Norma Lee Tonnell

Norma was born in 1937 to Ted and Carrie Warma in O’Fallon, IL. She attended O’Fallon Township High School where she was the class Salutatorian and school Carnival Queen. In 1954 she was crowned as the City of O’Fallon Centennial Celebration Queen. After high school she became an executive secretary at Scott AFB, IL and later advanced to the job as a Manpower Analyst.

In 1960 she met her future husband, USAF 1st Lt Gerald (Jerry) Tonnell during a church choir rehearsal where her mother was organist and choir director. Norma and Jerry were married in July 1961. In Oct 1962, Susan, their first child was born. In June 1965, Brian, their second, and last, child was born. Norma moved about and served aside Jerry during his Air Force career living in Illinois, Texas, France, Holland, New York, and Alabama. While in Texas she attended San Antonio College.

After they settled down in Montgomery she put her musical talents to work serving as the musical director of Christ The Redeemer Episcopal Church for 9 years and as the director of the Southern Accent Sweet Adeline Chorus for about 20 years taking that group to contests in Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Mobile, Birmingham, and Huntsville. She also served her Sweet Adeline Society Region as a coach for choruses, quartets, and chorus directors for groups in Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi. She was the baritone singer in the popular Accentuation Quartet for some 15 years.

Norma was a faithful member of a Christian church wherever she lived while worshipping her Lord and Savior. She was an extremely kind, considerate, and loving wife, mother, and grandmother and had a strong servant’s heart. She was very supportive of both her children and grandchildren’s academic, musical, scouting, athletic, religious, and career activities.

She is survived by her husband, Jerry, daughter, Susan Tonnell Hornsby (Kent), son Brian (Jenny), grandsons Andrew (Mary) and Jonathan (Katherine) Tonnell, Theo and Timothy Hornsby, great grandchildren Emmett, Sadie, and Caleb Tonnell. She was preceded in death by her parents and brother, Bill Warma.

Church services will be at Christchurch Anglican at 8800 Vaughn Road, Montgomery, AL, at 1 PM on Saturday, Jan 31, 2026. A reception will be held at the church following the service. Burial will be for the family members at Alabama Heritage Cemetery.

In lieu of flowers, please consider a donation in Norma’s name to Christchurch Anglican, 8800 Vaughn Rd, Montgomery, AL, 36117.

The family asks for those viewing Norma's online obituary to please click the "Leave a Memory" button and share fond memories and photos of Norma. It can be found by scrolling below the obituary text.

Norma Tonnell’s Eulogy

Father Andrew Rowell, 31 Jan 26

Almighty God, we thank you for the life of Norma Tonnell. Father, as we come today to weep over her death & rejoice over her eternal life with you, would you, Lord, send your spirit in this place? Would you attend to each one of us, Lord, brokenhearted as we are, & yet so glad that she rests from her pain & her labors of these last few months. Lord, it is a mystery how it is that you take us from what is mortal & catch us up in eternal life. Well, Lord, may we live in the joy of that mystery & be changed by our time with Norma, her influence in our lives. But most of all, Lord, by the power of your Spirit working in us, giving us courage beyond what the world could ever imagine, Lord, I pray that you would send us out today to do the work you've given us to do, to be heralds of the Good News like Norma always was. Father, I pray that every word out of my mouth & the meditation of every heart in this room would be pleasing & acceptable to you as we depend upon you every day, but most especially in these times of grief & commendation. You are our only rock & our only redeemer. Amen.

So we gather together today to give thanks to God for the life & Christian witness of Norma Lee Warma Tonnell. And on behalf of the people of Christchurch, let me say that our entire parish is in a state of mourning over the loss of a truly saintly member of this place. We often say that people are a part of the bedrock of a church, &, well, sometimes it's only pretty true. But in the case of Norma Tonnell, there can be no doubt she & Jerry were at the very core of the good work that God has been doing in this place over our brief 20-year life as a church. Not only was Norma a key member of this choir, the very heart of it in many ways, but through teaching & wisdom & presence & warmth & kindness, she & Jerry have always shown the world around them the Good News of Jesus in word & in deed. Norma's absence is already deeply felt in our corporate life.

Some of you are here today because you knew Norma at Christ the Redeemer Church, which I can say that in those nine years that she spent as your Director of Music, she built a program that glorified the Lord in all that they did & sang.

But even while all of us here grieve her death, we also delight with joy because we know that our precious Norma rests from her labors. She's been freed from her immense pain & is where she always longed to be, in the nearer presence of the Lord. And in a twinkling of an eye, those of us here who are in Christ will be with her again, & we will walk & talk with her again in a resurrection body that will never fail, never get pancreatic cancer, never suffer in a new heaven & a new earth. We will be together again. Amen? Amen.

If you're not part of a liturgical church, you may not know that priests & clergy people are the last people in procession to ever get up here in what we call the chancel. And so I'd get up here long after the choir had taken their place every Sunday. And I never knew where Norma was going to be in the choir on any given Sunday. Now, Jerry always held down the basses there in the back so she didn't have to do that. But if we needed a tenor, there she was. If the altos needed some help, Norma would slip into her place. The second sopranos, the first sopranos, she would plug in wherever she needed to be to help our choir make a joyful noise unto the Lord. And so, as I would come to the altar Sunday after Sunday, Norma would always catch my eye. I had to find her amongst the groups, but she would always give me that kind, warm smile that was, for me, a glimpse into the soul of a woman who knew the Lord & who loved him deeply & who knew of his deep love for her & who could not wait to get to the good work of worship.

When we found out that she had pancreatic cancer, I was angry. And that's an odd emotion for me as a priest. Clergy deal with illness & death & loss all the time. It's a part of our job. But I thought, not Norma, that she would go through such a painful death struck me as wrong to my very core. Right after her diagnosis & right before her Whipple surgery, a group of us gathered right down here on a Wednesday night to lay hands on Norma & to ask for the Lord to heal her. And it was a time of great weeping & gnashing of teeth. Tears aplenty were shed right here at this rail. You could hear the shock & anger in some of the voices, mine included.

But just before we wrapped up that time of healing prayer, Norma spoke up & she prayed. And Norma's prayer was a witness to the depth of her faith & of her joy in Christ, because Norma prayed without fear. If you were here, you remember this. I wish you could have all been here to hear her pray that God would be glorified even by her illness. She prayed that while she lived, she might live to God's glory & that when she died, she might die to God's glory. She prayed that those around her would be encouraged & upheld in their faith by how she carried herself, no matter whether the cancer was cured or whether pancreatic cancer would lead to her death. And the holy stillness that we all experienced at the end of that prayer was worth any year of sermons from this pulpit.

I consider hearing her pray that night to be one of the singular moments of my ministry life. God answered all of those prayers. The nurses & doctors all remarked to the family how moved they were by her courage in the face of great pain & almost certain death. Most of us would have been curled up in a ball for the months of that battle, while Norma would say, when the pain was at 11, “Oh, I've had better days.” Today we rejoice that Norma is having her best days. She's with her Savior. But during her dying days, we were all indeed sanctified by the sacred way she went about living & dying as a daughter of the King.

Norma was born in O'Fallon, Illinois, & she grew up the daughter of talented musicians. She was the darling of her town. She was salutatorian & Carnival Queen of her high school, & she was the Centennial Celebration Queen of all of O'Fallon. At the age of 23, she was busy doing what she loved to do, what God had made her to do. She was singing in her church choir, & her mother was the choir director & the organist of a vibrant Methodist church there in O'Fallon. And who would walk in one day to that choir rehearsal, but Jerry?

Jerry, we're so glad that the Air Force Base Chapel had unexpectedly changed its schedule that Sunday morning, leaving you to find a church. And on that summer Sunday morning, you drove home & saw a large crowd of folks lining up to go into that Methodist church. And so you pulled right in, & a kindly man heard you harmonizing in the pew. No surprise to the choir, right? And they promptly ushered you in to the very next choir rehearsal. And that man just happened to be your future father-in-law.

And the rest is sweet history. One choir rehearsal, a date a week later, an edging out of all the other men lined up to seek the Centennial Queen's hand in marriage. Your marriage within the year, complete with Jerry & his singing buddies serenading Norma with “Keep Your Eye on the Girl You Love.” A life full of travel & adventure & music & beauty.

And now look at this pew. These two pews, a quiver full of children & grandchildren & great grandchildren, all of whom know Jesus & all of whom worship him regularly. Norma's children & grandchildren all speak of the wonderful mother & grandmother she was. All of them came to be with Norma in these final months of her life. All of her grandchildren prayed with her, prayed over her. Some of them played the trumpet with a mute on it in her living room so that she could sing & pray & be near them. This, my friends, is a godly heritage that Norma has left behind.

Susan & Brian gave me a list of words by which they would describe their mother. Kind, rooted in faith, giving, selfless, encouraging, available, supportive, servant-hearted. A woman with a magic touch with a colicky child. A woman who would always have a meal ready & waiting for you in the fridge when she knew you were coming home from a trip. I could go on & on because they went on & on. But they aren't just merely platitudes. They were actually lived out in her life to God's glory.

Timothy shared how she would always climb into the back of the van to allow her grandchildren to have the front. Theo shared how Norma had time to talk to him almost every single day of his adult life. She would phone him while he was on his way back & forth to Troy or on his way up to Maryland to start his graduate work in trumpet performance, all to make sure that Theo stayed awake. Andrew shared of trips to the zoo, of vivid stories of precious family history, of shared meals of lefse & sauerbraten. Everyone in the family spoke of Norma's music, of her patience, her hospitality, her constant choice to always go last so that you could go first.

We can only imagine the joy of this family, those trips out to the cottage in Wisconsin, of watching Norma roll her eyes at Jerry's bad jokes, chasing skinks around the house to free Norma from her horror. The more daring among us would love to have joined you on that trip you took up the eastern coast in a Buick Skylark, setting up a tent beside the car every night until Jerry finally realized that no one was having as much fun as he was having & needed a bed & a shower & dangled the keys to a hotel room before a delighted Norma.

I love the hymns & passages from God's Word & the hymnal & the Baptist hymnal. Norma chose all of these for us today. All of them are songs about Jesus, & it's a reflection of the life that she lived, perhaps especially in the last days of her life; a life to the praise of God's name. In pain, trying to control it with morphine & whatever else might take away the horrible edge of it all, she would mouth the words to these hymns; she would speak along with Scripture you read over her body. Her children & grandchildren all gathered around, singing, playing, reading.

From Lamentations we remember what Norma knew to her bones that God's love & mercy & faithfulness, they are of everlasting. So even in our grief, we can see his goodness, the goodness that is there for those who wait for him, for the soul that seeks him. From Paul's second letter to the Corinthians, we hear Paul saying exactly what Norma said upon her initial diagnosis. Anything that happens to me will be a light, momentary affliction, and it will be nothing in comparison to the eternal weight of glory that Jesus has promised to me. Even while Norma's earthly tent has wasted away, she's now clothed by her Savior. And what was mortal is right there, in our midst, but it has been swallowed up by life. The 23rd Psalm has been, for her, fulfilled. The Lord was always Norma's shepherd, but now she dwells in the house of the Lord forever. And from our Gospel lesson from St. John, we hear Jesus saying to each one of us what he said to Norma, & which she believed with all of her heart, that he is the Way, & he is the Truth, & he is the Life. And Jesus went ahead of Norma so that where he is, she might be also in a house prepared not with human hands, but by the God of the universe, that where he is, she is, & where we might be also.

I have this image in my head of Norma being crowned the various queens she was crowned over her life. In my mind, she has a tiara & a scepter & a sash, you know, the whole nine yards. But those images pale in comparison to the heavenly reward that she knows even now: she's a daughter of the King. She's a joint heir with Jesus, and she's in his presence even now. And she's waiting for you, Jerry.

She's waiting for all of us who give their lives to Christ, for the trumpet to sound & the dead in Christ to be raised to resurrection life. What a crown is hers today. What a crown is hers forever. And it's not because of anything in her, no matter how glowing is this eulogy. We know that Norma was a sinner, like you & like me. It was just a little harder to tell with her than all of you. No, Norma's perfect today because Jesus is perfect. And Norma lives forever because God has given eternal life to her.

She said in one of her last breaths, “The God who made the universe loves me. And he loves each one of you,” she said to the family gathered around. And so we thank the Lord, do we not, for Norma? We thank you, Lord, that she yet lives & lives even more fully than she ever lived on earth, because Christ died & rose again to give her the hope of glory that she experiences face to face.

You know, Norma was always cold. She was a tiny little thing, & she had a sweatshirt that she would wear that said, “Yes, I'm freezing.” But at the very end of her life, the family was struck. She was super thirsty, & she said, “I cannot wait to have a glass of water with lots and lots of ice.” Today, Norma drinks freely, & if it needs to be cold for her to know bliss, then it is ice cold. But that water that she drinks today is different, because it comes from the well of living water. And so she'll never thirst again. She'll never be cold again. She'll never know sorrow or pain or weeping, but life everlasting. And again, not because she was perfect, though she seems to have been pretty close. But because her Savior is perfect.

Were she here today, she would tell you that if you do not know her Savior, come, come to the waters. Come buy bread without price. For the Lord desires that you & I might know salvation, the very salvation Norma celebrates before God's throne, even today. Amen? Amen.