Renee Manheimer, a Spanish teacher at Crossroads Academy, died suddenly and unexpectedly on May 12 from a brain tumor. Formal obituaries rarely capture a person’s essence, and her husband, Josh Manheimer, wanted to find a way to paint her more fully. So he wrote this:

Renee Granda Cordano Manheimer was an extraordinary individual with super human powers.

She could eat the hottest pepper, the yellow habanero, raw like an apple. Which meant she could eat the hottest chicken wings at Buffalo Wild Wings and the hottest Indian and Korean food our local restaurants would serve. The danger, of course, was kissing her. She had huge luscious lips, and if you just grazed the edge of one on your way out the door, and did not know what she had for lunch, you would catch on fire and lose sensation for days. Kissing her, however, was a risk worth taking.

Our favorite place to eat was Worthy Burger in South Royalton. I would order Renee the veggie burger with an egg, cheddar cheese, pineapple habanero sauce, lettuce, tomato, and garlic chipotle mayo. It took a crane to lift and two hands to eat and after the first bite, the egg would burst and drip down her fingers. This caused Renee indescribable pleasure but put her in a quandary. She couldn’t really put down the burger to add Sriracha to each bite so I, sensing the conundrum, would take a long french fry, dip it in the Sriracha, and paint the Sriracha onto her burger so she could enjoy each bite with maximum heat intensity. “This is love,” she would mumble with her mouth full. “This is love,” I would say back, dabbing away at the burger.

And the love would come back to me in spades.

Renee didn’t grow up with parents who read The New York Times every morning and discussed politics. And yet, she knew how to read a room to survive, and so she started reading The New York Times and The Washington Post and would ask me, as we watched MSNBC, “So what do you think of Biden’s new Fed Chair?” I remember during the last election she expressed particular concern about the voting patterns of certain precincts surrounding Philadelphia and which way the mail-in ballots would break.

Renee was incredibly observant, and could see things others couldn’t because she had to learn how to read people to survive. She grew up in a time of civil war in Peru when the military and the terrorists and the drug dealers were all fighting each other, and often civilians became casualties. “Your best friend was the person with the gun closest to your head,” she explained to me.

This ability to read people not only helped her survive, but it helped make her a great school teacher. She could quickly grasp where her students were struggling with language acquisition, and adapt on the fly to provide the best strategy for them to experience success and gain confidence. To this day, I’m still stunned by the intensity and thoughtfulness she would put into creating her lesson plans each week — for each level of student — so all her students would be entertained and educated. One day she would be plotting how to get her school to dance and sing along to a Marc Anthony video, and another day she would be translating Robert Frost poems into Spanish—with all the rhymes—so her class could memorize the poems and give a presentation at Dartmouth.

Renee was the nuclear core of our family, and then suddenly on Tuesday, the reactor melted down. It makes no sense, of course. She was only 55 and healthy. She worked out every day and drank vegetable shakes several times a day to prevent cancer. The brain tumor had picked the wrong person to invade; there must be some mistake.

As our kids moved away, and it was just Renee and I, she would say to me from time to time, “You are my family.” And I would say back, “You are my family.” I guess that was us renewing our vows. But in hindsight, it was also each of us saying, I trust you with my life.

Last Tuesday, I was suddenly and abruptly asked to look into the chasm and decide if I wanted to save Renee’s life. I said “absolutely” without hesitation. But when the efforts of one of the most advanced neurosurgery teams in the country failed, I was asked if I was ready to help Renee find peace. That took more thought. But Mia, Tomas and I knew we had to do what Renee would want. She’d be yelling at us to stop crying, let her go, and see if we can get a discount on the flowers by returning them after the service.

Renee leaves behind busloads of students who were lucky enough to have the best, hardest-working Spanish teacher in the history of mankind, two incredible children, and a 23-year-marriage with a husband who was absolutely devoted to her, and is now left holding a french fry, utterly lost about what to do with it.

Ciao, mi amorcita!