Sharon Johnson was supposed to be born on Christmas day.
Instead, on Dec. 3, Sharon’s mother was home alone in Bellaire when she gave birth.
“When the doctor finally got there, all he had to do was cut the cord,” said Johnson, 80 years later. She’s dressed in a scrub T-shirt with prints of Bambi and hearts across it, her vintage Cleveland baseball bomber jacket slung over the chair to her right.
She has just clocked out at Licking County Aging Partners, where she works 32 hours a week, every day of the week as a homemaker. She celebrated 12 years in April.
Johnson grew up in Monroe County on a hundred-acre farm, where she was raised by her grandparents. Out of the thirteen kids in her one-room school, she was the only one in her first-grade class.
“Little House on the Prairie? Yeah, that was me,” Johnson said.
Down in the hills of Monroe County, Sharon learned how to make her own fun. Her early memories are filled with apple picking and chasing snakes on the farm.
As a teenager, she moved to Hanover with her mom, but didn’t outgrow her love for the outdoors or sense of adventure.
“I had six male cousins that didn’t live far off,” said Sharon. “I was a tomboy because I had to keep up with them. They couldn’t pull nothing over me.”
She discovered her love of sports and was often picked first for baseball, but all Johnson ever wanted to do was become a wife and a mother.
“But it didn’t turn out that way,” she explained: She got married at 16 and divorced 30 years later.
At the time, Johnson had been working as a diener, a role that assists pathologists during autopsies. She started in 1976 as a housekeeper at the Licking Memorial Hospital and, when the pathologist requested assistance, Johnson volunteered. She began working in the labs until the position officially opened up.
“I don’t think anybody else wanted that job, a diener does all the dirty work, so I just fell into it,” she said. “But it was interesting work.”
In 1992, Johnson got a divorce, quit her job at the morgue, and moved to Nashville with her son.
“When I left, they had to quit doing autopsies in Licking County,” Johnson said. “There wasn’t anyone they could depend on here, so bodies had to be sent to Columbus.”
Johnson continued her work in cytology after moving to Nashville with her son, Todd, a gospel singer who was involved in a car accident in his early twenties, which left him disabled.
“He’s my bodyguard,” said Sharon. “He helped me get out of a bad situation and hasn’t left my side since.”
The two lived in Nashville for 20 years before moving back to Ohio in 2012 to take care of Johnson’s mother.
“I made sure she got to all of her doctor appointments but, really, I was just her entertainment,” Johnson said. “She would call me and ask ‘What are we going to do this weekend?’ and, even though I wanted to make plans of my own, I just couldn’t tell her no.”
It was because of her mother that Johnson began working at Licking County Aging Partners.
“After I moved back here, I retired and took a year off,” said Sharon. “But I didn’t like it one little bit. I thought, ‘I gotta get my butt back to work.’”
Johnson’s mom also worked as a homemaker at Licking County Aging Partners before Johnson started. As a kid, her mom taught her how to clean and the importance of hard work. Her mom was a hard worker and truly independent. Even in her later years, she asked little from Johnson besides her company.
“People would ask, ‘When you pick her up, do you have to help her get ready?’ and I would answer, ‘Are you kidding? I pull up and honk the horn, and she just comes right out on her own.’”
According to Johnson, her mom’s independence and resilience went hand in hand.
“She always rallied back,” Johnson said. “She had a brain stroke a couple of years ago and ended up at Riverside. We all thought, ‘well, this is it. She’s either not going to make it, or she’ll end up in the nursing home.’ But, nope. She had the stroke on Friday, had surgery, and then, on Tuesday, she went home.”
These qualities made her both special and contributed to her long life. Johnson’s mom passed away at 100 years old in December 2024.
“I can’t tell you how much I miss her,” Johnson said.
Perseverance is a quality that Johnson and her mother share.
“People ask me when I’m going to retire, and I don’t know what to tell them. I retired a long time ago,” Johnson said.
Now, she lives in Newark with her son, and she doesn’t expect much to change.
“I have so many people that are younger than me who I’m taking care of,” Johnson said. “I’m thankful that I have the health, energy, and state of mind that I do.”
Selah Griffin wrote for TheReportingProject.org, the nonprofit news organization of Denison University’s Journalism program, which is supported by generous donations from readers. Sign up for The Reporting Project newsletter here.