Celebrating a Wonderful Life

It has been a whirlwind of activity since Grandma’s passing on October 3rd. Although it took 10 days to get everyone here, we were finally able to gather all nine of children for the funeral. This was no easy task as they live in Boston, NYC, Washington D.C., Hawaii, San Diego, Palo Alto and two in Arizona and unfortunately none of their spouses were able to come. Luckily we have one family in Ogden which accounted for one spouse and five of our grandkids. Shawni also brought 12 year old Grace from AZ to represent the rest of the grandchildren.

As they began to drizzle in one at a time we took advantage of every moment! Here’s breakfast with the girls at a new downtown breakfast place:

And lots of happy greetings at the airport….

Saturday afternoon we went on a fun hike that started with the horses right outside our door. Beauty!

Glorious fall…

On Saturday night we had a fun dinner around the raclette grill with a raclette cheese delight that our Swiss daughter in law taught us about. Tal led a discussion about choices which was something he was learning in his classes at U-Penn. If you want to take a look at the fascinating things one of his guest professors Barry Schwartz had to say in a lecture called The Paradox of Choices check it out here. Most of us definitely have issues with handling too many choices. It was a fascinating discussion! We could have talked all night!

By late Saturday night we had all nine of our children under our roof at the same time. I had folders for each “kid” from 43 years of letters papers and certificates that they got a kick out of sorting out.

Shawni found a particularly entertaining list of her commitments as a child. We got a good belly laugh out of that!

Every bed and couch was full and we had a maybe once-in-a-lifetime breakfast with everyone there before leaving for Logan for the funeral. Here are the men of Eyrealm, ready to leave. Not Noah’s best pose…

After the viewing on Sunday night, we crammed into Grandma’s house for the last time and children, grandchildren and great grandchildren shared their favorite memories of Grandma. Magical! Love abounded!

Sunday night we stayed at a near-by hotel where we thought we had two double beds and a sofa bed in one of the rooms. As it turned out, the couch did not pull out. Jonah put the cushions on the floor and pulled out his trusty sleeping bag and claimed that it was better than sleeping on the floor of the airport where he often finds himself.

Noah absolutely insisted that he was perfectly comfortable with the cushion from a large chair in the living room and two suitcases which supported his bottom half. Go figure! I’m sure it was a delightful night’s sleep!  

The funeral was a wonderful celebration of Grandma Ruthie’s amazing and purposeful life! Saren gave a stellar life sketch which included delightful entries from our Grandpa Dean’s journal when he was courting Grandma in 1944 as well as stories that she shared from the grandchildren the night before.

Our wonderful musical nieces and nephews as well as some of Chris and Hedy’s grandchildren provided most incredible music for strings with an moving arrangement by our neice Rennie. We also heard a fabulous arrangement of Amazing Grace by our nephew who is a professional musician. And of course the great grandchildren sang “Oh Boy I Got Joy” with fervor. The closing song was sung by all of Grandma’s 23 beautiful grandchildren.

Grandma’s four sons and daughters all spoke briefly and the icing on the cake…Elder Tom Perry and wife Barbara showed up for the funeral and we were delighted to have Elder Perry, who is four days older than Grandma and went to school with her at Logan High as well as our life-long friend and alternate Grand father, be our final speaker. What a dynamic speech he gave to the future generations to carry on Grandma’s great legacy.

The cemetery was a lovely, peaceful experience, especially after Grandma’s many years of wishing she could be laid to rest by her beloved husband Dean.

 

Note Grandpa Dean’s headstone in the lower right.

The joy of being together after such a perfect send-off for Grandma is pretty obvious in the pictures below of a mom and dad so happy to have all nine children in the same place at the same time!

We loved our day of celebration for Grandma Ruthie and our adoration of her exemplary life!

For some remarkable tributes to Grandma and fabulous photography by our daughters click on the following links:

Saren: here, Shawni: here, Saydi: here and Charity: here.

We love you and will miss you our darling Grandma! Thanks for the wonders you have contributed to our lives!

Life and Death in Eyrealm

After a beautiful blessing given by her four loving sons in her living room on Monday night, our beloved Grandma Ruthie, age 91, finally passed away yesterday to reunite with her dearly beloved husband Dean, whom she has lived without for 53 years! Look at that sweet little face, pleading to go! The love in that room was thick enough to cut through that night!

 

How we adore that dear woman! She has influenced the lives of so many, not only the lives of hundreds of thousands of Joy School children throughout the world but most importantly the lives of our own children and grandchildren! For the past couple of years, she has not known who any of us are, but somehow she has managed to maintained her strong, pervasive spirit of love and gratitude for all of us as well as her delightful sense of humor! 

For moving pictures and fascinating reports on her amazing life take a look at the perfect post by Saren on her blog today here. She also adds a link to a post that Saydi did two years ago when we had Grandma at Bear Lake. How grateful we are for these stellar recollections of her incredible life.

Grandma and Dean were known for their dancing abilities in competitions when they were young and though we will sorely miss her, nothing gives us more joy than thinking of grandma “Dancing with Dean”! 

The celebration of her life at her funeral will be in Logan on October 14th at 11 a.m. Looks as though all of our children and some grandchildren will be coming home and we look forward to a remarkable reunion even as Grandma is relishing her reunion in heaven.

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Grandma Ruthie

As mentioned in the last post, we spent a week with Grandma Ruthie, Rick’s mom. She is ninety years old and has been ready to die every day since we was 83 which is the age that both her parents died. The poor darling has been a widow for over 50 years. When the love of her life died with colon cancer he was thirty nine and she was thirty eight. They had five children from 3-15. The fifteen year old was Rick. It has been a long, hard haul for her, with lots of joy along the way but she has had enough!

Since she can’t remember any of us or even what happened one minute ago, she is sad every morning when she wakes up….again! Still she maintains her sweet nature and her cute sense of humor in her more lucid moments. She can finish the last word of any nursery rhyme and the names of her nine brothers and sisters simply rolls off her tongue on demand.

She has one foot in heaven and keeps asking who is standing there behind us when there is no one there. She also asks several times a day if she is still alive, but thanks to her conscientious habits of good health all her life, her body is doing just fine. It’s just her mind that is gone. She often sleeps 18-20 hours a day. Which is a huge blessing.

Still we had a good-for-us realization of exactly what she is going through. That in addition to cleaning and shopping for food and a few new things for her wardrobe of nightgowns and getting up with her several times in the night made it truly a 24/7 week! Rick’s brother Kevan who is there with most of the year will have been gone for six weeks when he returns (a well-deserved vacation) so it has been good for all of us family members to take turns caring for her full-time. It’s a great learning experience! 

Saren and the kids came for a visit on Friday and we all went to the cemetery. We were worried that she would start crying when she realized where she was and that she was indeed, still alive, but she sat on her famous sister May Swenson’s (probably USU’s most famous graduate, one of about ten most famous poets in America) beautiful granite bench asking over and over where we were and why were we there.

She broke her hand a few weeks ago from a fall while wandering in the night and we wrapped her up with every coat we could find because she was freezing.  “Enduring to the end” is not for the faint-hearted!

 

The kids loved hearing “ancestor stories” from their grandfather about Grandpa Dean and others buried nearby.

We’re praying that she can go ASAP! But it could be a while! Ah…old age! We love you Grandma Ruthie!