Maxine Wood Hagemann

The spirit of life was strong in Maxine Wood Hagemann. We saw that so often as her life neared its end over the past few years. Through broken hips and dissected aortas and fractured ribs and pneumonia, through senility, dementia, and an occasional Alzheimer's or two, doctors kept telling us that Mom didn't have long to live. Days; months at most. They started telling us that in 1998. They told us again in 1999, then in 2000, 2001, and so on. But they underestimated how strong the spirit of life was in Maxine Wood Hagemann. Always.

The spirit of life was strong in Maxine Wood Hagemann from the moment of her birth. She was born as America entered World War I. She was born an orphan. For 18 years, she spent most of her nights sleeping in a hospital bed, not a home, raised by a good man, her "Daddy," Dr. John W. Kenney. But in every photograph from her infancy, her childhood, her adolescence, the spirit of life beams through. In those years, she learned to cherish. everything. Every smile, every kindness, every task, every flower, every journey.

But her spirit was in fullest flight not at the end, nor the beginning, of Maxine Wood Hagemann's life. If bred in the beginning and confirmed at the end, in the long middle, the spirit was simply glorious. Infectious. Indomitable. With the stubborn will of a small orphan girl determined to wring all the love, laughter, and spontaneity from life that life can bring think of The Little Engine That Could-"I think I can, I think I can, I know I can."; from at least 1937 when she first left San Antonio for Iowa State University until at least 1988, when her health began to war mightily with her spirit; from teaching elementary school children in Chicago, to becoming a highly respected buyer at Joske's, to traveling the world with the love of her life, Col. Joseph A. Hagemann; as the head fun-seeker for scores of Air Force wives and children around the world as they moved from base to base; in taking complete responsibility for herself and here son's lives when the love of her life left this earth too soon, all too soon; to becoming the substitute "Supermum" teacher of elementary schools near Lackland Air Force Base, what a spirit she had! Always.

Her spirit lives in her only son, Tom; her beloved daughter-in-law, Christianne; her two adored grandchildren, Emma and Max; and every single person she touched, however briefly, with her peculiar form of life's magic. Especially the boys of Lovett, including but no means limited to her son, for whom she will always be waiting patiently with two pans of fudge or brownies by the side of a road somewhere near Bergheim. Always. Visitation will be on Thursday, January 9, 2003 from 5 o'clock to 7 o'clock at Porter Loring.