ANNA PEARSON SISK

Anna Pearson Sisk
August 17, 1930
August 25, 2013
83 years of age

Those who love me call me Anna, Anna Marie, Bunk, Mom, and Mamamer. My parents were William Sampson Pearson and Mary Isabelle Williams. I was born at home in rural Mississippi, the seventh of nine kids, eight miles from Carthage, during the Great Depression. The preacher was there for Sunday dinner when my mother went into labor. They shooed my six older siblings out of the house, and as enterprising kids, they dangled from every window sill to watch my birth. I was the center of attention from my first moment.

As kids, we didn't know we were poor. Our dresses were made from flour sacks, but we had a garden. Mother was inventive with the thriftiest of foods, and we were never really hungry. My kids pretend to gag when I crumble cornbread into a glass of buttermilk and eat it with a spoon, alternating with bites of green onion, but it's what I grew up on, along with turnip greens and pot likker, boiled cabbage, tomato gravy and lots of soup. As a special treat, Mother made syrup from sugar and hot water. We had endless pine forests to play in and the Yockanookany River to swim in, even after my brothers set me adrift in a horse trough and nearly drowned me. I was rescued by my big sister Dale. A slow learner, I guess, I later became a swimming instructor, teaching at several places around Memphis, including teaching disabled vets at Kennedy Veterans' Hospital.

We moved to Memphis when I was in grade school, first on Agnes Place, then to 1067 Kyle Street, and attended Bellevue School. After graduating from Central High School in 1948, I attended Memphis State College where I was a member of the National Honor Society, Delta Zeta Sorority, and the Cub Club. I went to work as a research technician at Buckeye Cellulose in 1953. For my entire career, Buckeye was a wholly-owned subsidiary of Proctor & Gamble. I did research work on many products, especially Bounty paper towels and Pampers disposable diapers. Buckeye was a great place to work, and I had so many good friends as coworkers. I was especially lucky in having two great bosses over the span of my 38-year career. I also worked as a florist at my mother's flower shop, Flowerland Florist, located in the Curb Market on Cleveland, while growing up and, later, on weekends and holidays. I've always loved flowers and gardening and spent endless hours working in the yard wherever I lived, often volunteering my time to help out in other people's gardens.

Children of the Depression, my husband Gene Sisk and I bought a farm in Benton County, Mississippi, in 1963. It had a decades-old white frame house with an outhouse and no electricity. And, yes, we used the outhouse. Self-reliant and with lots of smart friends, whatever needed to be done or fixed, we learned how to do it. We wired the house for electricity ourselves. When the well ran dry, we concocted a Rube Goldberg scheme to pump water from a spring in the bottoms more than a quarter-mile distant, uphill, under the county road, to concrete-lined cisterns we dug at the house. The system is still in use forty-five years later. We learned how to grow peanuts, corn, strawberries, raspberries, lespedeza hay, potatoes, tomatoes, okra, lettuce and much more. We raised hogs and chickens and ate venison, squirrel, rabbit, dove, quail, and even raccoon that my husband and sons hunted. We picked muscadines, scuppernongs and blackberries that grew wild and sold them through ads in The East Memphis Shoppers News. We planted 11,000 pine trees in the late 1960s, now partially harvested, so I know how to use a dibble.

In 1975, we built an addition onto our home in Memphis, doing most of the work ourselves, with help from relatives who had worked in the construction trade. We upgraded the kitchen, added a den with a huge fireplace, a full bath, a washer and dryer closet, a driveway, a carport and a storage room. You can't tell professionals didn't do it.

In the late 1970s, we lost the world's greatest farm dog, Faithful, to a tractor accident. A few years later, in 1986, I lost the world's greatest husband, Gene Sisk, in another tractor accident. Farming is dangerous.

With an adventurous spirit and wonderful companions, I've been an avid traveler in my adult years. I've rafted the Grand Canyon, slid down sandstone chutes in Sedona, walked on glaciers in Alaska and Austria, stayed in a billionaire's home in Provence, ridden in the pace car at Road Atlanta Raceway, had my purse snatched on the French Riviera, hiked in Switzerland, skied in Austria, watched the sun linger long at the edge of the horizon near the Arctic Circle, stepped from stone to stone on the Giant's Causeway in Northern Ireland, marched (well, walked) through Moscow's Red Square, overpaid for a Turkish rug at the source, seen the "Lord of the Rings" mountains from within in New Zealand, trod the brightly-pigmented earth of Australia, ridden a tram up the mountains above Hong Kong, shopped the bazaars of Korea, strolled the beach on the Sea of Japan, climbed to the top of the Parthenon, camelled to the Pyramids of Giza, and walked the ancient streets of Jerusalem and Bethlehem in awe. My kids, and especially my grandkids, have had opportunities to travel the world, some even living for a time in foreign lands.

I've long been an active member of the Forward grief support group, Friendship Force and St. Matthews United Methodist Church on South Prescott. Throughout my seventies and right up to my eightieth year, as a member of the Memphis Conference UMC Disaster Response Team, I did heavy labor on storm cleanup duty after hurricanes, floods and tornadoes, but I've had a lifetime of practice. The Forward group helped me through the unexpected loss of my husband Gene, and later I helped others cope with similar losses. Friendship Force provided me with many of the travel experiences mentioned, with opportunities to stay in private residences around the world. In return, I've hosted visitors from more than twenty countries in my home...and it's always interesting. I've been a member of St. Matthews Methodist Church since the 1950s. I married Gene in its now-long-gone white frame church in 1961. The current sanctuary replaced it a year or two later. I taught Sunday school in the 1980s and have served as church treasurer.

I've been blessed with a large family and a larger family of friends. Thrice wed, twice widowed, all three good men are gone now: Don Byrd Cheek; Eugene M. Sisk Jr, the love of my life; and finally, Bill Scheffer. I have cared for the dying and been cared for in turn. Three children have been named for me, none of them relatives. I am survived by siblings Jesse Pearson, the baby; Neva Parker, more like me than anyone on earth; and Dale Sims, for whom my daughter is partially named and who saved me from drowning those many years ago, all of whom will be happy to tell you lies about my girlhood; my children Don K. Cheek, J. Dan Cheek, Kirk Eugene Sisk and his wife Renee Sisk, all of Memphis, and Dale Cheek and her husband Cullen Johnson of Florence, Kentucky; grandchildren Blaire Benavides and her husband Jay Brenner of Memphis, Cory Benavides of Santa Clara, California, and Stephen Fordyce Jr. of Clayton, North Carolina. I look forward to being reunited with my siblings who have gone before, William Sampson Pearson Jr., Turley Pearson, Leonard Pearson, John T. Pearson, and Francis Satchfield, as well as my parents and the love of my life, Eugene Sisk, and so many other relatives and friends.

I've had a long and wonderful life, and I want no funeral, no sadness. Instead, I want a party. Celebrate my amazing, wonderful life. Wear bright colors, tell funny stories about me, and laugh. And remember that life is short, so eat dessert first.

Memorial service - September 14, 2013, in Hardin Hall at the Memphis Botanic Garden, 750 Cherry Road, Memphis, TN 38117. Her family will greet guests beginning at 3 pm and begin telling stories of her life at 4 o'clock.