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Editor’s note: This is the conclusion of Maui columnist Tad Bartimus’ two-part report on the Hana woman who inspired the upcoming Women’s March on Washington. Read the first part here.

HANA, Maui — Teresa Shook married her high school sweetheart at 19, earned English literature and secondary education degrees, divorced at 28, cleaned houses to support her young sons and earned a law degree at 31.

Passing the Indiana bar exam on her first try, Shook so impressed the proctor he invited her to join his legal firm.

“I was paid like a clerk and still had to make coffee, but I was a lawyer with a job so I bought my first house,” she said. “I opened my own office so I could be close by when my boys came home from school. I loved going out to my grandmother’s house to do her friends’ wills. I did a little bit of everything. I was tenacious.”

It was the same tenacity that kept her typing, “I think we should march,” on Pantsuit Nation’s website the morning after Donald Trump won the presidential race.

Shook’s posts launched the Women’s March on Washington and the spinoff marches and rallies planned Jan. 21 in all 50 states and 26 foreign countries.

This lawyer/teacher/writer/mother/grandmother never waited for permission to pursue what she wanted. In sixth grade, she started a newspaper by herself, then convinced her disapproving mother to mimeograph 200 copies. The same year, she landed a coveted week as a page in the Indiana General Assembly. Early success taught her to set her goals high and keep working until she achieved them.

“I was always smart, but I never flaunted being smart,” she said. “I would rather be underestimated than overestimated. I don’t go in a straight line. I’ll take unusual paths to get where I need to go, but I always get there.”

“There” included taking her sons wilderness backpacking, parasailing off a mountain in Canada, rafting class IV rivers in West Virginia and building bridges over mud bogs in Alaska.

With her sons grown up and gone, Shook moved to California, passed that state’s bar exam on her first try, worked for the Santa Cruz County District Attorney’s Office, then went into private practice.

Diagnosed with breast cancer in 1995, she was treated and recovered but decided that being a lawyer was too stressful for her. Visiting East Maui with a friend in 2000, Shook decided to quit and moved to Hana.

Supporting herself with online writing and editing jobs, she settled into small town life. Then a new health challenge threatened her independence. Previously diagnosed with histoplasmosis, a disease that can cause blindness, Shook’s eyesight suddenly worsened in 2006. A specialist predicted she would be blind in six weeks.

“That set me off on a frantic odyssey to find a ‘last place to live’” Shook said. “I sold the Hana house because it was remote, bought another one in Florida where I could walk everywhere, then sat for two years and waited.”

Nothing much happened. The doctor had been wrong.

Still partially sighted but unable to drive and needing work, Shook put her face close to her computer screen “and spent hours online, squinting to find overseas teaching jobs.” Her tenacity again paid off.

Bluffing her way through phone interviews and feeling her way through foreign airports, she taught English at schools and a college in Bali, Guatemala, China, Saipan and Gabon.

“My supervisors never knew I was partially blind, but I always let my students in on the secret,” she said. “They were wonderful and helpful. No one ever betrayed me. I made great big signs with their names in big letters and taped them to the front of their desks until I learned their names.

“It is so stressful when you can’t see, when the world is fuzzy and getting worse. I was always in flight or fight mode because of my vision loss.”

Shook returned to Hana, bought another house and spent a lot of time with her constant companions, the internet and Facebook.

One day she clicked on a miracle.

“I discovered a clinic offering a stem cell treatment for my disease,” she said. “It was wildly expensive but seemed my only hope. I borrowed money from generous people and flew to Florida on faith.”

Her courage and tenacity paid off. Doctors injected stem cells from her spine into her eyes and six weeks later, “I started to see shadows in front of my eyes and at night. After my eyes healed three months later my cataracts were removed. I could see light and shapes again!”

Today Shook has almost 20/25 vision in one eye and can see “pretty well” out of the other. She drives her own car. Her Nov. 9 “I think we should march” internet post has made her a national figure.

“I was too far away to do the grunt work so I let go in my heart, early on, that I had to be involved in the details,” she said. “But I will always be proud of being the first to say ‘let’s march’ and to be the mother of the movement, in solidarity with thousands of wonderful women volunteers.”