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SUMMERFIELD — Ann Sherman still wears her wedding ring.

She says she’ll take it off when it feels “right.” But right now, it’s not. She loves her husband and misses him for all the things they shared, like Tennessee football, the Greensboro Symphony and their two girls, Beth and Becky.

She’ll run into people who don’t know her, and they’ll see her ring and ask, “What’s your husband do?”

“He died last year,” she responds.

That’s usually all they ask, and that’s usually all she says.

But sometimes, she gives them a short explanation of her grief. She’ll tell them about the tragedy that has forced her to redefine her life and think about who she is and who she wants to be.

It’s 14 words. But it’s 14 words she’ll always hate to say.

“I don’t know if you’ve heard,” she tells them, “but he was the cyclist who was killed.”

Her husband was David. David Sherman.

We all know what happened. We saw the headlines; we heard the news. David was killed by a hit-and-run driver as the sun set on a Saturday afternoon a week before Halloween 2009.

David was 55. He was found 11 steps from North Church Street extension near the intersection of N.C. 150. He was killed riding his bike.

Ann remembers.

It was nearly 6 p.m. on Oct. 24. She was watching the Tennessee Volunteers, the alma mater that she and her husband shared, play the Alabama Crimson Tide in football.

She knew he wanted to watch the game between two rivals as much as she did. And they always watched Tennessee football together because it reminded them of their college days three decades ago.

“Gosh, why isn’t he home?” she kept asking herself.

A few hours later, she found out. State troopers told her, with a knock on their front door. She soon found out the worst. She became a widow and her husband became forever linked to something horrible that was incredibly public.

She hated it. She felt invaded. Ann, a longtime teacher at Greensboro’s New Garden Friends School, always valued her and her family’s privacy. And now, 14 months after his death, she wanted to honor her husband’s memory beyond his bike.

She felt her husband was more than just the name of Guilford County’s seventh bike fatality since 1997. She wanted his memory to be attached to something more enriching, more him.

For her, the answer came easy. All she had to do was remember a conversation they had in a darkened auditorium when they went to see the Greensboro Symphony perform.

“One day,” David told his wife. “I want to have an endowed chair.”

He does, thanks to Ann and their two daughters. Last week, the symphony announced the Shermans’ $40,000 gift will create an endowed chair in David’s name.

That gift has been added to the symphony’s endowment of nearly $4 million. The interest from that account is used to pay the musicians and cover operating expenses.

So, in his own way, David will keep the symphony going. From now on, you’ll find his name in any symphony program, on a page with the names attached to the 60 other endowed chairs.

David, Ann says, would like that. He was, as she says, a “symphony groupie.”

He liked nothing better than meeting a guest soloist or having a conversation with director Dmitry Sitkovetsky. He even bought the music the symphony was to perform beforehand, so he could get familiar with it before he and Ann sat in their seats.

David loved classical music. He loved rock music, particularly Bob Dylan. But really, David loved playing the violin. He took it with him everywhere.

On business trips, he’d stow it away in the overhead compartment, keeping it near him because he didn’t want to lose it. He knew he had to practice wherever he went.

And he practiced all the time, almost every day. After work, he’d steal up 14 steps, to his room just beyond the kitchen to watch TV and practice his violin for at least two hours every night.

Sometimes, he’d run down and get Ann to listen. Or he’d get her to fetch her flute so they could play together. Other times, he’d just listen to his own tapes of his music lessons. He wanted to get better.

He wanted to play with the Greensboro Philharmonia, and he wanted to master the musical hurdle of any violinist: Play the “Concerto for Two Violins in D Minor” by J.S. Bach. In music shorthand, it’s known as the Bach Double.

Yet David didn’t start playing the violin until he was 48. His teacher? One of Ann’s good friends, Jeannie Sykes, the music teacher at New Garden Friends School and a violinist with the Greensboro Symphony.

The suggestion came up over dinner with both families seven years ago. Since then, he had frequent lessons on a Saturday or Sunday for seven years. His payment: Baby-sitting Anna, the young daughter of Jeannie and Wiley Sykes.

David called it his “Anna time.”

Together, David and Anna played games, rode bikes, created pottery and practiced. Anna got better. And David did, too.

He’d still get nervous at his recitals. But it wasn’t because he was surrounded by other students at least 30 years his junior. It was because of the music. He wanted it to be perfect. David never did anything halfway.

Before a recital, his hands would shake so much that Ann would often have to tell him, “Don’t worry about it. You’ll do fine.”

He did. In his professional life, he knew how to navigate the complicated terrain of tax law as vice president for Sealy Inc. In his personal life, he knew how to make a violin sing.

Listen to his tapes. You can hear it. It’s the beautiful moan of his instrument and the comfortable instruction from Sykes, just two people in tune with trying to find a tune.

That’s what Ann likes to remember. And that’s what she never wants to forget.

“That whole thing was tragic and awful, and it wasn’t an accident, and it could’ve been prevented,” she says. “But this (endowed chair) is what I want him to be remembered for. His passion for living. This is who he was. This will be his memory.”

Ann met David when she was 18. In a month, she’ll turn 50. She doesn’t watch Tennessee football anymore. She watches the New York Yankees. She doesn’t ride her bike on the road anymore. She sticks to the trails.

Meanwhile, she’s taken a sabbatical from New Garden Friends, a school where she’s taught for 14 years. She needs time to think, to reflect on what to do next.

She’ll do that wearing her wedding ring.

“You know, my whole life was tied to him,” she says. “He had his music. I had a passion for teaching. We had a place in Boone, and we were trying to define our next phase of life without kids, and Greensboro was a part of that.

“Now, I have to figure out who I am,” she says. “At first, I kept thinking, 'Why keep going?’ It’s not suicidal, but you define yourself with the people you love. And now, I have to redefine who I am and ask, 'What do I do now?’”

A few weeks ago, it was to see Anna Sykes and her mom perform at Greensboro’s Holy Trinity Episcopal Church. Ann sat in a folding chair, in the second row, her hands knit together in her lap. When Anna and her mom started to play, a chill raced up Ann’s back.

Anna, a fifth-grader at New Garden Friends, was playing the Bach Double. And it was perfect.

Ann is not especially religious, but right there, in that fellowship hall at Holy Trinity, she says she felt the presence of her husband, the Volunteers fan, the cyclist, the violinist, her friend.

“I miss David,” Anna told Ann after the performance. “I wish he could’ve been here.”

Maybe, he was, Ann thought. Maybe, he was.

Contact Jeri Rowe at 373-7374 or jeri.rowe@news-record.com