Mrs. Juanita Elizabeth Moore Edwards

Born August 26, 1914, to Jesse and Loretta Moore, Juanita was a lifelong resident of Dallas. She graduated from North Dallas HS and from SMU in 1937. Juanita was a sixty-year member of St. Bernard Catholic Church where she was a member of the St. Callistus Prayer Circle. After the death of her husband in 1964, she resumed her career, retiring from Texas Employment Commission at age 72. She enjoyed traveling with her children and grandchildren and she loved to play bridge. She will be truly missed.

She is survived by her five children, Joan Porter, Thomas, Steve, Mark, James, their spouses, her 19 grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren She was preceded in death by her husband Joseph Thomas Edwards and her sister Helen Cole.

A vigil service and rosary will be held at Sparkman Crane Funeral Home, Friday, November 4, 2011 beginning at 7 pm. The funeral mass will be at St. Bernard Church of Clairveaux Catholic Church, 1404 Old Gate Lane in Dallas Saturday, November 5, 2011 at 10 am., with interment at Calvary Hill Cemetery.

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Eulogy of Grandmother Juanita Elizabeth Edwards, née Moore

November 5, 2011, at St Bernard of Clairvaux Catholic Church

First, let me introduce myself to those few of you who don’t know me. My name is Will Porter. Our

honoree today, Juanita Edwards, had four sons and one daughter. I married the daughter, Joan, so

Mrs Edwards was my mother-in-law. But if you don’t mind, I will refer to her today the way I have

referred to her for the last thirty years, as Grandmother.

I can’t compete with the things my wife and her brothers said last night. I just want to add three

short rambles of my own about Grandmother.

Ramble Number 1

In the 1990s, we had a Scottish Terrier named Henry. Henry and Grandmother didn’t have a lot in

common. For one thing, Henry was a Scottish Terrier and Grandmother was a bulldog. And unlike

Grandmother, Henry didn’t live to extreme old age; he died of cancer when he was just seven.

But Henry and Grandmother did have something in common and it was something really important.

Scotties are known as one-family dogs, that is, they are fiercely loyal to the small circle of their

owners — their family — and suspicious of, even downright hostile to, pretty much everybody else.

That’s the way Henry was. And that’s the way Grandmother was, too, for much of her life. She was

definitely a one-family woman, devoted to her five children and suspicious of, occasionally even

hostile to, everybody else.

For example, from Grandmother’s perspective, for the first ten or fifteen years of my marriage to

her daughter, through the births of our first two children, I was more or less on probation.

Of course, when I was young, I didn’t appreciate her skepticism about me.

But as I grew older, I also grew up, at least a little. For one thing, for the last several years I’ve

found myself vetting my daughter Mary’s boyfriend. I was skeptical of him at first, but he’s grown

wonderfully on me, and when he asked me recently for permission to marry my daughter, well,

I realized what a fine young man he really is. Maybe that was my mistake. Maybe I should have

gone to Grandmother and asked for her daughter’s hand in marriage.... Okay, maybe not.

Anyway, as I learned that life isn’t the cake walk it seemed to me in my teens and twenties, I grew

to respect Grandmother, and then to love her. I realized that she had not stifled her children, on

the contrary, they all turned out to be terrific people, independent, strong, loving, and of course,

strongly devoted to their own families. My wife is the most wonderful woman in the world, and my

brothers in law — the only brothers I’ve ever had — are four of the finest men I’ve ever known.

I could carry this on to the next two generations but you get the point. This beautiful family is

Grandmother’s achievement.

I should add that I eventually got off probation. I knew I’d really arrived a few years ago, when

Grandmother would phone us and I’d answer, and instead of insisting on talking to Joan, she’d be

willing to talk to me.

Ramble Number 2

I went to fourth and fifth grade at St Hugo of the Hills Catholic School up in Bloomfield Hills,

Michigan, and while I was there, I remember learning from the sisters that St Joseph is the patron

of a good death. What a lousy assignment for St Joseph, I thought! Who’s going to pray to him?

Who wants to pray for a death of any kind? Of course, at that time I myself was planning to live

forever.

It looked for a while like Grandmother had a similar plan. Until just a couple of weeks ago, I

would have been willing to wager that she was going to make it to 100. Every now and then God

seemed to play at killing her, the way a cat might play with an insect, but until recently I guess

His heart wasn’t really in it. What was a death stroke for another person, was a minor set-back for

Grandmother.

A car crash killed my grandfather Porter, but that approach didn’t work with Grandmother Edwards.

Shortly after we moved back to Dallas to be closer to her, she survived a head-on collision with a

truck. (Thank God the driver of the truck was unharmed as well.) She was 89 at the time. That was

when she stopped driving.

A fall down the stairs killed my other grandfather, but that didn’t work for Grandmother either. A

year or two later she fell and slid down the stairs at her son Stephen's house, face first. She was a

little rattled and had, I think, some rug burns, but she bounced back.

Breast cancer killed one of our friends and neighbors down in Houston, but again, not

Grandmother. When she was diagnosed with breast cancer a few years ago, they did a

lumpectomy and that was the end of that. Even in her last days, the nurses from the hospice more

than once declared that the moment had come — and she proved them wrong.

She was a tough old bird.

But she didn’t live forever and I know now that I won’t, either. Now I pray myself to St Joseph, for

guidance as a father and husband — and for a good death. I I don’t know whether Grandmother

prayed to St Joseph, but I do know that she had a good, peaceful, happy death. It was the last

blessing of a long life crowded with blessings.

Ramble Number 3

Everybody who knows her knows how she loved to go places. We heard last night at the rosary

about some of her big trips, to Europe and Vegas and New York. As long as she had company, she

was always ready to go anywhere.

One of my favorite stories about Grandmother the traveler happened fairly recently. Around the

time Joan and Catherine and I moved up to Dallas in 2003, my brother-in-law James decided

to make a twenty-four hour trip to Las Vegas. He called Grandmother around 7am to ask if she

wanted to come with. She asked him when he was going. I've always assumed she wanted to know

if it was next week or next month.

But James replied that he was on his way to her house at that moment and would be there in 30

minutes. When he arrived he was standing outside by the driveway, ready to go. She was 89 or 90

at the time but that was typical behavior for her.

She was just as willing to take a short trip as a long one. In fact, she never turned down an

invitation.

In the last seven years since we've been living close to her we saw her several times a week, often

for dinner. We never had a routine though. If we knew that she wasn’t already going out with Tom

or Mark or James and if Steve wasn’t in town, then Joan or I would just call her up at 6 or 7 and

say, come have dinner with us.

She would always resist slightly. Are you sure you want me to come, she’d ask. Are you sure you

have enough food. Sometimes she'd already eaten. And especially in the last couple of years there

were a few times when I know she wasn't feeling tip top. But she never said no.

Two summers ago, she balked for a bit at going to Yellowstone and I thought she might actually

stay home. But in the end, she came and of course she thought it was the best vacation ever. She

was almost 96 at the time.

That is how I like to think of her death, as one more invitation she politely resisted but in the end

just couldn't turn down.

I imagine God calling her recently, to be precise, about two in the morning last Wednesday.

God said to her, “Juanita?”

She replied, "Yes, Lord, here I am.”

God said, "Juanita, how would you like to go someplace nice with me, someplace even more

beautiful than Yellowstone?"

And she said, "When, Lord?" She thought maybe he meant next month.

But he replied, "Right now. I'm on my way."

And an instant later, when He arrived to pick her up, she was standing at the side of the bed, ready

to go.