Pauline "Granny" Harrison

Pauline Harrison was a loyal and constant wife, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and friend to everyone gathered here today in remembrance of her life. Let us recall now her loving smile, her gentle laughter, and her healing touch. Let us invoke the spirit of her patience, the depth of her compassion, and the strength of her will to overcome, with love, any hardship the world might cast before her.

Pauline often fondly reminisced about her childhood as one of the middle sisters in a sprawling brood of 13 children born to John and Mabel Oakley on a dirt farm in a tiny place called Afton, Oklahoma. There were two sets of twins which included Pauline and her sister Cauline, born on August 15th, 1923.

The family lived a rugged farm life as the dustbowl swirled and smothered, and the Oakley children did without many worldly “things.” With no electricity or running water in their home and with few possessions, the kids learned that all they really needed in this world was each other. They went to sleep each night with three or four to a bed, hands and arms entwined, exhausted from the hard labors their young lives demanded. Pauline and the other kids tended to the animals, plowed the fields, and canned hundreds of gallons of vegetables every year from the vegetable garden the family kept to feed themselves.

Pauline’s Mom and Poppie were gentle and generous parents who instilled in Pauline a deep and powerful dedication to the happiness and welfare of her family. Pauline helped her mother care for many of brothers and sisters including a younger sister, Kiki, who was stricken with Polio in infancy and lived a short 19 years of convalescence. The family also lost the youngest of the children, Bobby, to pneumonia when he was only 6 months old.

Pauline never forgot the losses she endured. In 1941 when Pauline was 17, her gentle and loving father, John Oakley, was killed in an accident while acting as a good Samaratin to stranded travelers on Route 66 near the family farm. He was 57 years old. Her brother, Buck, also suffered crippling injuries in the accident. Pauline suffered wounds that day too, not to her body though, she suffered wounds that bruised her spirit. She talked about that tragic day many times throughout her life, never forgetting what had been taken from her.

But the tragedies of Pauline’s youth only seemed to open her heart more to the loved ones who remained, and she bravely loved deeper and better and more despite her fears of future loss.

Around the time Pauline turned 20, she met a bean-pole thin man with mischievious hazel eyes who was to become the love of her life: Aubrey Harrison and Pauline wed April 7th, 1947.

Shortly thereafter, they bravely set out to build their own life and family in Redmond, Oregon. Pauline blossomed into her new identity as a wife and, not long after, as a mother to children of her own: Two healthy sons, Lynn and Rod.

The young couple worked hard. While Aubrey labored as a “powder monkey” dynamiting out tons of lava rock, Pauline took charge of her sons, showering them with love while doling out a little bit of down-home discipline.

By 1955, Pauline was beginning to feel pangs of homesickness. She missed the familial warmth she felt with her kinfolk back home in Afton. Visions of her mother and brothers and sisters were always at the front of her mind. So, the young family crammed their baby blue 1953 Chevy and a home-made trailer with all their belongings and headed back toward Oklahoma. They stopped in Denver to visit Pauline’s kid sister, Rowena, and there they stayed. Being near Rowena provided Pauline the connection to her extended family she longed for, and Colorado was close enough to Oklahoma to allow a couple of visits a year.

Aubrey needed work. Pauline and Rowena bought him a tool belt, a hammer, a tape measure and a book on carpentry and said “have at it.” Aubrey began his career as a builder and the pieces of the Harrison family’s future life had fallen into place.

Over the next 30 years Aubrey and Pauline built a home building company that is respected in Denver to this day. Lynn and Rod grew into strong and determined men, in the mold of their parents, and became integral parts of the family business.

But, in 1970, Pauline was heartbroken again when she lost her cherished mother to a stroke. The woman who set the example for Pauline’s nurturing ways was gone, just as Pauline was growing into her new role as grandmother. She was proud to call herself “Granny” to Lynn’s sons, Jeff and Scott, and a few years later to Rod’s children, Tony and Jessie.

A life-long passion for Pauline was gardening. She kept a large vegetable garden every year as well as dedicating an entire sun-porch to potted plants. Her yard overflowed with multi-colored Irises, red and pink roses, poppies, peonies and a lovely Rose of Sharon bush planted in honor of her mother. Pauline possessed more than just a “green thumb,” as she was known to be able to clip off a branch or some other small clipping from a plant and just stick it in the ground where it would take root and thrive.

She was also a lover of animals. Pauline once had a cat who bore a litter of kittens. The kittens weren’t healthy and most of them died shortly after birth. Only one kitten survived, a charcoal gray one that Pauline named Denver. But, little Denver had a hind leg that was deformed and faced backward.

Pauline took the tiny kitten to a veterinarian whose only advice was to amputate the leg. But Pauline knew better, as she always did. She knew that she could not only save that kitten’s leg, but heal it.

She took the kitten home and began to gently massage and bend the leg, taping it gradually forward and day by day, week by week, she tranformed that twisted and deformed leg until the kitty walked normally and with no signs of what his leg had once been.

This was Pauline. What she did for that little cat’s body, she did also for the souls and the hearts of her friends and family. She could find the bruises, the injuries that one may have suffered, and through her gentle care, she could transform those wounds, allowing the child or the man or the woman to heal and to thrive.

Though Pauline loved her plants and her pets, it was children: the faces, the joys, the laughter of children that most enlivened her loving spirit. Before there was such a thing as “Day Care”, Pauline was the unpaid

nanny to scores of “youngins”. Her children, the neighbor’s children, nieces, nephews, grandchildren, and great grandchildren spent countless hours being spoiled, over-fed and loved to the limit. In the waning years of her life she found immense joy in her great-grandchildren, Sophia and Rhea.

But, Pauline’s rock, and the foundation on which she built her life, was her husband Aubrey. She gave to him a love without measure, and he cherished her in return. They were partners in the truest sense of the word. At the time of her death Pauline and Aubrey were just one month shy of their 64th wedding anniversary.

Pauline believed in a heavenly reward where sorrow and suffering would cease. She believed in a place where God shall wipe away the tears from our eyes. A place where pain and death pass away and where the beloved souls of her Mom and Poppie would be waiting for her. She believed in a place where she could dwell within the mighty love of God forever. We are grateful today that she has found her reward in the mansions of Heaven, for surely none could be more deserving than she.

As time passes, we may forget some of the things Pauline said, and maybe we will forget some of the things she did, but we will never forget the way she made us feel: Loved, nurtured, cared for and safe.

In the words of the poet David Harkins:

“You can shed tears that she is gone,

or you can smile because she has lived.

You can close your eyes and pray that she'll come back,

or you can open your eyes and see all she's left.

Your heart can be empty because you can't see her,

or you can be full of the love you shared.

You can turn your back on tomorrow and live yesterday,

or you can be happy for tomorrow because of yesterday.

You can remember her only that she is gone,

or you can cherish her memory and let it live on.

You can cry and close your mind,

be empty and turn your back.

Or you can do what she'd want:

smile, open your eyes, love and go on.”

Eulogy by her loving grandson, Jeffrey Harrison and the Harrison family.