight and controlled—the voice she used when she was scared but refused to show it—while my heart stopped three times. The woman who raised two boys on a farm in Washington, who treated patients for forty-three years, who called me an idiot when I deserved it and loved me anyway.
She’s still here. Three hundred feet across a courtyard, past a fountain and a bench where we used to sit. And I’ll keep walking over there, every morning and every evening, because that’s what forty-five years means.
It means you stay.
Karen Sue Schneider (1945–) was born in Detroit, Michigan the daughter of Gordon and Verna Schneider. A family nurse practitioner for forty-three years, she served patients across multiple states. She married William F. Stratton on April 4, 1980 in Guam. They raised two sons and settled in Washington State. She is the subject of this tribute by the author, her husband.
—Wm. F. Stratton, April 2026
© 2025 Wm F Stratton. All rights reserved.