I want to thank each and every one of you for your prayers and support during my mother’s battle with pancreatic cancer. She is missed as much as she was loved, and that’s enormously.

We are all born with a quest for knowledge. We hunger for an understanding of the world around us. Charlsie’s was a passion for learning. Learning anything and everything.

To be in Charlsie’s life was to learn from her. Her every interaction left you changed forever. She was fascinated by what new things you’d been learning and how she could learn more about you by listening to your stories.

Charlsie leaned in when she listened. She squinted to read every word. She took notes in the margins of her books and asked questions to be sure she understood.

Many in her life consider her a teacher. She took thousands of us on journeys through A Course in Miracles, Sunday School, Reiki Healing Courses, Cub Scouts leadership, and the countless hours spent one-on-one, shining a light on the path we walk. Charlsie could make the nonsense of our lives seem logical. Her thoughtful explanations gave us hope that our journeys were in fact fated, and we were learning exactly the lessons God had sent for us.

Somehow, Charlsie taught us to see ourselves more deeply, with the richness of texture she saw in us, all with a simple analogy she shared so generously.

Charlsie passed her love of learning on to her children. Each of us believes that we can do anything, simply because she never let us doubt that fact. She climbed into bed with her children and read to us with the enthusiasm and passion that she felt, as she took the character’s adventure right along with him. In a way, she received her formal education with us, as we shared our class notes with her, explaining concepts and theories she delighted in consuming.

When Art attended continuing education courses, he would be greeted at home by a woman ready for her lesson. He would experience class all over again, as he shared his class notes with Charlsie. The two of them attended spiritual workshops with The Sparkies group here in the mountains, thrilled to have connected with fellow seekers in their new community.

From her childhood habit of counting columns and columns of numbers to learn about addition to her most recent class in knitting, Charlsie found her thirst for knowledge quenched, but never satisfied. There was always another new thing to learn.