Myrtle Marie Nabors Sims

Myrtle Marie Nabors Sims was a loving wife. She devoted her life to others-- her husband, five children, and to foster children.  

Blessed with a long life of ninety-three years, she witnessed events we can only read about:

She lived through Prohibition, witnessed over eighteen American presidencies, and lived through the fast and furious Roaring Twenties. She experienced every parched and brutal moment of the Great Depression, and reminded her family for decades afterward how her husband would never eat another bean again. 
 
She lived through WWII as it shocked every country and touched nearly every family of the civilised world.  Then came Hiroshima and the Holocaust (Shoah).

She sat anxiously worrying through the Cold War and the Cuban Missile Crisis. She watched her son deployed during the Vietnam war period, not knowing if she would see him again. She witnessed the fall of the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall.  
 
Through all this her and her husband fought poverty, raised five children, and somehow, somehow, kept the children clean, in school, fed, warm and cared for.
 
She saw the first images from space of our silvery Moon— that silent light that lent gaiety to the Art Deco spires of the Gilded Age, consolation to the arid Dust Bowl, now serving to unite humanity as it looked up to the Heavens. She saw the end of segregation, and with it the birth of hope that a New World might be one where all were truly brothers and sisters. She witnessed the greatest technological boom in history, the modernisation of air travel, the birth of the Internet… and a pandemic that shook the planet.  

She was many things to many people-- A devout mother and wife.  A friend.  A sister.  A mother-in-law, a grandmother, a great grandmother, and even a great great grandmother. Perhaps these things would seem, to some, trite accomplishments, maybe even incidental; but they would be completely wrong. As evidence, look closer at this modest, unassuming yet extraordinary life:
 
So many pass through life without a loving spouse or parents, let us think of them and their plight; she certainly did. In spite of her anaemic income, Marie took action and sponsored a poverty stricken child overseas-- a little girl who had no support or prospects. Marie faithfully provided for the child's needs through the youngster's entire childhood. Marie gave her an education, a future and the rarest of things in any orphan's experience: hope.

Marie and her husband, JD, additionally brought two teenagers into their home for a season for foster care years prior.  
 
As a pastor's wife, she stood faithfully by her husband's side caring for the church congregation's welfare— a work life that defies the limits of the hours between eight and five o'clock. Until the day of her husband's departure from this world, she had little to show for her years of time, toil and sacrifice… nothing but love.  However, what a wise choice she had made, since love and memories are all we take with us in the end. How very wealthy she was.
 
As a member of the Greatest Generation, she epitomised all their hallmarks, their singular distinctions:
 
Prudence, kindness, strong work ethics, dignity, modesty, economy, faithful commitment to family, G-d and country as well as an unflinching, unsinkable spirit.  
 
She cared for her husband through the Lou Gehrig's disease (ALS) that took his life. Marie survived the crushing blow of his passing and never remarried.  How could she?  Who could ever understand the sheer body of memories and shared history that interconnected her with her beloved?
 
All this, she overcame, outlived, and weathered. All this, and in the end, she passed on to be laid to rest (coincidentally) on the same month and day of the month as her husband was buried decades ago. 
 
She was a wife and a mother — and what a wife and mother, indeed!  For we, none of us, could imagine what her eyes have seen, nor what she endured to be with us all to that fateful day of her last breath.  We were blessed to have her as a matriarch.  None of us would be here without her.  Every good thing we do to make this broken world a little more just, is very much down to her. May our good merit be shared with her.  May we learn from her life, and may her memory be both blessed, and a blessing. 
 
Baruch Dayan Emet.
(Blessed be G-d, The True Judge)

(As written by her granddaughter, Hadassah Rosa Linda Broscova- Righetti)