From Betty Ponder, Wilford Park's oldest child, Evelyn's step-daughter

I was grown with a family when Evelyn came into our lives. She moved into our household of children, teenagers and adults, and she tackled the impossibly difficult, taking-the-place of a mother just recently passed. She loved my father and she would try her best. She would try in her orderly fashion to forge a family of her own out of the tatters of the rest of us. And my father loved her and reveled in her directness. He understood her fragility, muddled with her need to accomplish something of importance, and her protection of "what they were building together" without inference from the past.

During those early years she became a sort of role model for me because she was the first professional working mother I had encountered. She drove her own car with my father sitting beside her as a passenger and she directed dinner parties for her staff. She was truly competent in her own right. She accomplished so much in her life, won awards, received many honors, and toward the end of her life became sort of the central recipient and source of family news. She'd call me sometimes after my father's death just to talk about things, and about how she loved him.

Above all she lived her life with courage. She made choices, first choosing to become a physician, then choosing a husband in middle age with a ready-made family, choosing to retire from her career when my father could no longer work, and choosing to love and marry again after my father's death. In the end she arranged her affairs carefully so she would be a burden to no one, though encumbered with a debilitating illness. She traveled those last days and hours of her journey in the same manner as she had lived her life, choosing and accepting what she needed. She didn't want to say good bye to any of us except the youngest, Warren, the one she had mostly raised. Perhaps for her there wasn't time or necessity as she slipped with a sure heart toward her next life. I think, for her, there were never any good byes, only "we'll meet again sometime". She had that kind of faith and that kind of courage. We all bid her Godspeed, until we will meet again.

Betty