A Meditation for Aunt Shirley, Given at her Funeral

My memories of Aunt Shirley go back to when I was about four years old, around 1950. My dad was serving with the Air Force overseas, and my mother, Bill, and I were living with Grandma and Grandpa Sutton. Since John Humble was about the same age as Bill and I, we spent a lot of time together, and I can remember going back and forth between the homes on Mill St and Oliver St often, maybe every day. It was delightful, for at both ends of the trip there was a warm welcome – and often cookies! I was beginning to appreciate what a loving person Aunt Shirley was, and what a good baker.
About ten years later, after my Dad retired from the Air Force, we were living on Mill St again while Dad looked for work. There was still a lot of traveling between Mill St and Oliver St. I used to spend Wednesday nights with the Humbles, so that I could help John deliver the heavy Thursday morning paper, with all its extra advertising. Aunt Shirley and Uncle Jack were always so welcoming when I came to stay over, and when John and I returned from our rounds there was a good breakfast waiting for us.
During my high school years, the Chuck Suttons, the Don Suttons, the Humbles, and two other families used to go camping together a few times a year – ten adults and more than twenty kids. I do not think that we teens and kids had many conversations with the adults, as we were engaged in our own activities – but the adults certainly had a grand time with each other. I can remember thinking that they were really ancient. A vast gulf seemed to be between us, and I had little idea of what they did or thought.
Of course, I now know that, being in their 30’s & 40’s, they were not at all ancient; indeed, they were still young. As I got older, and especially after I got married, that “vast gulf” disappeared. I began to talk with my aunts and uncles a lot more. I heard many stories about their years growing up in the house on Mill St – about Grandma Sutton baking eight loaves of bread three times a week in the old coal stove, about Dad and Uncle Donald and a batch of the neighborhood boys heading off on a Saturday to the woods by climbing onto a freight car, about taffy pulls, singing after supper almost every night, and many more little stories of their life among friends and family.
I began looking at the photos on the walls of the homes on Mill St and Oliver St, and began to see a larger story there, as I remembered those little stories. It was the story of a family that was rich, not in the world’s goods, but wealthy beyond the hopes of many in love and in faith. The welcome that I received when I was four when I came in the door at Aunt Shirley’s was warm and real. At the time, I noticed it in cookies. Years later, I noticed it in the care and concern of Aunt Shirley – and indeed of all my aunts and uncles – about how things were going. They were not being polite when they asked; they really wanted to know, because they cared for me, and not just me but all my cousins.
Since I grew up in a branch of the family that often lived far away, and since I later spent a lot of my 20’s and 30’s in various places around the country, I did not get to visit in Wilkes-Barre as much as I now wish I had. A lot of my cousins did, and I know that they have been blessed by seeing Aunt Shirley & Uncle Jack, Aunt Claire & Uncle Walter, Aunt Betty and Grandpa Sutton, and the cousins who lived here. There was always a warm welcome here in Parsons for other members of the family, and their friends.
I have been talking a good bit not only about Aunt Shirley but about the family she grew up with, and their children. One reason for that is because it is impossible to separate who Aunt Shirley was from that family. She was the next-to-youngest child, and her brothers and sisters formed her as well as her parents. But there is another reason: Aunt Shirley was the last of that family we had among us. Her passing marks the end of an era. We still have my mom and Uncle Jack as representatives of that great generation, but there is no one left now who grew up at the house on Mill St in the first half of the 20th Century.
I am glad to know that there is still a batch of cousins here in Wilkes-Barre to represent the family and our history, and that they are Aunt Shirley and Uncle Jack’s descendants. They too have many good memories of Aunt Shirley. That is good for them and good for all of us.
We cannot separate Aunt Shirley from the family with whom she grew up, because it was a very close and caring family. But every member of that family had his or her own particular personality, and we can remember Aunt Shirley in her own constellation of gifts and graces. I can never think of Aunt Shirley without hearing her laugh in my mind, a combination, more or less, of a whoop and a giggle. She was one of the most joy-filled people I have ever met, and laughter came easily to her. She could certainly talk about serious and difficult things, but while she took things seriously, she never took herself too seriously, and she often saw a funny side to a serious situation.
Besides her laugh, when I think of Aunt Shirley, I also picture her in two places – the first with a warm hug of greeting at her front door, and the second is at the table in her kitchen. She was a great cook, a marvelous baker, and a wonderful conversationalist. After a delicious meal, we could sit and talk for hours.
And many people gathered around that table – her children, and in due course, grandchildren. Her nephews and nieces and their children – and not only those of the Sutton side, but also the Humble side of Aunt Shirley and Uncle Jack’s family. For years, Aunt Shirley and Uncle Jack hosted Sunday dinners, with many people seated around the table. And there would be friends as well – especially friends of her children and friends from church. I can remember thinking several years ago, “It is sort of like I have a second mother” – and then as I listened to more stories as time went on, I realized that Aunt Shirley was indeed a second mother to a number of people. Aunt Shirley and Uncle Jack did not brag about it at all, but there were a number of people who spent a few weeks, or months, or even longer, at their home, because they needed a place to call home for a time. Aunt Shirley had a tremendous gift of hospitality. She was a great cook, and even more a great and kind heart.
And we cannot talk about Aunt Shirley without talking about her faith. She was a lifelong member of this congregation, and as a member she was both blessed by it and a blessing to it. As we are gathered here today to remember Aunt Shirley, we are dealing with two great realities. One is her loss – we will never hear her laugh again, or get a hug, or taste her cooking. We will never hear her ask how we are, knowing that she really wants to know. She will no longer promise to pray for things that concern us. We have a real and deep loss. At the same time, we rejoice that she is in heaven, freed from the aches and pains she endured these last years, reunited with her parents and brothers and sisters, and with a son-in-law and many friends who went on before her. And she is with the Lord Jesus, whom she followed all the years of her life. She is standing before his throne with myriads of saints and angels, praising and adoring him with a radiant joy.
There might be those who would say, “Of course she is in heaven! She was a good person. God will accept her because of the life she led.” But if you were to tell her that somehow, her response would be a laugh. She may have been good in comparison to other people, but no one is anywhere near as good as God requires.
Aunt Shirley is not in heaven because she was good. Rather, I think that she would say that, as far as she was good, she was good because she was going to heaven. Her life was one long thanksgiving for the grace and mercy she received from Jesus Christ. She knew that Jesus had died to pay the just penalty for her sins, and because he had died for her, she joyfully lived for him.
In her growing up years, Aunt Shirley was a member of Christian Endeavor, a church-based youth ministry. CE’s motto was “love and service,” and the CE movement believed that “youth can lead.” Teens were taught how to run meetings and how to organize and carry out activities. As useful as such skill could be however, the main reason the youth of Christian Endeavor were taught such things was so that they might be in fellowship with young followers of Jesus, and that they might love the Lord Jesus and serve him in their daily lives, while helping others to know him. Aunt Shirley never forgot those lessons, and she applied them all her life, not only as a young person. And she did so out of delight, not duty, for she knew the deep and transforming love of God.
All who knew Aunt Shirley were blessed by her. She was, by the mercy of God, simply that kind of person. I have only touched on a few of the stories that could be told about her, but even in these few, we know that we have lost a wonderful person, someone filled with kindness, and humor, and love.
We will all miss her more than words can say. We have the comfort of God’s promises, but that does not mean that pain and loss simply vanish. Uncle Jack, we know that your loss is great, and we are praying for you. John, Barbara, Elizabeth, and Ellen, you have lost a wonderful mother, and you also have our prayers. Thank you for sharing her with so many others who were blessed by her care.
We will miss her. The lives of those whom we love are too short, no matter how many years, or how full, or how well-lived. But we can give thanks to God that he placed Aunt Shirley in our lives and that he gave us an experience of his love through her.