Gerrie Johnson

 I love sitting behind Gerrie Johnson at Saturday night Mass. 

Gerrie Johnson

Gerrie's not only one of my very favorite people, but she has the most beautiful hair I've ever seen. Even at Mass, when I should be focusing on the altar, I stare at the back of Gerrie's head. She might be 96 years old, but she boasts the hair of a young girl - thick, lustrous and full of body. Everybody loves Gerrie Johnson.

"My wonderful friend!" she greets church neighbors. We all walk away believing we are the single most important person in Gerrie's universe at that moment. She tenderly comforts, encourages, extols. For a little while at least, even if your own mother is long gone, you feel you have a mother in Gerrie.

She died at the end of May, and the space she filled in the front pew every Saturday night is now painfully empty. Gerrie's nieces Mary Kaye and Padi Jo, who often sit just a few rows behind me, miss her, too. Everybody at Blessed Sacrament Church does. Gerrie was and is, as Father Jorge Canela proclaimed at her burial, a "saint" for all of us.

On this warm June evening just three weeks after her funeral, I'm having dinner with Gerrie's daughters and granddaughters. Jen, Gerrie's oldest daughter, serves quesadillas, chips, and - of all things - birthday cake. Today would have been Gerrie's 97th birthday. We dig into that delicious cake in Gerrie's memory, and her delightful girls Jen, Pete (Patrice) and Renae share photos, videos and stories of their remarkable mother.

Young Gerrie Buhrman

The fifth of nine children, Gerrie Buhrman grew up in a devoutly Catholic home in St. Libory, Nebraska. She taught her brothers to dance and made all her own clothes. The rules, however, were strict. On Saturday night before Mass the next morning, the Buhrman kids shined their Sunday shoes, and the water pump was turned off. Nobody was allowed to drink water until after Mass the next morning.

Gerrie, unlike many young people, was resolved to graduate from high school. It was common for teenagers 80 years ago to opt out of school after the eighth or ninth grades. Rural kids, especially, lived miles away from the nearest high school. Gerrie didn't own a car, and if she wanted to attend Grand Island Senior High 12 miles down the road, her only option was to board with a Grand Island family. She spoke fondly of the family she lived with, her kids remember, and put herself through high school.

When she was 23, she married her sweetheart Huck (Howard) Johnson and eventually started a family. Their boys Rick and Tim came along followed by three daughters: Jennifer, Pete and baby Renae.

Gerrie raised her five children as strictly as she and her siblings had been raised.

"We went to Confession every Saturday," Jen recalls, "and we said the Rosary every night during Lent."

The sisters laugh remembering the warm spring evenings they'd all be playing outside with the neighbor kids until Gerrie's voice rang through the neighborhood.

Young Johnson clan. From left: Jen, Rick,
Tim holding baby Renae, Pete

"Kids!" Gerrie would call out. "Get in here! It's time to pray the Rosary!"

The Johnson kids would groan, roll their eyes, and succomb to the torture of the nightly Rosary.

Often, Gerrie would invite a local priest to say a private Mass for all the Johnsons in their own basement - which necessitated dragging their father's beer signs from the walls.

Huck Johnson was a live-in-the-moment, freewheeling father to his five kids and very different from his devout wife. To supplement the family income, Gerrie worked at the Ordinance Plant until four every afternoon. A Grand Island mail carrier, Huck was finished delivering at three and was charged with the chore of picking up the Johnson kids from school at Blessed Sacrament. Very often, however, he'd stop at Ed and Net's for a little snort and forget all about the kids for an hour or two.

"Sometimes, though," Pete recalls, "he'd remember and ask us, 'How'd you kids like to get a little snack?' Then he'd haul all of us to the bar with him."

All grown up, from left: Tim, Renae, Jen,
Pete, Gerrie, Rick

Gerrie was kept in the dark about these after school adventures. Likewise, she never knew that Huck taught the kids to drive when they were all 10 or 11 years old. Jen remembers calling her pal Mary Eoriatti one afternoon.

"Get ready, Mary!" she said. "I'm coming to pick you up!"

Eleven-year-old Jen drove up to the Eoriatti house, honked the horn, and Mary quickly ran out the door. "Going with the Johnsons, Mom!" she called over her shoulder before disappearing for a little joy riding with Jen.

Renae, several years later, took her own friends Karla Rork, Theresa Costello and Kathy Northup out for a little jaunt up and down South Locust Street. When they spied some cute boys in the car next to them, Renae's friends urged her to honk the horn.

From left: Jen, Pete, Gerrie, Renae

"And the horn got stuck," Renae laughs. "Right there at the stoplight."

Renae also remembers that Jen would drive her to school at Blessed Sacrament before taking herself and Pete to Central Catholic High School. Jen refused, however, to bring the car to a stop as she let Renae off.

"Get out!" she screamed at Renae. Full of fear, Renae would leap from the still moving car. One morning she hesitated a second too long, and Jen ran over her shoe.

"You broke my favorite saddle shoe," Renae says now with an accusing look at Jen. "I had to limp around in a broken shoe all day at school."

Their mother knew none of this, and Huck always covered for his kids.

In the summertime when both parents were at work and five Johnson kids were left on their own at home, Gerrie would leave them a list of chores to complete before she returned home at 4. As soon as she shut the door behind her, the kids created their own fun and overturned all the furniture to make forts and bunkers for their favorite "War" game.

"We fought with whatever we had," Pete remembers. "Water balloons, shaving cream..."

Gerrie, right, with sister Marcella

One year when they worked a family paper route, they were in possession of an endless supply of rubber bands.

"Those rubber bands were great for 'War'," Jen laughs.

All the fun came to a halt at ten minutes until four when their mother was on the way home.

"Quick!" the girls screamed. "Clean the house!"

The girls all remember the day they found a mysterious duffel bag. The Johnson kids couldn't wait to tear into it. Inside was an old military flare.

"Hey," they wondered. "What can we do with this?"

They set it off in the yard, and it promptly filled the entire neighborhood with smoke.

"People driving on the street couldn't see a thing," Renae remembers. Every house vanished in a dark, billowing cloud of smoke. Neighbors were petrified.

Gerrie, of course, was never the wiser. Her kids had been adults for a long time before they confessed their youthful sins.

"She was horrified," Jen says, "but amused."

With her cousin, Father Don Buhrman

Gerrie wasn't entirely in the dark about her children's wild adventures. One of the brothers, in an ornery moment, got into a little trouble with the authorities. Gerrie, terribly upset, immediately went to her daughters' bedroom to furiously jostle awake her innocently sleeping girls.

"If you girls so much as look cross eyed," she shook her finger at her astonished and confused daughters, "I'm sending you to Geneva."

At the time, Geneva, Nebraska, supported a youth rehabilitation treatment center for girls. Gerrie meant business. All her kids' friends knew it, too.

"Mom was feared among our friends," Jen says.

Clowning with the grandkids

The strict, fearsome Gerrie was a woman her grandchildren never knew. In fact, as Jen, Pete and Renae relate the stories of their youth, Jen's daughters Jamie and Sarah can hardly picture the strict disciplinarian their grandmother - their precious GG, as they call her - must have been.

"She was always our core," Jamie remembers. "Each of us had our own relationship with GG, and she was so supportive - the pillar of our family."

Her sister Sarah, likewise, only remembers her grandmother's joyful persona. "She was so sweet and nice, but fun, you know?" Sarah remembers at her own wedding that Gerrie entered the reception photo booth to laughingly don silly boas and feathers along with all her grandchildren.

With grandson Nate

Gerrie's grandchildren adored her. They loved going to her house and loved celebrating holidays with her. One Thanksgiving when Gerrie informed the family she was going elsewhere and wouldn't be able to make Thanksgiving dinner, her grandchildren were horrified. Thanksgiving without GG? It was unthinkable. They might as well cancel the holiday, her grandchildren grumbled.

"GG was the special sauce of every family event," her granddaughter Sarah said.

Jen believes it was her mother's absolute faith that carried Gerrie through four generations of the joys, sorrows, and anguish that 96 years of living will inevitably bring to a large family.

"Mother said the Rosary every day of her life and never missed Mass. But if somebody's politics or religious beliefs differed from her own," Jen observed, "she'd always listen to another point of view with complete respect. She was never judgmental."

During the last 40 years of her life, Gerrie thoroughly enjoyed her grandchildren's school events and family gatherings. She was the matriarch of her large family welcoming her children's and grandchildren's new spouses, new babies, new grandbabies and, finally, new great-grandbabies. Her joy was never more apparent than when she was surrounded by her family and reminiscing about funny family stories or competing in some intense card games.

To her granddaughter Abbie: "I will come
back to haunt you."

At Sartor Hamann Jewelers where she worked for 32 years, Gerrie was known for being a talented jewelry designer, and for more than 40 years she was a member of Catholic Daughters and religiously helped with funeral dinners at Blessed Sacrament. Abruptly, though, almost overnight, Gerrie lost her strength and footing. In the hospital after several tests, her doctor delivered the hard news. Gerrie's kidneys were failing. Her time was limited, and her doctor suggested that Hospice be the next immediate step.

It was hardly any time at all before every member of her family filled her small hospital room shocked by the unfathomable news.

"Now listen, all of you," Gerrie said firmly. "I've lived a long time, and I'm grateful for that. I'm grateful for all of you."

One by one, she spoke to every member of her heartsick family and assured them all was well. She even delivered a special message to one great-granddaughter.

"Abbie," she said, "you're a good girl, and I expect you always to be a good girl," she warned her great-granddaughter, "or I will come back to haunt you."

Gerrie Johnson died the way she lived - joyfully focusing on the other person and offering her gracious love and humor to family, friends and even medical staff. Even in her last days she was lovely and smiling.

Gerrie's last days

On this, her 97th birthday which she is spending in Heaven, her daughters and granddaughters are grieving.

"People tell us all the time," Renae says, "that we're really lucky. Our mother lived to be 96, and we had her for so long. We were very fortunate."

But what people don't understand, the sisters agree, is that all those long years mean so much more to miss about their beautiful mother.

Jen believes her mother is still close. After Gerrie's funeral, she and Renae were going through some of their mother's boxes in Jen's garage when Jen noticed a beautiful pure gold Rosary hanging from a peg on her garage wall. Confused, she wondered if Renae had hung it there.

Last photo - Gerrie
and daughters

"I've never seen it before," Renae said.

Jen's husband Mike had no idea where the Rosary had come from either, and both he and Jen knew they surely would have seen it hanging there before. It was indeed a mystery, but because of Gerrie's great devotion to the Rosary, Jen felt sure her mother was instructing her to recite the powerful prayer.

"She's telling me something, I think!" Jen says.

Of course, she is. Gerrie might be in Heaven at long last, but she still has four generations of family to look after.

GG will take care of them all.

After her funeral, Gerrie's grands and great-grands