My mother passed away this morning, at the age of 100, coming pretty close to making it to 101. It was no surprise, as she was in decline for a few months. I was asked to prepare an obituary. Newspaper obituaries are typically 300 or so words, and I have one that long for official publication. But I wanted to write something longer, because how can you sum up such an amazing life of 100 years in so few words. So below is the slightly longer version, still too few words but at least with a few more personal details.

Willie Maude Harvey (1925 – 2026)

Willie Maude Harvey (born Willie Maude Weeks) was born in Durant Oklahoma on May 29, 1925. She celebrated her one hundredth birthday happily with family and friends present in Oklahoma City in May 2025. She passed peacefully at 3:00 a.m. on February 27, 2026. She leaves behind four loving children, seven grandchildren, and seven great grandchildren, who currently live in Oklahoma, Texas, Colorado, Washington state, Japan, and the Maldives. All of us join in celebrating her amazing life.

Willie Maude was born in the age of the Model T. She still possessed a sharp mind and wit into the age of Artificial Intelligence. It was one sharp enough to very recently run the table at a game of Rummikub against one hopelessly outmatched son (me); even at age 100 she still laid down the square tiles like a champ. For much of her adult life, that mind and a creative spark evidenced itself in her luminous art pieces, dozens of which are in the hands now of her children and grandchildren, as well as remarkable quilts. She was particularly proud of her water colors. They are numerous and varied: small studies of flowers, impressionist portraits of New Mexico or Oklahoma landscapes, seaside scenes or sailing ships, street vendors hawking their wares, and much more.

She thought less personally of her oils, but in fact they are just as striking; some of them hung in the home in which her children spent most of their growing up years, a house inventively placed in a sloped landscape at the edge of the town of Beaver, Oklahoma, with a routine view of spectacular Oklahoma sunsets through much of the year visible just by stepping out to the patio.

Willie Maude was the daughter of a Baptist preacher. She possessed a Christian faith that carried her through a Depression-era childhood in small town Oklahoma and bouts of diphtheria and other diseases (and tragic losses of siblings) characteristic of the era; through cross-country train and bus trips during World War II, as her parents moved to California for defense industry work but she returned to Oklahoma for college at Oklahoma Baptist University, where she majored in biology and in 1946 tutored in German a recently returned Navy veteran named William (Bill) Gipson Harvey (1925-2008), whom she married in 1948; through his career in medical school in Oklahoma City while she worked as a secretary; through her years of raising four children in various small towns in Oklahoma, finally settling in Beaver in 1961, where she lived until moving to Oklahoma City in 1987; through breast cancer in the 1970s, and numerous nagging health problems that followed her afterwards; through long lonely days at home as Bill worked endless hours in his family practice clinic; and later through later-life hip fractures, dental health tortures, and assorted difficult health issues, and most of all Bill’s unexpectedly sudden death from esophageal cancer in 2008.

Through it all, she retained a spirit that somehow found the best in any situation, a kind word to say about almost anyone (perhaps a few recent politicians excepted), a word of advice that nearly always turned out to be right even if one didn’t realize it at the time (me, again), a funny witticism or malapropism to relate to lighten the day, or a lightly given but well-placed criticism when one was needed. She loved her family and she cared for other people, and always found some way to show that, more through actions than through words. Like most in our family, she was not much of a talker and not often overtly expressive, but one always knew the care and love that came from her soul.

She studied the Bible through her life (although she admitted to finding some parts of the Old Testament a tad boring); sang or hummed hymns both in congregations and in choirs, not to mention in cars on the way home from church or in the kitchen while making roast beef and mashed potatoes; laughed at Archie Bunker and with Mary Tyler Moore along with everyone else in the 1970s; loved Billy Graham but cast a properly skeptical eye at fraudulent or pompous televangelists who she knew defrauded the faith; read voraciously but wished that she could write as well as Jane Austen; loved musicals and light comedies; learned to play golf (well, sort of) in an attempt to strengthen her upper body after breast cancer surgery; walked at a rapid pace befitting the energies that kept her alive and mentally alert for such a long life; traveled the world as an adult and constantly tried to plot family cruises for everyone else; cheered loudly for the Oklahoma Sooners and more recently for the OKC Thunder; lit up like a candle at the sight of new grandchildren or great grandchildren; and wanted everybody to be kind and love everybody, and grieved when that was not so in our broken world. She wanted everyone to be like Jesus in their hearts.

Her remains will rest next to Bill Harvey’s in Oklahoma City, but she would be quick to add that her soul will join his in eternity.

Survived by: daughters Gayle McNish and Jan Scott; sons John Harvey and Paul Harvey; son-in-law Don Scott; daughters-in-law Kim Harvey and Susan Nishida Harvey; grandchildren Layne McNish, Mark Scott, Andrew Scott, Jessica Brooks, Chris Harvey, Alex Harvey, John Robert Harvey II.; great-grandchildren Kamden Elijah and Kai Micah Scott; Charlie Elizabeth and William Jasper Brooks; Ivy Hope, Clara Kim, and John Robert (III) Harvey.