If Sheila were here, she'd have written this page herself, and it would have been better. She'd have known every statistic without looking it up, woud have made every word choice supremely accurate, and would have added jokes to keep you entertained. We'll do our best.
Our mum died on 31st January 2026 in Kirkcaldy, Scotland, with her family around her. She had lived with diagnosed Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis for six years. She understood the disease inside out — the mechanics of it, the research, the prognosis — because that was how Sheila handled things. She read everything, she understood everything, and she beat the odds.
IPF is a progressive lung disease that scars the lungs and gradually destroys the ability to breathe. There is no cure. It is relentlessly cruel, and it was particularly cruel to Sheila, because she loved to sing, to play her clarinet, and to stride the countryside. With Z-cars at her side, she had completed most of the UK coastal path. She was a woman who studied geology walking the cliffs, a marine biologist reading the rockpools, an organic chemist who simply never stopped being curious about how the world was put together. IPF took took her breath, her energy, her independence, but it never took her mind, or her curiosity.
Sheila was born in Dover in 1950 while her father was deployed overseas, and spent her earliest years in Yorkshire with her mother's mining family. It was there that her lifelong devotion to Everton FC was cemented — and she never wavered. She began her career in computing with IBM in the 1970s, back when the women got the night shift and the machines ran on punch cards. She punched the cards. She was a programmer and tester, brilliant with maths, a born organiser, and a natural administrator. She later spent ten years at Abbey Life in Bournemouth before moving to Yorkshire, and eventually to Loja in Spain, where she and Bill lived for fifteen years before settling in Scotland together in 2025.
She was extraordinarily well read and could hold her own on almost any subject. She loved the theatre, quoted Shakespeare relentlessly, and attended the Edinbrugh festival more regularly than most comedians, and she never missed The Archers. She watched Casualty and Call the Midwife with the critical eye of someone who probably knew more about the medicine than the scriptwriters. She was kind, warm, generous, pithy, and forthright — sometimes all in the same sentence.
Sheila gave her time where it mattered. She was a volunteer school governor at Summerbee and a Guide leader for many years. In Boscombe, she volunteered to sit with people who simply needed someone to listen. She said it was one of the hardest jobs she ever had.
She married Bill in August 1976, and they were together for nearly fifty years — a strong, supporting partnership that set the pattern for their three children, now 47, 46, and 40, all happily married themselves. She was a mother and a grandmother who was deeply loved.
After her death, Sheila donated her body to the University of Glasgow Medical School for education and research. Of course she did.
We are raising funds for the Pulmonary Fibrosis Foundation because IPF is underfunded and poorly understood. Over 250,000 people in the US are living with pulmonary fibrosis. Around 50,000 new cases are diagnosed every year. Sheila knew this number already. She would have wanted it to change.
If you can donate, please do. If you can't, please share this page. Sheila would probably have told you the research needs funding, explained exactly why, and then beaten you at cards.
Thank you for reading about our mum.
The Nicol family
Helen and Mandie, Kate and Sean, Gavin, Michelle and Ben.