Mary Elaine Thurston

She graduated from Midwest City High School in 1967. She attended Great Plains Area Vo-Tech Center where she earned her diploma in Practical Nursing on March 12, 1972. In addition to her OK nursing license, she received her California license in June, 1979, the year she moved to California. She also obtained a California vocational teaching credential. Mary''s nursing career included acute and long term care, teaching nursing students and home health care.

Mary loved "being a nurse". Her caring spirit motivated her to approach nursing as a ministry and see the good in her patients. In her many years of service, she often cared for home-care patients with long-term and terminal illnesses who others may have shunned.

Her Christianity was always a part of her life. Mary's father was a Methodist minister and she converted to Catholicism in April, 1994.

Mary lived and breathed Los Alamitos High School football. She rarely missed a game in the last 25 years. She knew the individual stats of the players better than their parents. She loved those boys as her own, following college and professional careers of alumni.

Mary loved reading and watching movies and television shows about history, particularly English history. She fulfilled a lifelong dream of visiting England in 2003, where, typical of her, she added a new friend, Susan Palmer.

She is preceded in death by her parents Elwyn and Amy Thurston and her grandparents, all of OK.

She is survived by her brother Robert Thurston, Tulsa, OK, and her "adopted" CA family, Kat and Walt Sixsmith, Chino Hills, CA, Theora and Lynn Goodrich, Nevis, MN, John and Anita Barnes, Placentia, CA, nieces Karyn Barnes, Lara Sixsmith, nephews Brian and Jimmy Barnes, "Bopi" John Wiltgen, Marly Henry and Debie Gartner.

Funeral Mass Friday July 15,2010 at 12noon at St. Cyprian Catholic Church, Long Beach,Ca.