Gold Star mom bids Carson Valley farewell

In a whirlwind, Gold Star Mom Sally Wiley and husband Mike plan to move from their East Valley home to Brookings, Ore., in mid-June.

And the first thing they plan to do once they’re settled in their new home is to visit Crater Lake, somewhere Mike has always wanted to go.

“Between us we have an incredible story, and you know what? The story’s about to get bigger,” Sally Wiley said in an interview last week. “We’re excited that we’re moving when we’re both able to travel, and to do things. How can you be looking at a new adventure like this, and not be happy when you’re old, but not too old to see Crater Lake.”

Wiley said the move to an independent living center will bring her closer to her sister, who’s nine years younger.

“My sister and brother-in-law have lived up in Curry County since the 1970s,” Wiley said. “Mike is 80 and I’m 76. She’s been pushing us to move up for quite a while. She knows that place through and through, and I’ve got my sister, who loves me and takes care of me, 15 minutes away.”

The couple visited Brookings at the end of April to celebrate birthdays and decided to put their house on the market with the expectation there wouldn’t be any movement until after they got back.

“We put the house on the market on Tuesday and we had three offers by Thursday,” Wiley said. “We got a phone call from our agent and she said we have to sign these papers, and we said ‘We’re in Oregon.’”

By the following Saturday, the couple signed the papers on the house.

“It’s very hard to leave for both of us,” Wiley said. “We keep getting calls and emails asking ‘whey can you have dinner with us, when can you do lunch?’ We’re trying to keep up.”

Besides being a Gold Star Mom, Wiley spent a decade as a commissioner on the Nevada Department of Veteran’s Services, the Sierra Nevada Republican Women’s Caring for America Committee and on the board of Welcome All Veterans Everywhere.

Her son, Sean Diamond was killed Feb. 15, 2009, in Iraq in an explosion.

She’d been sending him care packages when he was overseas, and she started sending them to members of the armed services serving overseas, something she kept up until 2019.

“It was horrible, but there’s more to this community then people realize,” she said.

A member of Sertoma and a Sierra Nevada Republican woman, she said she really missed connecting with people during the coronavirus.

“All this stuff has happened, and you can’t see people,” she said. “I finally got to go to a meeting, and whoever saw me would come and just hug me. I know they are still caretaking and I’m going to miss all that a lot.”

But the Wileys will be making new friends in their new home, where her sister belongs to the Episcopal Church.

“She posted a beautiful article that ‘I will be able to go to church with my sister,’” Wiley said. “And all these people from there started saying ‘we can’t wait to meet you.’”