Suzanne Shurts

Suzanne was preceded in death by her parents; daughter, Linda "Lin" Susan Shurts; and husband, V. Nelson Shurts. She is survived by her sons, Russell Shurts and John Shurts.

A memorial service will be held at 10 am, Thursday, December 18, 2014 at Cherry Creek Retirement Village, 14555 East Hampden Ave., Aurora, CO 80018.

Donations may be made in Suzanne's name with the Rocky Mountain Chapter of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, 720 S. Colorado Blvd. Suite 500-S, Denver, CO 80246. http://www.lls.org/aboutlls/chapters/rm/.

NOTES ON THE LIFE OF SUZANNE SHURTS

Greetings – and welcome. Welcome to a gathering to celebrate the life and mourn the passing of Suzanne Shurts.

I’m John Shurts, her younger son, from Portland, Oregon, and I’ll be your guide today.

Russ Shurts, my brother and her elder son, from Denver, is also here.

I’ll Introduce other family members as we go along.

Also, I want to introduce Gary Oakley, my mother and father’s close friend. You are going to hear some words from Gary too.

To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heavens

A time to be born, A time to die

A time to plant, and a time to reap.

Ok, I’ll digress here for a moment to note that Mom and Dad attended the Methodist church regularly here in Denver years ago, and then again in Sun Lakes, Arizona.

And I have learned in the last few days that the famous passage from Ecclesiastes is a particular favorite of the Methodists. So I’m starting there.

So, a time to weep and a time to laugh – and this is a time for both.

A time to mourn and a time to dance – And lord, did Mom love to dance. My father, the perfect gentleman and not so perfect dancer at first, learned to love to dance with her.

And there is a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together…

I’ve always thought that line should be stories, not stones – there is a time to gather stories together.

This is that time, the time to gather the stories of a life, of the life of Suzanne Shurts, our mother and grandmother and great-grandmother and dear friend. Stories to share in remembrance and celebration.

That’s my purpose here today, really, just to tell some stories about Mom, organized more by theme than by time.

Gary’s going to tell a few, too – and if anyone here would like to tell a story or two, well, you’ll get your chance.

So to begin, Suzanne Shurts was born Suzanne Combs. She had no middle name, as we have had to explain a hundred times the last few days. Born in Dubuque, Iowa, in October of 1928, to Robert and Eve Combs.

My grandparents named her for Suzanne Lenglen, the flamboyant, glamorous French tennis champion of the 1920s. An international sensation, who combined championship athletics with an enormous sense of style. Who won Wimbledon six times, all the while scandalizing the British by such things as “casually sipping brandy between sets.”

This is the person my grandmother named my Mom for. It says a lot about my grandmother. And my Mom was well named…

Mom also ended up (maybe coincidentally) with a life-long love of tennis, playing it for years and enjoying watching it even more. When I came to town a few weeks ago to sit with her as she was failing, I found her sitting with the Tennis Channel on.

Anyway, given this naming, before we go any further we need to say a few words about her mother, my Grandmother Eve, and really about both my grandparents, and you’ll understand why in a minute.

I think a good word to describe my mother’s mother would be that she was a real firecracker – a huge personality, a beautiful woman, active as the day is long, who loved life and lived it to the fullest, as they say, and found a husband in my grandfather to match.

Grandma was a dancing, partying, poker-playing, hard working, adventuresome, mischievous, diamond- and fur-wearing, Manhattan-flask carrying, kind and generous, loving, wonderful and flamboyant woman.

And among other things my grandmother was also my mother’s high-school English teacher, so you can imagine how that went over.

As for adventurous, how many people were taking trips by car from the Midwest over the Rockies to California to play in the sun – in the 1920s and 30s?? That was my Grandma and Grandpa, Mom’s parents.

And so, one important story that I think may give you a better sense than any other what Mom’s early life was like with her parents, and it takes a bit of time to tell: It begins before WWII, in Mom’s childhood years in the 1930s and early 40s. In those years they lived in a number of cities in Iowa. My grandfather was a County extension agent, an early figure in the REA in Iowa, and a radio personality doing the farm shows – at one point at the same radio station in Des Moines where Ronald “Dutch” Reagan was getting his start. They moved constantly, in a whirlwind of houses, apartments, friends, activities, work, parties, local politics of a sort. Mom always said she just kept wishing they could settle down for awhile. She was tired of always having to make new friends in a new school – although if you know anything about my Mom, you know that it took her about 15 minutes in any new setting to be surrounded by a group of good friends.

By the way, this was just as true of the Cherry Creek Retirement Village as any other time of her life. I know she made great friends here quickly – dining friends and bridge-playing friends, although (to her regret), no football-watching friends. Russ and I are grateful and thankful to all of you, to all of her friends here for the wonderful times you spent with her.

But back to the story: During her high school years Mom got her wish. They moved to Princeton, Illinois; Grandpa took a job as a salesman for Pioneer Corn; Grandma taught English at the high school; and Mom got four solid enjoyable years in one place and one high school.

This was during the war, and the war years were tough for everyone, no mistake. And especially hard for my grandparents and for Mom: Her brother Russell, Mom’s only brother, older than her by eight years, and very much an older brother she adored and idolized, died during the war. A pilot whose plane crashed over France. One of the two great tragedies of Mom’s life. And yet even with that so very tragic event -- even so, on balance Mom loved those years and those times and those friends. She talked of it often.

Mom then graduated from high school in the spring of 1946, just after the war ended, and life was opening up again for everyone. She wanted to go to college, and was accepted at the University of Iowa. Because of the influx of a large number of servicemen heading into the colleges under the GI Bill, the over-crowded university told her that if she wanted to get in, she had to start college right away that summer. And so in just a matter of weeks, Mom went from graduating from high school to leaving home and starting college and living in the dorm. And she was a little shell-shocked herself by the speedy transition.

And here is the best part. Life was opening up for everyone, and my grandparents weren’t about to be left behind. Mom had barely gone off to college when they decided they needed some adventure, got in the car and headed for California. And on the way back they stopped in Denver and, well, they bought a hotel. The old Lewiston Hotel in downtown Denver. They came back to Princeton long enough to pack up and move – to a city, a region, and a way of making a living entirely new to all of them. Mom was barely in college, and as I said already a little overcome with just that transition, when Grandma called her to let her know that home was now a hotel in Denver! She probably would have hit her mother with the telephone at the moment if she could have, although she soon got over it.

Three things to know about Mom that come out of that story:

One is that if you have a mother like that, you can either live your life in the shadow of that brilliance, or you can learn to shine on your own. Mom shone – a life of her own magnificent style and elegance and fun, and her own kind of brilliance, really a brilliance of a sparkling web of friends and family -- Mom was what you would call highly social. And what I really loved was how well in her adult years she and my Dad fit into my grandparents still active and brilliant life, and in turn, how well my grandparents fit into my parents’ life and friends, how much they enjoyed each other’s company. My Mom and my grandmother talked every day on the phone when we weren’t all together – and we spent an enormous amount of time together and we all loved it, my mother most of all. I can also tell you that as a kid I got into more trouble hanging out with my grandmother than ever with my peers.

The second thing to know is that this is the origin story of why we are here, in Denver. Turned out that my mother kind of liked this place, once she got over the shock of it all and also once she discovered there was more fun things to do here than clean rooms in the hotel in the summer. Denver has been the center of our family life ever since. For one thing, Mom thought the climate in Colorado was ideal Years later I realized that I think the climate in Oregon is even better. Mom didn’t take that well.

And third, out of this whimsical and quixotic Denver-hotel-buying adventure eventually came the great love of Mom’s life. In the summer of 1949, between her junior and senior years at Iowa and tired of cleaning hotel rooms for a summer job, Mom heard about summer work in Yellowstone National Park. Off she went, finding work at the Canyon Lodge and Cabins. Cleaning rooms again, but with a magnificent view.

And what especially came into her view was a tall handsome man wearing a Miami sweatshirt. Mom thought he was from Florida. That may have been the last time they did not understand each other. Nelson Shurts was from Miami of Ohio, an Ohio farm boy who had been in the Navy, was happy to be in college, had discovered the west, and had no intention of ever ever being a farm man. And that was all wonderful with her.

A delightful summer romance continued as they returned to their respective colleges for senior year. Dad would hitchhike from Oxford Ohio to Iowa City to see her. And Dad then asked Mom to marry him that winter, and as Mom tells the story, he asked her tentatively, worried she’d say no. The joke was on him – Mom said she told her mother three weeks after she meant Dad that here was the man she was going to marry.

Married in June of 1950 in Denver, at the Trinity Methodist Church downtown. They were as close together for 50 years as two people can be until my father’s sudden death in 2000. We are here to celebrate my mother’s life, but that is to celebrate my father’s life, too. For they were complete together – as devoted and delightful and in-love couple as there has ever been in this world. Mom missed him so terribly, every night and every morning, she told me often, and if you ever saw them together, you would not need her to tell you so to know that would be.

Once married, Mom and Dad moved first to Michigan, and Dad took a job with Ford. But that wasn’t the life they wanted, either place or work. With a stop for a few months in Kansas City along the way, they were living in Denver by the end of 1951. And in Denver, they found the life they wanted. They were here for 44 absolutely fun and amazing years until they moved to Sun Lakes in Arizona in 1995, in warm retirement.

In Denver my father also eventually found the situation he wanted, as the chief financial guy for more than 20 years with a family-owned manufacturing company. Most important for both of them, and especially important to understand my mother’s life, is the part about it being a family-held company – because that family became their closest friends.

Put it this way – when I arrived at the Phoenix airport in 2000 to be with my mother after receiving the news of my father’s death, it was JoAnn and Gary Oakley who were there to pick me up. Russ and I are so grateful that the four of them had a great week-end of fun together just before Dad died. And when I got to Denver these past weeks to be with my mother in her last days, and as she passed away, there is no one other than my brother and his wife that I thought of more and that I needed to talk with and be with than Joann and Gary. We all had a long lunch together on Monday to celebrate my mother, and for me that was when all of her life came home. Friends like these two are the diamonds of the universe.

Along with Gary and JoAnn she had all of these other friends, from wherever we were living, from college, and from what have you. Mom and Dad ended up embedded in a web of super good friends. Bridge playing – Mom was in about five bridge clubs at once. Pot luck groups and dinner parties and progressive dinners and dinners out together. Holiday and special event parties – someone was always having an anniversary or something momentous and fun to celebrate. Broncos-watching parties. Traveling together. Multi-family camping and ski trips. Well, Dad was the skier; Mom specialized in the after ski social events. Lake Powell trips. Lots of golf and tennis together.

Mom’s version of golf was to walk to the ball, pull out her club, take the swing, whack the ball straight down the fairway a little farther, put the club back, and start walking, with nary a wasted motion or practice swing, talking and listening to her friends all the while, and looking forward to lunch. You get the idea. She did everything fast.

Lunch parties. Summer pool parties. Tea parties. Kid watching and kid talking. They all loved to talk about their kids.

And when they left Denver and moved to Arizona in 1995 after my father finally retired, to the host of friends in Denver she just added an entirely new set of wonderfully close friends and kept on going. Same for here at Cherry Creek.

I know that it was Mom’s friends in Sun Lakes who helped her not just survive my father’s passing – to survive and thrive and thoroughly enjoy life for another decade even while missing him so. Out of those many friends was another absolute diamond, her friend Shirley Davis. Inseparable for most of the last decade, and her great traveling buddy in my Dad’s place. I wish Shirley could have been here today – I feel for her for the loss of her good friend, and will forever be grateful for what she meant to my mother.

What I so loved about my Mom is she knew instinctively that every day was to be lived and enjoyed, enjoyed in the company of friends and family. And this was true even as you needed to do and did what you had to do to take care of the necessities of life, the work and the cleaning and the cooking and the raising. And do it with style, as well as fun.

About that style – you never saw my mother but she was elegantly dressed -- comfortably dressed, yes, but at the same time always elegant, impeccable, and with a flair. The same for her house. Russ and I were talking the other day about our house as we grew up, about how it was such a combination of comfort and really well-put-together style – the pictures on the wall, the furniture and the decorations, the curtains and the art, the colors and the landscaping just so. Not too much, never ostentatious or overdone, always elegant and inspiring. That was all our mother. She had a particular fondness for the styles and colors of the desert southwest, in both dress and décor, something you may have noticed even in her apartment here in Cherry Creek. The house in Arizona was actually the zenith of her style – such a beautiful place.

Talk of family too. Together Mom and Dad raised a family:

Linda, born in 1951.

Russell, in 1954.

Last, myself, in 1956.

You see two of us here today. Mom and Dad’s so beloved daughter, our beautiful sister Lin, died in 1974, gone way too early in the greatest trial of Mom and Dad’s life. Mom didn’t like to talk much about Lin after that – it was just too hard. It still is. What another amazing woman she was and would have been, eclipsing I suspect even her amazing grandmother and mother. Mom’s one way of speaking of Lin’s passing was through her actions, quietly beginning work as a volunteer at Porter’s hospital, helping other families in pain and need.

Mom was a wonderful mother, and she loved her sons. It made my wife Trudy smile and even laugh when Mom would still call me “her baby,” routinely introducing me as her baby, too. My Mom and Dad together provided just that right balance of love, support and guidance and the freedom and independence to make our own way. I’m not sure she ever understood what the heck I was doing with my life, but it didn’t matter. Her love and support was always there anyway.

Support and love Mom later extended to the next generation, to her granddaughter Amy (and Amy’s husband Dan) and her grand-daughter Amber (and Bryan), Russ’ children. And to her grandson Sam, my son, who is studying for his first set of law school exams, and so I told him to stay home and study, remember his grandmother fondly, and do her proud. Love and support to her really really fun great-grandsons Adi and Dillon, and to Mom’s beautiful new great-granddaughter Isabella.

Also, no one could have been a better daughter for my mom than her utterly delightful and devoted daughter-in-law Becky, Russ’ wife. Mom knew it and loved her deeply. I can’t tell you all how much love and appreciation I have for Becky and my brother for how they took care of Mom these last years especially.

And when I found the love of my life Trudy just a few years ago – well, I know and I heard and I saw and I have heard from many people how much Mom loved Trudy and how much Mom loved that I had someone – at last, she would say – to care for me. Mom was so happy for me, maybe even more happy than I was for myself, and I’m super happy about finding Trudy -- and it comforted Mom that I now had someone wonderful in my life, and that made me feel good for Mom as well.

Trudy and I got married on the Oregon coast the summer before last, and what a thrill it was to have my mother in the middle of it all – Russ and Becky brought her out. We did our own wedding ceremony, and she had to have her own say, and yes, she called me her baby. And you have should have seen her later, sitting at the table looking out over the ocean, right in the middle of Trudy’s three daughters and their two husbands, and my son and his girlfriend, drinking champagne and chatting away like one of the kids. They loved her – she had another new set of friends. Of all the times of my life with my mother -- I think that will be the moment I will come back to most.

That trip to Oregon was Mom’s last bit of traveling, and that brings me to the last element of her life that I want to talk about – travel. Mom always wanted to get out and go places, and so did my Dad. When we were kids that wasn’t much more than camping trips; and the annual family trip to Glenwood Springs that we always loved, where my mother and grandmother taught Russ and I to play bridge, too, so they could have the never-ending foursome; to family trips back to the Midwest. But as we kids got older and away from the house, and especially after Lin died, Mom and Dad just took off. An amazing amount of travel over three decades, much of it just the two of them, some in the company of their friends.

I think Mom might have been happy with a steady diet of England, Victoria, Hawaii, the desert southwest, and the Mexican coast of Acapulco and Ixtapa and Zihuataneo, where they learned to love turtle spaghetti. But Dad had a different streak in him, and Mom was also just as happy to join Dad and scratch that adventurous itch. For one, they traveled by car to, we think, every state in the union but South Carolina, and down into Mexico to places like Puerto Penasco. I remember them coming back from one driving trip with tales about how good the catfish was in Tennessee, something I never would have imagined coming out of my parents before that.

But that was just the domestic side. They began taking trips such as to ride the Trans-Siberian railroad and then go to Central Asia. Who went to Soviet Central Asia in the 1970s?? Among other things they had 18 Aeroflot flights in three weeks, and that was an awful airline. I took them to the airport and then picked them up three weeks later, and they look like they had aged 20 years. That trip alone spawned a lifetime of stories, and I think Mom extracted two or three relaxing pleasure trips out of Dad for that one.

And who goes to the Amazon to see piranhas?? Mom and Dad, that’s who. Another trip to the other end of South America, to Buenos Aires and Argentina. Trips to Asia – to Hong Kong, to Indonesia and Bali, and to China, to Beijing and particularly memorable to Mom, to Xian to see the terra-cotta army. Trips to Europe – to England (maybe her favorite place and trip of all time, with the Oakleys), to Italy where they loved the food and Dad lost most everything to a pickpocket, to Greece, where their idea of travel was not just island-hopping to Santorini but also to rent a car and drive the rugged mountain roads of the Peloponnese. To the Caribbean and to Alaska – a lovely inside-passage cruise trip to Glacier Bay with my grandparents. And to the South Pacific – not just Hawaii, but also Tahiti with their big group of friends. Mom almost died of a stomach ailment in Tahiti, and she still loved the trip and thought Tahiti was paradise.

And of all the exotic travel, her favorite was the two photo safaris Mom and Dad took to Kenya. If you’d been in her home or apartment, you saw some of the fruits of those trips in the beautiful photos and art on the walls.

After my father died, I thought Mom might stop traveling. And the first trip she took without him with her friend Shirley – to Branson, Missouri -- was a bit of a disaster, for a number of reasons, bad weather included. And Dad had always taken care of the logistical details when they traveled, and so Mom wasn’t quite ready to handle it herself. She knew she wouldn’t be driving, so why take her driver’s license? I don’t know how she got on the plane there; I just know she called me from Missouri to say they wouldn’t let her on the plane home without a photo ID.

Ok, but she soon got the hang of it. And then there they were – Shirley and Mom to the Portuguese island of Madeira in the Atlantic. Shirley and Mom riding the canal boats of Germany and France. And even a Las Vegas trip of the four amigos, as she and one group of friends called themselves. It was wonderful to watch, and finally slowed down not many years ago.

And all of that brings me to the last story, a story that ties together many of these strands of Mom’s life – especially her life and love of Dad, her love of friends, and love of travel: When Dad retired. and after a huge retirement party, Mom and Dad went off to Hawaii, just the two of them for a long, close, relaxing time together. The Oakleys had made available a house on the island of Kauai for Mom and Dad to stay in. And not only that, Gary and JoAnn also told them of a restaurant near the house that they had to try, a restaurant that had a Hawaiian dance show they should see. And Gary and JoAnn even thoughtfully made reservations for them at the restaurant for one evening after they had been there for awhile.

So that evening Mom and Dad go to the restaurant, and the food is great and the service is particularly wonderful and attentive, and they settle back to watch the show. The master of ceremonies announces that there is a special visiting dance group that night, and out come the dancers. Mom is about to tell Dad that the special dance troupe is well, really a rather awful group of dancers. When she notices that one of them looks suspiciously like one of their friends, and then realizes in shock that the dancers are their friends, in grass skirts and Hawaiian dance regalia! The Oakleys had organized an entire party of their friends to surprise them in Kauai. And what began as a romantic and relaxing trip of just Mom with the man she loved became another rip roaring time with friends. Such was the life of Suzanne Shurts.

There is a quote we ran into the other day: “Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass. It’s about dancing in the rain.” Mom had some storm and tragedy in her life, true. But oh my, could she ever dance in the rain.

Turn it over to Gary for a few words.

Others to say something?

Thank you all for joining us today to celebrate my mother’s life. Please stay and join us for some refreshments and socializing in her memory as well.