Sigourney Woods Cheek (1945-2010)

Finding a voice

By: Christine Kreyling

Published On: May 24, 2010



Sometime in the late 1990s, Sigourney decided she wanted to write. She’d been scripting sketches, essays, memories for years. But now she wanted to get serious; i.e., get published. And, being Sigourney, she intended to start at the top.

“I was thinking about the New York Times, or maybe Vanity Fair,” she told me without a trace of irony.

Because I’m a writer myself, Sigourney sent me some samples and took me to lunch at Sunset Grill to get my reaction. Today, I have little memory of the samples’ specifics. I clearly recall, however, what I told her: There were glimpses of her voice, the voice that when spoken was so compelling, but only glimpses.

“Personality-wise,” I said, “you’re, shall we say, sharply defined.” I thought of the face she presented when she’d determined on a course of action, that direct, horizontal gaze, the mouth a thin line creased by a smile at the corners. “The voice you write in, on the other hand, is a bit muddy. What you’re writing about—parents and children, friends and places you love—isn’t unique. But you are. And if you capture that ‘you’ people will read.”

I’d learned the distinctiveness of Sigourney Cheek during my five years as museum curator at Cheekwood in the early ’90s. They were unsettled years, with lots of staff turnover. As chair of the institution’s board and its virtual, and unpaid, president, Sigourney attacked piles of problems with a relish.

There were mornings, of course, when I’d pick up the phone to hear, “Christine, I have an idea,” and pray it was a good one. Sigourney batted better than .500, but if it was a clunker I knew I’d spend the next 24 hours—make that 48—talking her down. Only to have her call me on another morning to ask yet again why we couldn’t do what she thought we should do. I fully grasped, however, the upside to her stubbornness, the mortar of boundless energy and positive thinking holding Cheekwood together during trying times. And so we were friends.

Sigourney had a gift for friendship. Many were forged through the rigors of work: the A-list fundraisers she chaired, the leading role she played at Belmont University, Christ Church Cathedral, Magdalene House, Vanderbilt’s Kennedy Center, the YWCA and other organizations too numerous to list. Then there were those friends gathered through her passions for gardening, bridge, needlepoint, travel, the fine arts, interior design and true blue style in general.

One special comrade was Connie Cigarran, with whom she founded the Antiques & Garden Show. “Sigourney was a risk taker who made you feel that you could do it—whatever “it” was—and it was always fun,” Connie says. After A&G was humming, Sigourney moved on to the antiques business, forming Amici with Connie and Anne Whetsell. Then, in 2005, came the diagnosis of leukemia. And in that unlikely quarter, she found her voice.

“The cancer diagnosis gave Sigourney’s writing focus,” Anne explains. At first she gave email medical updates to a small circle of friends. The circle grew as those friends forwarded her messages to their friends, who asked to be added to the list. What Sigourney wrote expanded from news bites to a highly personal journey. The positive feedback became “an antidote to the isolation of illness,” she writes. The result was a community, and a book: Patient Siggy: Hope and Healing in Cyberspace.

Here the voice is fully fleshed, describing the wrenching times and the exhilarating times with equal acuteness. Nowhere is that voice stronger than in her final paragraph, when Sigourney contemplates crossing the last threshold.

“I plan to take my time, allowing significant climbs and curves and practice rounds and explorations into every nook and cranny before I am ready to say, ‘It is time,’ and then, I hope, I can enter the final door with just a whisper of grace.”

Consider hope fulfilled, Sigourney Cheek.