Heritage Presbyterian Church Pastor Bob Curry
Heritage Presbyterian Church
Pastor Bob Curry
Esther Odell Hays was born in Philadelphia on September 12, 1920. She was the youngest of four children born to Dr. Edward A. Odell and Irene Diehl Odell, serving as Presbyterian missionaries in the West Indies. Esther spent her first five years in Havana, Cuba, after which the family moved to Montclair, New Jersey.
When Esther was eleven and a half months old, she was stricken with polio, leaving her left leg paralyzed. Esther had many corrective operations in childhood and in her teens.
Esther graduated from New Jersey College for Women (renamed Douglas College) of Rutgers University, in 1942, with a B.A. in French, minoring in Spanish and Music. At NJC, Esther toured with the college choir. After graduation, Esther returned to Cuba, working in a School founded by her father. Later, in New York City, Esther was Editor of publications for World Literacy and Christian Literature, founded by world-famous literacy expert, Dr. Frank Laubach.
In the Literacy Office, Esther met John Hays and they were married in 1948. Their first son, Timothy, was born in 1954 in New York City, and their second son, Christopher, was born in 1957, in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico. In 1955 the family moved to San Germán, Puerto Rico, where Esther taught High School English, Spanish, French, and Latin at the pilot school on the campus of Inter American University, and where John was Head and Associate Professor of the Department of Mathematics.
In 1967 the family moved to Orono, Maine. In the University of Maine at Orono, John taught mathematics, while Esther began and completed graduate work in Comparative Literature, in English, Spanish and French. Her Master's Thesis compared Gil Blas and Lazarillo De Tormes as examples of picaresque novels. In 1971 Esther was awarded First Prize in a National Literary Contest conducted by Sigma Delta Pi, The National Spanish Honor Society, for her essay, "Vista de Toledo por Lazarillo de Tormes".
In 1972 the family moved to Virginia where Esther served as Editor for The American Symphony Orchestra League. Later, in The National Park Service, Esther created their first demographic database, resulting in the hiring of more women and minorities. In 1993 she retired from the National Park Service but continued her many interests. For three years, until limitations prevented her, Esther tutored a girl from Central America at a local elementary school.
Esther was a wonderful wife, mother, proud grandmother of four, teacher, and a talented scholar. She never allowed her disability to limit her activities and associations. All of us who had the privilege of knowing Esther took inspiration from her selflessness and perseverance in the face of adversity. Up to the week of her terminal illness, Esther was researching and writing a study of Marguerite de Navarre, who was described as representing both the Renaissance and the Reformation.
Esther is loved by all who knew her. We will miss her cheerful and positive approach to life and her sincere interest in the details of our own lives. Everyone who knew Esther were immediately put at ease by her friendly openness and we will all dearly miss her enthusiasm for Life and the Works of Love.
Esther died December 22, 2001 of metastatic breast cancer. She is survived by her husband H. John Hays, Alexandria, VA; Son, Timithy Hays, Elmhurst, IL; Son, Christopher, Fond du Lac, WI; and four grand children.
Esther was a smart, sassy woman. making me realize that I like smart, sassy women, and don't feel intimidated by them. I've often said that knowing Esther made other women seem a little boring. As part of her sassiness, Esther suffered fools gladly, so she could fool them right back, although, often, they didn't know they were being fooled. One thing she fooled was her own disability.
We "normals" cannot adequately understand, or even imagine, the invasion of privacy, the threat to individuality and integrity, suffered by those who must frequently accept prosthetic support. Esther knew and surmounted it all--to the end.
Her father thought she couldn't "mainstream" in public school; shouldn't go away to college; shouldn't work in Cuba or later in New York City; should not get married and have children; should not go with me to Puerto Rico to a college she helped found and would visit one or two times a year; etc. But she did all of these things.
I'm consoled by remembering that whenever she asked me about a new venture, I encouraged her and said I'd support her in any way I could. One venture, which at first surprised me, was to have children. Esther gave me two handsome, loving, talented sons, who gave us four beautiful grandchildren.
Esther often laughed with pride at their activities. However, citing her disability, her college Dean had not allowed Esther to major in Education to fulfill her aspirations of becoming a teacher. Decades later, both the President and the Dean, in separate letters, apologized for their predecessors. But Esther had already ignored this limitation, teaching in many different schools.
Starting to work with Esther in the office, we--essentially the same age--soon realized, that we were kindred creatures. Esther lived her teens in Montclair, NJ; I, in Springfield, MO, and Tulsa, OK. But we were reading the same short stories, novels, poetry and dramas; listening to the same music and radio programs. We both heard Benny Goodman's first "swing session" in New York City. We both heard that first broadcast of Glen Miller's Band at the Meadowbrook, near Esther's home. We both heard the first broadcast of Bing Crosby's "Kraft Music Hall" and Bob Hope's comedy program.
Soon after our engagement, I received a World War II veterans bonus of $500--a lot of money in those days. Money for a good time: the City Center Ballet--under Balanchine--was a year or two old, and a City Center Opera Company had been established. We went to ballets, operas, concerts, Broadway plays, movies, restaurants, art galleries, museums. Years later--when busy with work and family duties--we were renewed by the memory of those happy days of our year of engagement.
Esther had her college degree, but I did not. Immediately, after marriage, I began studies, under the "G.I. Bill," on a physics major at Columbia University, working by day, going to school at night. After the first year, we agreed this would take too long. So I attended Columbia full-time by day, and did part-time work. Esther continued to work at the Literacy Office. Then I worked full-time by day at an insurance brokerage and attended New York University Graduate School. I suggested that Esther begin graduate work, but she put it off. However, when I was in the Mathematics Department of The University of Maine at Orono, I persuaded her to complete courses for a Master's degree in Comparative Literature.
Having suffered many breaks in her legs, she was mostly confined to wheelchair, able walk only short distances on crutches. The Buildings of her classes had no elevators. I'd support her walking up, on Australian crutches, one or two flights of stairs; then I brought up her wheelchair. But the day she had defended her Thesis and all was complete, she broke her good leg again. So the local newspaper displayed a photograph of Esther, capped and gowned in wheelchair with leg in cast, receiving her degree.
These studies inspired her important research. One subject was Marguerite d'Angouleme (1492-1549), popularly known as Maguerite, Queen of Navarre, author of a classic, The Heptameron. Will Durant, in his 11-volume work, The Story of Civilization, says that Marguerite d'Angouleme represents two Ages, both The Renaissance and The Reformation--a recognition apparently granted to no man in all literature.
The other great research interest concerned authorship of the 1554 anonymously published classic, Lazarillo de Tormes, subject of the paper for which Esther won First Prize in a contest given by the National Spanish Honor Society. Lazarillo de Tormes is progenitor of The Picaresque Novel in literature, a genre including Daniel Dafoe's Moll Flanders, Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, and Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn.
I have 14 websites on-line, and more planned--some of these explicitly involve research Esther initiated; and all of them implicitly involve interests we shared.
In May, 1997, in a Saturday twilight, I suffered a stroke, fell, and could only raise my head. Esther was bedridden and couldn't help. Lights were off; our only telephone across the apartment. I scooted 12 hours on my back to reach the phone, for several calls to rescue us. I kept my brain busy and constantly told Esther where I was and what I was doing. She was taken to Home Care and I to hospital and rehabilitation, until we were re-united. During that ordeal, I realized that I was activating the lesson Esther taught me over the 53 years we loved together.
In the last months, as her limitations increased, Esther sometimes uncharacteristically gave way to concerns, saying, "I'm so much trouble to you. You'd be better off without me." I'd object, "Don't say that; if I lost you, I'd become a disreputable old recluse." Esther would beg, "Don't say that--promise you won't do that!" So I promised--and I will keep my promise, as I kept my marriage vows.
As with Esther, I will fall and pick myself up and be grateful for support of others in doing so, as I continue to activate the lesson I learned from this sassy, smart, beautiful, sweet woman who still graces and blesses my life.
Thus, I pass from a wonderful, exciting, and richly rewarding Life With Esther to a Life For Esther.
Celebration of the Life of
Esther Odell Hays,
December 26, 2000
Heritage Presbyterian Church,
Bob Curry
Let us pray: God, be very present with us this evening. While all about us joy is wished, here is heartache, and sorrow and loss. Enable us all to feel profoundly your love in our lives--a love so genuinely found in the life of our beloved wife, mother, grandmother and friend. Amen.
I remember as a child every afternoon my mother would wait for the Altoona Mirror to be delivered to our front porch. If it was summer time she sat on the porch and if winter, at her favorite chair in the living room. She never had to open the paper for her eyes eagerly went to the obituary page. And there she would read who had died. I thought it was a morbid habit, and perhaps it was. But I believe it was mother's way of keeping up with the world--her world.
This week there have been three deaths in our church family:
Esther whom we come in sorrow to praise with our love and remembrances tonight;
Jim - my wife's father whose life we shall remember tomorrow; and
Diana Johannes' mother, whose life also shall be remembered tomorrow.
Christmas will never be the same for those who loved them and now feel deeply their loss in this season of peace and joy. But is there ever a right time to die?
Each of these folk who died were in their 9th decade - their 80's. And if you report their deaths to whom they were not well known, they would ask: "Well, how old were they?" You tell them and the response comes quickly, "Ah they have lived a long and full life."
Surely, a long and full life is clearly described in the wonderful summary of Esther's life shown above.
One of our church elders who visited Esther and John when we took the sacrament to their home - commented upon reading her biography "My, what an amazing woman."
Indeed she was and this does not seem to be the right time for her die. She still had projects to complete, correspondence to continue, caring for John--so important to her life, and being cared for by John--so important to his life. More time to be with her sons of whom she was so justly proud--and her grandchildren.
I will not soon forget coming to their home the first time. It was an hour-long visit; both Esther and John had wonderful stories to tell--not only of the life you read about, but of what they were presently doing.
John described his mathematical work on the computer. I politely said "Uh huh" not wanting him to know that "first year algebra" was my last taste of math. And books they read, and correspondence they carried on, and the world opened up to them by that marvelous computer.
No, this doesn't seem the right time for death.
The season is wrong,
There is too much yet to be done.
If only I could get my strength back.
If only I had not been attacked by cancer.
In the hospital just a week or so ago, as John sat holding Esther's hand (Esther who had really almost left him already), he remembered their 52 years and their being together...
"Well," John corrected himself, "Really 52 + 1." The first year was New York City and it was a plus. Ballet, theater, concerts--a wonderful year of getting to know and be known. That was a good time, a wonderful time. That was the right time. A time always remembered with love. Esther lived in New Jersey and said to him once, "Why didn't you come to New Jersey earlier?"
And there were many other "right times" in their life--only death seems to be the wrong time.
Not so the writer of Ecclesiastes: He asserts, "There is a time for everything and a season for every activity under heaven and there is a time to be born and a time to die." There are 14 antitheses in the list but we have time to comment only on two.
The first named: "There is a time to be born and a time to die" We have very little to do with those "times" at all. We had nothing to do with our conception and birth, and we shall have little to do with our death. Oh, we can work hard to be healthy, We enjoy a wonderful longevity of life because of medicine, food, awareness, exercise, all the rest. But when all has been done--all that science and the practice of modern medicine can do--there is a time, when the human body says "No more!"
"And the mercy of the Lord is upon us." Ah, Christmas-time again.
Remember that wonderful teaching of the Master. Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life--what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body--what you will wear. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? So don't worry about tomorrow for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today's trouble is enough for today."
"There is a time for everything and a season for every activity under heaven." And so, as hard and as difficult and as painful as the death of Esther is to those who loved her "it was time."
Our service of celebration has a wonderful phrase of thanksgiving in its prayers: "We thank you that for Esther all sickness and suffering has ended and that death has past..." Thanks be to God for the life and now, dare we pray, for the death of Esther. It was her time.
Listen to these words of poet Dorothy N. Monroe in her poem, "The Cost."
Death is not to high a price to pay
for having lived. Mountains never die,
nor do the seas or rocks or endless sky.
Through countless centuries of time,
they stay, eternal, deathless. Yet they never live!
If choice there were, I would not hesitate
to choose mortality. Whatever Fate
demanded in return for life I'd give,
for, never to have seen the fertile plains
nor heard the winds nor felt the warm sun on sands
beside the salty sea, nor touched the hands
of those I love - without these, all the gains
of timelessness would not be worth one day
of living and of loving; come what may.
The writer of Ecclesiastes does something beautiful, that usually goes unnoticed.
The first antithesis "there is a time to be born, and a time to die."
The last antithesis "there is a time for war and a time for peace."
All fourteen antithetical statements are bracketed by the word "born" (the positive) at the beginning; and then and "peace" (the positive) at the end.
"Hark, the hearld angels sing,
"Glory to the new born King.
Peace on earth and mercy mild,
God and sinners reconciled!"
Joyful, all ye nations rise,
Join the triumph of the skies,
With the angelic host proclaim,
"Christ is born in Bethlehem!"
Hark the herald angels sing,
Glory to the new-born King!"
Peace and born: Ah Christmas-time again.
Is there ever a right time to die? Yes, there is. But that time is only easy on the one who has died. We who are left behind:
Weep for the one who
no more shall be with us;
Feel a depth of emptiness, hollowness,
that never again will be filled;
Value what is lost almost more
than when she was not gone from us.
And so it is a time of tears, but, dear friends, there will a time of laughter. For there is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heaven.
Gibran says it so powerfully: "When you are sorrowful look aging in Your heart, and you shall see in truth You are weeping for that which has been Your delight."
John, Chris, Tim weep now for wife and mother. But, thank God for each of you who were so richly blest.
All in this sanctuary say after me: Thanks be to God, for the life and love of Esther Hays. Amen.
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