She was born on Aug. 22, 1926, in Eureka, NC, to Mary Gertrude and John Vick Mooring, and passed away on Sunday, Jan. 21, 2024, in Daybreak, UT, surrounded by the ones who loved her, the ones she loved.
If your math is any good, you’ve calculated that she was 97 years, and five months old. What a life.
Wilma had one sister and nine brothers. She met her husband, Leon Monson, after traveling to Utah from Carolina to attend Brigham Young University in 1945. Leon was a chemical engineering student at the University of Utah, “the smartest man I ever met,” she said. Wilma was 5-foot-3, Leon was 6-foot-5, and that’s the long and short of it.
They married in the Salt Lake (LDS) Temple on June 10, 1946, eventually moving to Madison, WI, where Leon earned advanced degrees and taught classes in chemistry. Thereafter, Wilma and Leon moved to Wilmington, DE, where they reared five kids, Wilma working primarily as a homemaker and Leon inventing stuff and earning patents as a scientist for DuPont.
Wilma was a caring mom, guiding her children, Marilyn, Jan, Peggy, Gordon and Sandy, toward happy, successful lives, teaching them from a young age the importance of careful study, independent thinking, rocksteady character, laughter as a means to greasing life’s skids, and faith found in God.
She wasn’t much of a cook, but she loved Leon and her children and attempted to feed them well. She joked that she once burned a pot of boiling water. Nobody cared because laughing made every meal taste like a feast.
And laugh is what Wilma did almost as quickly as she made others laugh. Lighting up a room with her big personality was her gift, her forte, a talent that drew people to her with a gravitational force. She was fun, and everybody knew it, everybody wanted to be around it, around her.
Wilma loved her family, so much so that her children, taught by her to live and learn, grew up to praise and bless her name, to see her as the force for good that she was. They praise and bless her name now, alongside her 21 grandchildren and a plethora of great-grandchildren, as the thousand stories told by and about her echo through their lives still, and into the eternities.
She’s survived by two brothers, Billy Mooring, and Richard Mooring, and her five children, Marilyn Nimtz, Janet Cheney, Peggy Schroeder, Gordon Monson, and Sandy Wilber.
A celebration of her life will be held at the Highland Park ward building at 11632 South Night Heron Road (Daybreak) on Saturday, Jan. 27, 2024, with visitation at 11:30 a.m. and services at 12:15 p.m.
Interment will be held on Monday, Jan. 29, 2024, at Wasatch Lawn Memorial Park 3401 S. Highland Dr. Millcreek, UT 84106.
