Sunday, August 24, 2014

Mom's Obituary

Joyce Marie Ambuehl, resident of Richmond, Texas, died at the age of 67 years old on August 18, 2014 at OakBend Medical Center of a hemorrhagic stroke.

Joyce was born May 23, 1947 to Ezell and Edward Colson in St. Petersburg, Florida where she spent her childhood with her three best friends and her cousins. She married Ralph Ambuehl on February 22, 1969. They moved to Gainesville, Florida and stayed there for three years while Ralph finished both his bachelors and masters degrees. They moved to Houston with their 18 month old son Robert in the spring of 1973.

Joyce and Ralph set down their roots in Alief, Texas where they raised their three children. She worked in the Alief Independent School District for 18 years as a paraprofessional in a Special Education classroom with her best friend Sharon Thomas. During the summers, she worked tirelessly with physically handicapped children. She served as an officer and president of the Alief Paraprofessional Association. Later in life, she worked at the Fort Bend County Library in Richmond where she was able to share her passion for reading with her community.

Joyce was committed to her Catholic faith and was active as a Eucharistic minister and a member of the RCIA team at St. Justin Martyr Church for almost 20 years. More recently she had served as a member of the ACTS Core Team and Pastoral Council.

She is survived by her husband Ralph and their three children, Robert, Dawn, and Jean; her five grandchildren, Alexandra, Zachery, Anastasia, Maya, and Lila; as well as her brother John Colson. Edward Colson, Jr., her baby brother, preceded her in death 18 months ago.

Services for Joyce Ambuehl
Viewing & Funeral Vigil with the Rosary – Thursday, 8/21/2014
4:00 pm – 6:45 pm – Viewing
6:45Pm – 8:00pm Funeral Vigil with Rosary
Distinctive Life Funeral Home
5455 Dashwood St., Bellaire, TX 77401
(713) 933-0356

Funeral – Friday, 8/22/2014
10:00 am 11:30am
St Justin Martyr Catholic Community
13350 Ashford Point Dr., Houston, TX 77082
(281) 556-5116

Interment – Immediately following Funeral
12:30 – 1:00pm
Davis - Greenlawn Cemetery
3900 B.F. Terry Blvd
(FM 2218 & US 59)
Rosenberg, Texas 77471
(281) 341-8800

Reception Immediately following Interment (~1:30pm) at
St Justin Martyr Catholic Community
13350 Ashford Point Dr, Houston, TX 77082
(281) 556-5116

Note: The Ambuehl Family has requested that in Lieu of Flowers, donations be made to St. Justin or St. Faustina in that order of priority.

Friday, August 22, 2014

Eulogy for Joyce M. Ambuehl

Joyce Marie Ambuehl

Ages and Stages
On May 23, 1947, a two and a half pound fetus was pronounced stillborn before she ever entered the world. In the delivery room, her mother clutched her own mother's hand, pushed forth her infant who, to everyone's astonishment, she was alive. At the time, there was no medical technology to support such a premature baby, so the doctor sent my grandmother home with the stern warning to not expect her to live past a few weeks.

My mother spent the next few weeks sleeping in her father's shoebox with his handkerchief as her blanket.

It may be hard to reconcile this image of my infant mother with the woman we are here to say goodbye to. Her life was truly a miracle; thereby, all of our lives have been miracles. The child who by all means should not have lived did so and brought forth my life, the lives of my siblings, and the lives of my children. If she had not survived, none of us would ever have been born.

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Mom and dad's wedding, Feb 22, 1969
"She was a saint," my brother in law said recently. My gut reaction was, "No, she wasn't!" I'm her daughter; I should know. In my mind it can be difficult to separate the mother I had growing up and the woman you knew in her later life.

As an adult and as a mother, I have come to understand the strain my mother was under as a young woman and what drove her to behave as she did. I've come to have more compassion for her, to understand that, just like me, she did the best she could with what she had.

Having moved from Florida - the only home she'd ever known - to Texas with only her infant and her husband, she was isolated and alone most of the time. This was particularly challenging for her because she is descended from the Colson clan, which includes about a hundred people all of whom live within a five mile radius of each other. Then she had me and two short years later, my sister.

As a child, ours was a house divided. Where my father was so silent at times as to seem comatose, my mom was so outspoken as to seem manic. At other times, especially around the times of her migraines, she would fall into deep depressions. I remember lying in bed at night and listening to her cry on the porch outside my window. Once, she went so far as to climb in her car and drive off without telling anyone where she was going.

There were wonderful times, though, too. I had terrible nightmares as a child. In the wee hours of the morning, I would run to her bedside and beg to get in. She pulled me close, comforted me by wrapping her arm around me, and kissed my head. In time, I could calm down and fall asleep to her rhythmic breathing.

Before school, she would lovingly plait my hair - the same hair she always wished she'd had. We held dance parties in the living room the three of us girls, flitting around to Strawberry Fields Forever, tromping around to Thriller, learning the jitterbug, cha-cha, and line dancing. She sang Que Sera to us in the morning and before we went to bed just as her mother did and as I do now for my girls.

All that changed 25 years ago when my dad finally embraced the faith he so admired and he and my mom got on the same page, to share their love of The Lord with their children.

When you read about the saints, many of them experienced similar conversions.

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I have been trying all week to make sense of this.
Mom with her baby brother Ed before he died.

My dad has said that God prepared him in his thoughts and prayers throughout the past year. To be honest, God has done the same for me though I didn't know why it was happening. Every time I spoke to her recently, if I started to get annoyed with her, I would say to myself, 'One day, you're going to miss this.'

When my uncle died 18 months ago, I saw a side of my mother I had not seen in almost 20 years, not since my grandma died. For the first time in my selfish life, I saw my mother's weakness and asked, "What can I do to help?" I saw her depression and realized that she and I are the same.

When I got pregnant with Lila, My momma's 5th and final grandchild, I asked my mom to be by my side just like she was when Maya was born. Earlier this year, She missed Lila's birth by mere minutes, and I could see in her eyes immediately how sad and sorry she was. But in the five days to come while I was hooked up to machines in the hospital, my mom was the one I needed at my bedside. Though Lila may never remember her the way we will, her grandma is the one who helped form her earliest moments in the world. Her foundation. Grandma held her when mommy couldn't, comforted her while mommy slept, and became the rock upon whom We all trusted. My mother will forever be the model of motherhood I will try to live up to.

She was my confessor. She may not have been a priest, but I knew if anyone could ask God to forgive me, it had to be her. Like my sister, I have no regrets in regards to what I needed to say to my mom. I told her all in the last year. She did not judge me; she simply told me to use the rest of my life as atonement for my sins.

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Look at that smile.
People love my mother for many reasons: Her smile, her compassion, her selflessness. She was the kind of woman who would take the vegetables her kids turned their noses up at and would feed to the poor. Her special ed students depended on her for hugs because they had no one at home to hug them. My friends told me over and over again they wished she were their mother.

She was mother to many; the rock upon whom we depended; our strength, our guide, counselor, teacher, wife, mother, sister, daughter, aunt, cousin, friend.

Perhaps to make sense of her death we must look inside ourselves and ask, "What have I learned from Joyce Marie Ambuehl and how can I share that with others so that I may carry on her legacy of compassion and perseverance?"

Was her life a miracle? There can be no doubt.

Was she a saint?

You knew her, too. What do you think?

Monday, August 4, 2014

Haiku

Last week, my summer campers and I studied haiku poetry together. It's definitely one of my favorite forms for its simplicity, concise phraseology, and adoration of Nature. We did a Nature walk, chalked out some rough drafts on pavement, and used word association to come up with unique poems. Here are some I crafted using several words the kids came up with. My prompt was Zoo Animals:

Zebra galloping
Ebony and ivory
Blurs across the plains

Monkeys are hyper
Whipping through the air on vines
Chattering loudly

Isolated fox
Roaming the woods, quiet, alone -
Where is his pack?