Around the Town: Who Loretta wants to be when she grows up

Betty Pogue went home this week, and just like Betty, her funeral was an absolute blast. Lots of joyful music, most of it played and sung by her very talented family, lots of laughter, a few tears, and many people eager to take their turn telling how she made their lives better.

And just like Betty would have done it, the sweetest gentlest requests that if you don’t know Jesus, please get to know him, so you can go be with Jesus and Betty when your time comes.

It was the best funeral I ever saw.

I wanted to get up and say what Betty meant to me, but by the time I figured how to say it, the time had passed. So I’ve pulled up and am reprinting a column I wrote last year that featured Betty. I shortened the others a little, so maybe they will let me squeeze the rest in.

By Loretta Humble/Around the Town

I had a birthday this last week. Birthdays get you to thinking. …

I got a lot of nice things. I also got a card from Angie Miller, saying she wants to be just like me when she grows up. I’m not sure either one of us will ever grow up, but I loved the sentiment. And actually I wouldn’t mind being more like Angie.

I had already been thinking for some time about who I want to be like. The latest one is Betty Pogue, one of my favorite residents at Cedar Lake Nursing Home. Betty is almost exactly 10 years older than me. Betty has some infirmities which HIPPA laws forbid me to talk about, but over all she is doing great. I want to be like Betty in 10 years. She is definitely still in charge of her own life. She nearly always has a smile on her face, unless she is mad, and then that doesn’t last long. She keeps busy every day making things which she gives away, and is always on the lookout for good she can do. But she doesn’t mind straightening us out here at the nursing home when she thinks we get on the wrong track. And she prays for us. Her kids love her, and come to see her because they want to, not because it is their duty. I admire her spirit so much I’ve asked Celene Terry to use her as a model for a spunky old lady in her series of paintings of women who live their lives well.

Speaking of Celene, I wouldn’t mind being like her, but there isn’t much chance of that. Celene has retired from a successful career as an educator, is a fine artist and lives an orderly life, where she enjoys a close family life in a beautiful home. She paints wonderful watercolors, and has time to create an environment where lots of birds and butterflies thrive, and then she takes time to appreciate them, as well as paint them. My excuse for never having lived a regular, orderly life is that I must be too creative. Celene knocks that excuse out the window.

Then there is Jo Ann Surls. She does not talk about age, and while I don’t seem to be able to follow that example, I do think that is a good idea. I just know she got in this world a few years before I did, and seems to have taken charge of her part of it a lot better than I have mine. She was married for many years to a man she was and still is deeply in love with, and lives very happily alone in the place they created together. If you don’t know about her place, you should. She has now turned it into the James Surls Sculpture Garden: a Memorial to Joe Surls. How wonderful her acres of gardens are — wonderful because she gives her life to it — every day doing almost all the gardening herself; the outstanding sculpture; the wonderful little buildings scattered through the place; a woman who knows what she loves, and has built a life where she can get up every morning and live it.

As has Celene. Now Betty Pogue would rather be a little healthier so she could live at home and do all the things she used to do. But given the circumstances she has to deal with, she is doing just fine with her life, still happy, still living fully, still giving back. So are a number of people here; Betty just happens to be a shining example.

This is not how I meant to wind up this column. I was going to write about some other people I would like to be like, but I just had this thought: If Jo Ann or Celene, or any of a dozen other women I admire as much ever showed up in our nursing home, they would be a lot like Betty Pogue. In the first place, they would still have a say in their environment: they would demand that we do our job right. They would be nice about it, but we wouldn’t hear the end of it till we listened. But then they would bring extra life into the place, and make it better because they were here. I guess what I’m seeing is that people who live fully, are just going to do it, whatever their circumstances.