Funeral Homily for Dorie Nichols--The Rev Melanie Lemburg

 Funeral Homily_Dorie Nichols

March 19, 2022

 

To begin, I’d like to share with you Dorie’s Eulogy written by her daughter in law Cindy. 

        Today we gather here to remember our dear Mother, Grandmother and friend, Doris Barbara Piegols Nichols. She was born in Midland, Michigan.  She was an avid painter, writer and Florida gator fan!! She loved writing to friends and family and that carried on until she was no longer able to write or paint.  If you ever received a letter from her, I am certain you received an article or clipping from the newspaper or a magazine referring to something she thought you cared about. She kept every card, note and letter she ever received. To her they were treasures to reminisce over and over.

        She has spent the last 5 years in assisted living from Snellville GA, “where everybody is somebody”, to Rock Hill, SC to Pineville, NC and lastly her final home in Tega Cay, SC.

        What you may not have known about my mom was that she grew up on a family farm and begged her father to let her go work at a Country Club during the summer in Mackinac Island, Michigan to get away from the hard farm life.  Being the second youngest of 10 children, it seemed to her “that was too much for a young girl to have to put up with.”

        She met her first husband in Lansing MI and lived in California with him until he went missing in an Navy aircraft in Korea approximately a year after their marriage while he was serving in the army during the Korean War.

        She moved to Bradenton, FL and became an art teacher at Manatee High School. She traded tutoring lessons for pilot’s lessons from a student’s dad while living in there. She met Henry at the DMV in Bradenton and as they say the rest is history.  They moved to Anna Maria Island, Florida, a place they both held dear in their hearts and their very best friends lived there and they visited often.  They eventually made their way to Atlanta for Henry to go to Georgia Tech to get his Master’s degree in business administration.  They then made their home in Savannah when Henry got a job at Union Camp and they raised their family in Isle of Hope.

        She loved to travel and loved photography as well.  She also loved to golf. She was excited to travel around the world to Japan, Ireland, Luxembourg, Germany, & California. She had an adventurous spirit! She also spent years putting together genealogies for both the Piegols and the Nichols families.  She traveled to cities, libraries and churches looking up relatives’ records of deaths, births and marriages. She interviewed many relatives in order to have an accurate record of the family history.  They are cherished genealogies we are grateful to have to pass down for generations!

She loved Henry, her children, her grandchildren, Jesus, and chocolate, especially mini m&m’s that she always had in her pocket and gladly shared with everyone! She loved flowers especially orchids, hydrangeas and her dog Beau Cou (sp). We always said her favorite grandchild was Coco, Jay’s family dog whom she kept on occasion.

She played solitaire almost every day! She and Henry loved watching sports especially Braves Baseball, Florida football and PGA golf.

        She served on the altar guild here at St. Thomas for many, many years and trained many young ladies how to make arrangements and care for flowers.  Thank you, Mary Hill, for designing the flowers for her funeral. She would be so proud. If she found that you loved flowers she would gladly give you a cutting of her beautiful Hydragenas which she also painted.

 

Her love of art carries on in her children and grandchildren. I am sure she is currently adding watercolor paintings around heaven! Maybe even giving a few lessons.

        In her later years she mellowed and was happy. She loved playing bingo, going on rides and the chocolate milkshake treat afterwards. She endeared herself to the nurses at Wellmore always making them laugh. She also made a special friend named Elizabeth, a young lady who would come visit her and learn about art.  Together they would watch the birds at the birdfeeder and Dorie would save cookies and other small prizes to share with Elizabeth when she would visit.

        We will miss sitting with her watching her favorite shows: Andy Griffiths and MASH and playing cards!  But we thank God for the promise of heaven when we will all be gathered together once again!

 

Happy painting and golfing in heaven Mom!! And give Pops and Gary big hugs from us! We miss you all!

            Thank you for those beautiful words, Cindy, that so capture Dorie’s spirit and the love you all shared! 

I knew Dorie best through her art.  This is an award winning painting of Dorie’s that I bought at a church sale a few years ago and that now hangs in my house.  (I also have a painting of hers in my office as well.)  I’ve always liked this scene and especially the way that Dorie used darkness in this painting to offset the light. 

One of the prayers in our tradition talks about how Jesus knew both the beauty and pain of human life.  That’s captured in the gospel reading that Dorie chose for us to read today.  Even as Jesus is headed to his death on the cross, he is offering consolation and encouragement to his disciples.  In learning more about Dorie’s story, about her early years of hardship on the family farm and about the grievous loss of her first husband in service in the Korean War, I can see how she used light and dark as two sides of the same coin, the same way that beauty and pain of human life are two sides of the same coin.  She who had known great suffering was still able to find and appreciate and create beauty; she was able to love well, and she created beauty through cultivating relationships in the same way she cultivated beauty through flowers.  She was able to find adventure and independence, and she was able to laugh. 

        Today, we gather to remember the hope of our faith—that death is not the end but a change; that through Jesus’s suffering and death and resurrection, God has shown that God’s love is stronger than absolutely anything, even death. That death and life, like light and dark, are two sides of the same coin and are never really far apart.  And that the light is stronger than the dark, that it can never really be snuffed out, no matter what it seems.

We gather to give thanks for Dorie, to remember all the ways that she helped make our lives more beautiful, through both the light and the dark, and we gather to mourn the loss of her presence with us and among us.  On the day that Dorie died, which happened to be hers and Henry’s anniversary, church member Margaret Minis sent Pam a text saying that heaven was definitely livelier that day as Dorie joined God’s heavenly banquet.  May she enjoy her place in that never-ending party (she always loved a good party), and may we look forward to the day when we will join her once again.