Laura Lee Donoho

I called her Sissy. She was my mother’s sister, and because we are Southern that name stuck, along with the importance of handwritten cards, corn casserole at Thanksgiving, service to country, and family at the center of everything. You know you are dealing with a selfless person when you search for the perfect photograph of her and instead you find perfect photographs of everyone else, that she took, on their birthdays and graduations and weddings, and on their new job day and new car day and on their bad hair day too, because she didn’t see hair, she saw you. She was there, witnessing the beauty of you.

She wrote long biographical anecdotes about great - grandparents and Easter egg hunts and Christmases. She painted trees and whimsical ladies and glowing portraits of her descendants, let there be many. She told it how it is, and earned the right, because she was the force that bound people who could have been as unconnected as pebbles in a dry riverbed. But she, like all domestic sages before her, knew her work was not her painting or her writing or even her teaching - though her sparkling students are many and spread across the world - but the way she poured these gifts into molding and uplifting her family. She was the river.

So you will not find a perfect photo of her, may not have remembered to get one at the baby shower she made sure you had, but she knows that, she doesn’t mind that, and in fact she insisted on it. It wasn’t about her, and yet it was because of her, and in this way we could all be a little more like Laura Lee Donoho, first child of Bobby and Jeanne Fletcher, eldest sister of Bobby Jr., Lucy, and Guy Fletcher, devoted wife to Robert Donoho and treasured mother, grandmother, and aunt to the best loved people in the world. The portrait of a matriarch is made clear only in seeing them, too.

I called her Sissy, a pet name that made her mine, though I can’t claim her more than anybody else. But I know I am more myself because of her, more grounded in the world. It doesn’t matter why she’s gone as much that she will always be here, and I take comfort in knowing my child will eat from her table, as will I, for the rest of our lives.

She will be missed by her co-parishioners at Calvary Baptist Church and the loved ones she left behind. She is survived by her loving family: husband, Col. (ret) Robert R Donoho; children, Lt Col Riley Donoho and his family, wife, Joni Donoho, and children Aidan and Marlee Donoho; Katharine Hughes and her family, husband Michael Hughes, and children Noah, Abigail and Charles Hughes; Charlotte Donoho and her children Huckleberry and Hazel Beatty; brother Bobby Fletcher and his wife Dorinda Fletcher and children Meredith Therrien and Natalie Carter; sister Lucy Barnes and her children, Marlane Spain (the writer of this obituary), Eric, and Kevin Barnes; brother Guy Fletcher and his wife Lisa Fletcher and their children Olivia Fletcher and Elizabeth Prewett; sister-in-law Cille McGowan and her daughter Amy McGowan.

Laura Lee will be happy to be with her heavenly family: father, Bob E. Fletcher; mother Jeanne Fletcher; niece Annabeth McGowan; nephew Matthew McGowan, and brother-in-law Pat McGowan.

A visitation for Laura will be held Monday, January 27, 2025 from 5:00 PM to 7:00 PM at Edwards Funeral Home, 201 North 12th Street, Fort Smith, AR. A funeral service will be Tuesday, January 28, 2025 at 9:00 AM at Calvary Baptist Church, 2301 Midland Blvd., Fort Smith, AR. A private burial will be Tuesday, January 28, 2025 at Fort Smith National Cemetery, 522 Garland Ave., Fort Smith, AR.