“Eulagy”

remarks by the Rev. Claire Childress at the memorial service for Eula Redenbaugh

First United Methodist Church, Boulder, Colorado, May 22, 2007

A week ago yesterday I was in our home study reading the Scripture texts for this past Sunday – I often do that on Monday, which is not a day off per se but hopefully a quiet one in which to regroup from the day before and begin looking ahead at the Sunday to come.

  It was already a day out of the ordinary routine because I had come to Frasier Meadows that morning to visit Eula, the one which proved to be my last to her, after her sister had called me the night before to tell me she was in hospice care.  I was back home from that trip, though, and into my ordinary routine, reading the stories of the ascension of Christ – that event following Easter morning in which he leaves earth and is taken up into heaven.  It is the point at which his earthly ministry ceases, and I was reading it when the telephone rang with the word that Eula had died.

A stunning and graceful end to the life born on Easter Sunday eighty-nine years before, coming to me through Scripture as Eula herself whirled away.  

I don’t remember a single conversation of the many I had with her in which I didn’t want to take notes – to capture this extraordinary life, and to help prepare me for this day.  If I only wrote this down, I would say to myself, I could be a better pastor on this day.

I never did, of course, the pastor who thought note-taking would have been tacky winning out every time.  Neither was I successful in urging her on several occasions this past year to write or record or dictate her life story while she still had a firm hold on it, and so here I am, along with the rest of us, wondering how in the world to begin to do justice to the sheer expanse of this great life.

I will not attempt it, actually, beyond saying a few things, and welcoming a few other people who will say a few things, and being sure you know that anyone who cares to will be invited to speak at the reception which will follow this service.  But all our words will see only dimly into the radiance of this woman we honor today.

She was born on Easter Sunday morning, April 7, 1918 in her great-grandparents’ farm home in rural Taylor County, Iowa, the first of seven children born to Earl Robert Redenbaugh and Dessie Harriet Clayton Redenbaugh.  She was “the leader of the pack,” one family member says, “the glue that held us together.”        

The family moved to Colorado when Eula was a youngster and she started school near Ault, and also lived in Greeley and Ft. Collins before moving to Omaha, Nebraska, where she graduated from high school.

It was the early years of the Great Depression and life was hard – her sister remembers the period when much of the family income came from the kids selling their mother’s homemade donuts door-to-door in wealthy neighborhoods early in the morning, but that didn’t stop them from being straight A students.

Eula received a scholarship to Peru State Teachers College, where she earned a B.A. in Education, went on to graduate work at Chicago Theological Seminary and in 1955 received a Masters Degree in religious education from the University of Chicago.

 She went as a missionary from the United Methodist Board of Missions to the Phillippines, where she worked with students to develop the Student Christian movement, and participated in additional camps in Norway, Alaska, Mexico and Japan.

 All this, and lots more I haven’t told you, before embarking on her major career, a 27-year term of service with the YWCA.  She was Executive Director four years at the University of Illinois, another four at the University of Colorado, and lived also during those Y years in Boise, Pasadena, New York City, Philadelphia and Topeka.  While in Topeka my own Uncle Gene Frank, a United Methodist minister and retired bishop tried to hire her away from the Y for the church, but she stuck with her beloved organization and relocated with its headquarters to Denver after a tornado demolished their building in Topeka.

 Retirement in 1982 did not slow her down and if anything shifted her into overdrive.  Always sensitive to people of differing abilities and advantages, she served church, city, county and state in many roles and many ways, most notably for ten years on the Colorado Commission on Aging, which she chaired for two years and also served on the executive and legislative committees, working tirelessly for benefits and services for aging citizens.  When she left that organization in 2002 (saying she was term-limited!) she was awarded the Allen Buckingham Senior Leadership Legacy Award.

One of her fond memories is the time she and several much younger staffers worked all night on a proposal to combat the legislature’s attempt to do away with the old age pension program; the proposal had to be ready by 9:00 am.  “It was so much fun!” she said, “like being back in college.”  It also was successful.

Not quite four years ago she was honored in the monthly spotlight of the Boulder County Government Volunteer Programs, and described as “an extraordinary public servant, an outstanding example of someone who uses her strengths for the benefit of the community as a whole.”

 A friend once asked Eula how long she wanted to live.  She answered:  “As long as I can be productive.”

She kept a list of the major medical crises and procedures she endured, beginning with a tonsillectomy in 1941.  It’s a long list, with a lot of stuff on it – broken bones, major surgeries, other very serious conditions.  We watched her as she weathered them all, returning triumphant again and again to give more of herself to others.

The last entry on her list says “Dec. 2006 pinned left hip.”

Insofar as Eula died of natural causes, I imagine those causes to include the unwelcome reality that she no longer felt productive.  Without ability she lost purpose, without clear purpose, she lost will.  In our own despair we watched her diminish before our eyes, seeing this worldwide life reduced to the size of a room simply too small to hold her.

I imagine she might have liked these words by Edwin Madison Cameron, in a lecture he delivered to his aging body shortly before his death:

“When you can go no further, I shall leave you and be free . . . when we separate I shall continue to exist . . . a power greater than you and I started us on our journey.

Your journey is approaching its end and you are aware of it . . . my journey has merely begun and I know it because I have never been more alive.  Our separation is therefore not one of sadness, but of joy.  You are weary and want to stop.  I am longing to alight from this slowing vehicle and go on without you.”