Obituary written by Trea Murdock West
Ruth Murdock JANUARY 09, 2013 12:50 AM •
Ruth Berniece Holdaway Murdock
1927 ~ 2013
Ruth Berniece Holdaway Murdock, 86, was born to Leland Eugene and Violet May Moulton Holdaway in Heber, Utah on 1/15/1927. Ruth died peacefully of diabetic complications at a care center in Highland, Utah with family around her on 1/6/2013.
Ruth married the love of her life, LaDell Reece Murdock on 6/21/1948. She graduated BYU in social work and psychology in June 1949. Reece accepted her diploma to the laughter of the audience because Ruth felt too pregnant with their first child.
She possessed many talents, a mischievous wit, and wicked sense of humor. A voracious reader until her eyesight failed, the last book her son Phil and daughter Trea read aloud to Ruth was Donald Hall's Eagle Pond. Ruth valued, pursued and promoted education, literacy, and the arts. She loved antiques, red geraniums in clay pots, teddy bears, kittens, thrift stores, mashed potatoes and gravy, old movies, all musicals, yard work, deer hunting, and puttering at the family cabin now beneath the waters of Strawberry Reservoir.
Ruth loved raising her family in the old American Fork 2nd Ward. There she participated in ward choirs, taught many Primary and Sunday School classes, and served happily as co-Scoutmaster with Reece. A daughter-in-law remembers meeting Ruth for the first time after picking beans at the church farm. Ruth climbed on the back of son Steve's motorcycle, utilizing the bean bucked as a helmet for the ride home. She learned to read Danish in order to research ancestral records.
Ruth worked 17 years as an x-ray technician at the old American Fork Hospital. She was also a social worker for the then American Fork Training School. After Reece died of a brain tumor in May 76, Ruth was no longer able to endure a hospital environment. So Ruth became the children's storyteller and then the research librarian who ordered all the books for the American Fork Public Library for another 17 years. Ruth completed a master's degree in library science at BYU in 1986 while working full time.
Ruth is survived by her sisters: Dorothy H. Eggleston (Heber, UT) and Leah H. Monson (Redondo Beach, CA); Ruth's five children: Petrea M. (Doug) West of American Fork, Phillip (Beverly) Murdock of Rexburg, ID, Stephen (Colleen) Murdock of Castle Dale, UT, Ross (Pam) Murdock of Enoch, UT, and Russell Murdock, her chief care-giver, of American Fork. Ruth leaves a legacy with ten remarkable grandchildren and fifteen great-grandchildren (one more's on the way).
Ruth is reunited with her Reecie and his father Isaac Stacy Murdock, whom she regarded as her father too. She is with her grandmother, Annie K. Jensen Moulton who grew fabulous flower gardens. She adored her older brother Floyd Holdaway, and mourned for and missed her late brothers-in-law Howard Eggleston, and Vern Monson, as well as Reece's brother Ralph and sister Colleen M. Casper; also brothers-in-law Ellis Casper, Floyd Webb, and Pat Patterson. She is getting to know three grandsons now: Loren Jackson Murdock, Stacy Murdock West, and Joseph Whitley Murdock, in addition to twin great-granddaughters Seija and Daisy Yardley.
The family wishes to thank Ruth's care-givers at Sunrise and I-Care Home Health Care, particularly loving hospice nurse Lori Liston, RN, and CNA Balenda Gutierrez. Cody, Balenda's fluffy white Maltese/Pomeranian, jumped into Ruth's lap joyously almost every day. She would also want the efforts of Kaitlyn Harris, CNA, and neighbors Bill Wood and Ross Bratt who saw to outside chores (without being asked) acknowledged. Long-time home teachers Bill Brailsford and Ted Strong visited Ruth faithfully even in the care center. CNA Katie Johnson took a special interest in Ruth during her holiday stay at the Ashford Memory Care Alzheimer's/Dementia care center. The Murdock family appreciates the many kindnesses of staff and administrators during Ruth's weeks there.
Funeral services will be held at 12:00 noon on Friday, January 11, 2013 at the Warenski Funeral Home Chapel, 1776 North 900 East in American Fork. Friends may call from 10:00 to 11:30 am on Friday prior to funeral services.
Condolences, memories, or messages may be sent to the family at www.warenski.com
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Eulogy written by Phil Murdock
Eulogy for Ruth Murdock, 11 January 2012
This past month has provided unasked-for opportunity to spend time with mom in intimate ways. Her care in the nursing home required presence 24 hours a day, and each of her children has spent nights in the chair beside her bed. In the small hours of the morning, last Friday, I listened to mom’s increasingly shallow breath and remembered some lines written by the 17 century poet John Donne. I looked up the poem on my phone:
As virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say
The breath goes now, and some say, No:
So let us melt1
As I read, I was comforted by a parallel spanning 400 years. Since mom was instrumental in my love of reading, I hope you will indulge some poetry in her eulogy.
John Donne wrote the poem to his wife Anne, who greatly feared his death. Anne’s fear turned out to be unfounded, with Donne outliving her. Not so with mom. As you are probably aware, mom’s center of existence disappeared with the death of her husband Reece in 1976, when he was 49.
He was more than a supportive husband. Ruth comes from, and has unintentionally passed on, a line of familial mental illness. Depression, bipolar disorder, debilitating anxieties. All of us children know the story of Ruth’s grandmother, Anna Katrina, an LDS convert who emigrated from Denmark and lived a hand-to-mouth existence with her sister as second and third wives in a polygamous marriage. As I speak, Anna Katrina’s photograph sits on mom’s piano. Anna Katrina supported herself by selling novelties and raspberries door to door. I maintain a patch of raspberries in honor of her. In 1891 Anna was in a difficult place mentally. Her husband, sister and children had fled to Mexico in response to anti-polygamy pressure. Anna could not follow. In the post-partum depression of her last baby, she had been committed to the Territorial Insane Asylum in Provo. Anna was in the asylum when that baby, Heber Parley, died and was buried in an unmarked grave in Mexico. Mom still has one of Heber Parley’s little leather shoes.
None of this was lost on mom’s mother, Grandma Doty, who was on that fateful trip to Mexico. I was too young to know her well, but Trea tells of her deep anxieties, and, eventually, her refusal to enter public places.
Mom had the same uneasy mind, which she attempted to manage with discipline and focus. In
1 A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning
addition to becoming a mother, she graduated from BYU, certifying as a social worker for the
state of Utah. As you might suspect, this was not an ideal career for someone emotionally stressed, so mom went back to school and certified as an X-ray technician. This too, took its toll, and mom went back to school for the third time to indulge her love of books. She became a librarian and worked at the American Fork Library until her retirement.
Mom attempted other mind management as well. Just on the edge of my memory are the elaborate marionette productions mom produced. She wrote the scripts, sewed the puppets, built a portable stage, and drafted us children into productions of Hiawatha and Hansel and Gretel at local schools. I also remember several years during which mom faux-finished all the doors and woodwork in the old house at 148 South Center.
Through all of this it was Reece who supported her, who talked her through the bad times. Often talk was not enough, and mom would go into the hospital for electroconvulsive shock therapy. Reece made arrangements with his father, Grandpa Stacy, to tend us children weeks at a time. He became our third parent.
And so you understand what it meant for mom to lose Reece at age 49. Ross was 17 and Russell 11.
In my nighttime vigil by mom’s bed I was touched by John Donne’s attempts to comfort his wife. If we part, he says,
Our two souls therefore, which are one,
. . . endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to airy thinness beat.
Their love, Donne says, pure and malleable as gold, can bridge the impossible distance of separation with its “airy thinness.’
But mom found scant consolation in the wake of dad’s death. Her childhood witness of Anna Katrina’s polygamous marriage, combined with the fact that Reece had a first wife who died in childbirth, fueled her anxiety.
It was Trea who first stepped into the gap. Even though her own hands were full with family, education, and career, Trea cared for mom and her younger siblings. She accompanied mom on countless visits and negotiated with doctors, pharmacists, and lawyers.
As Russell became older, he shouldered much of the responsibility. When mom retired and later became infirm, Russell gave mom fifteen years of assisted life in her own home. At great sacrifice and risk to his own career, he cared for mom with a mix of compassion and blustering. I still smile when I remember him teasing mom about her favorite television show: Molly B’s Polka Party. Russell was assisted by an army of helpers: visiting teachers, home teachers, nurses, and especially aides like Katie and Belinda. Ruth took great delight in Belinda’s little dog, Cody. Ross, Harley, and I, living at a distance, visited and helped with tasks around the house. But make no mistake, it was Trea and Russell who did the heavy lifting.
Beside mom’s bed I read on through the night. Anne Donne was not comforted by John’s clever gold metaphor, so he tried again. We two are, he says, like the paired legs of a scribing compass, the tool used by mathematicians to draw arcs and circles.
If [we] be two, [we] are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if the other do.
And though it in the center sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.
If mom was forced by circumstance to decades of a solitary life made meaningful by whatever “movings” and “roamings” she could manage, it was Reece who was the “fixed foot,” which “in the center sit.” Whatever she undertook, it was with the deep hope that Reece was leaning forward in interest, that he “hearkened” to her concerns and misgivings.
Donne follows the metaphor to its conclusion:
Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like th' other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.
The firmness of the set leg, Donne explains, allows the scribing of a just and perfect circle. On Sunday, January 6, that circle was scribed. It is just, in ways we cannot comprehend. The prophet Alma, speaking of the resurrection, says
both limb and joint shall be restored to its proper frame…
Alma might have added the mind, since limb and joint are small stuff in comparison.
Through my night vigil with mom I was touched by an old poem about a husband who comforts his anxious wife. I prayed that mom would be released after her son Harley had arrived and spent time with her. And I prayed that at the moment of death Reece would be the first to greet mom, intent, as always, on easing her fears. For very personal reasons I am sure this has happened.
In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.
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