| Notes |
- The following is the obituary for our dear Mother written by me (Linda Coate) and published at hillfuneral.com. "Marcena Coate, age 103, passed away peacefully on Sept. 17, 2019 at Willow Brook Christian Village in Delaware, Ohio. Marcena was born to William Edward Clark and Grace Evans of Rio Grande, Ohio, on March 1, 1916. Marcena was a 2-year graduate of Rio Grande College. As a youth, she was the lead in many college plays and first place winner in dramatic reading contests. She was an outstanding elementary school teacher, bank teller and bookkeeper for her husband's home building business. We would all consider her role as mother and homemaker to be her most important career.Those who cherish memories of her include daughter, Linda Coate (Jim Hetzer) and Perry Coate (Jenny Leonhart), Columbus, Ohio; grandchildren, Jeremy (Autumn Giewont Dudick) of Moncure, NC, son of Linda Coate and Jim Dudick; Amber (Michael Hofstetter) of Gahanna, Ohio, daughter of Linda Coate and Jim Dudick; Tyler and Abby Coate, Westerville, Ohio; her great grandchildren, Ethan and Ryan Hofstetter, Jerrin and River Dudick, and nieces, nephews and friends. She is preceded in death by her husband, Albert Edward Coate, her parents, sisters (Wanda Getz and Avanall Sunderhaus), aunts (including her Aunt Maude Evans Schafer whom she considered a second mother), uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews. Marcena at 103 was the second oldest person in her family with her Aunt Sophie Clark Liggett living to 107. We attribute our mother's longevity to good genes, a contented spirit, avoidance of medicine and continued interest in learning. She first used a computer at age 80. Family members would call to see if she was okay when they hadn't received their daily email from her. She was a member of the Northland Church of Christ for her last many years and started life attending both of her parent's churches. Her mother was a Baptist and her father a Methodist. She, like her mother, had read the entire New Testament. She had read it twice in fact in her late 80's and early 90's.We look forward to celebrating her life with family and friends at Hill Funeral Home in Westerville, Ohio on Saturday, Sep. 21, 2019. Visiting hours are 9:30-11:00 a.m. followed by her funeral. We know she will bring many blessings to her new realm of life. She was a wonderful, considerate, loving and beloved soul in this one. Donations to Willow Brook Christian Village would be appreciated. Please send to: Willow Brook Christian Village, 100 Willow Brook Way S., Delaware OH 43015
"Her funeral was as follows: Funeral of Marcena Coate. Welcome. Good morning, and thank you all for coming to the funeral of Marcena Coate today. We will be remembering and celebrating Marcena's life through some songs led by Don Milnor, through stories that the family has shared with me, through a reading of Scripture, through a poem shared by a friend, through some thoughts by her granddaughter, and through a prayer. We'll begin by singing the hymn "I Come to the Garden Alone." Don, I'll turn it over to you. I Come to the Garden Alone, Amazing Grace and Common Love were the songs she wanted sung at her funeral throughout the service.
Eulogy: I did not get to know Marcena very long, but even a brief encounter revealed the beauty of her character and the depths of her love. I met Marcena for the first time this year, at the age of 103, and although her memory was fading, the one phrase she held onto and continued to repeat, was "I love you." I told Perry, if just one thought was near enough to my heart that I remembered it even though I was forgetting everything else, "I love you" is what I would want. Love was an overwhelmingly strong characteristic for Marcena, and that came through in my visit with her and in the stories shared with me by her children. In addition to love, resilience was another dominant trait that characterized Marcena's life. She battled Scarlet Fever and Rheumatic Fever and as young as age 8 the doctors told her she wouldn't live that long. Well, whether by stubbornness or resilience, Marcena outlived every one of those doctors. She lived a long, blessed life that was intricately tied with her love for her family.
Born in 1916, in the midst of World War 1 and 4 years before women could vote, Marcena was raised by loving parents whom she affectionately called Mamma and Papa. Her Mamma was a small, quiet, and sweet woman, and those same characteristics were attributed to Marcena. Her father was resourceful and industrious, working on a farm and using the profits to build a garage where he would work on cars and then using those profits to build a general store while he also cut hair and worked for Ford and he built houses by hand. Marcena grew up with those same industrious skills. She acted in both high school and college stage plays, almost always starring in the lead role, and competed in dramatic reading contests where she often won first place. Her day to day life may have been quieter and humbler, but she knew how to demonstrate boldness. She attended Rio Grande College and Wilmington college where she studied elementary education.
After two years of college she was hired as a teacher, where she had to use some of her bold and industrious qualities. She told a story about a large, difficult boy in one of her classes that had a knife on the playground and threatened other kids. When she approached him, he cut her a little, but she ignored the cut, not allowing him to know that, and she told him with I imagine a large about of courage, to follower to her to the Principal's office, and that large, difficult boy obeyed her voice and followed the 4 foot 11 woman. Another story was shared in a different year that one of her students went home after the first day of classes and exclaimed to his parents that his teacher was a 12 year old, because she was such as small woman. But this small woman had a large, exciting life.
Aside from her teaching stories, she loved to tell the story of how she was hired as a bank teller by a wonderful boss named Mr. Hood in Los Angeles, California. Perry and Linda agreed they had to have heard this story upwards of 100 times, because it was a story Marcena was proud of. The story goes something like this: Marcena moved to California when she was about 30 with a couple other girls. The three of them shared a single room in someone's house. During their first couple days in LA, they were walking along the street and passed by a bank. Marcena needed a job and she felt that God was telling her to go into the bank; so she did. From across the lobby the bank manager, Mr. Hood, saw her. He picked up on her body language and asked her if she was wanting to apply for a job. She said yes, so they sat down and talked. After a short conversation he offered her the job. Marcena asked, "aren't you going to look at my references?" He replied that he was a good judge of character...and he wanted her to start that very day. Marcena expressed that she was hoping to have a few days to see LA, so he gave her 3 days. On her first day of work she was sitting on a stool at a teller window. Mr. Hood saw her and said in a laughing way "Marcena your feet don't touch the floor!" The next day when she came into the bank, she found that he had built a platform for her feet, something she was very impressed by. She picked up the nick name Mickey (like Mickey Mouse) at the bank because she was so short, topped off by the fact that her initials were M.I.C.
Marcena was very good at math (which stayed with her even at 103 years old when I first met her and Perry had her successfully answering division and multiplication questions), so naturally she excelled at the banking job. She was given special responsibilities that co-workers who had been there longer than her were not given. She prided herself that she only had to be taught any job once.
One of the responsibilities had to do with counting very large sums of money, and she had to count it in a large bullet proof glass bubble to protect the person counting the banks money. She took great pride in the fact that she was entrusted with that job.At one point she had to have an operation that required significant recovery time. Mr. Hood's wife wanted Marcena to move in with them so that she could take care of her during her recovery. Marcena didn't want to impose, so. Mrs. Hood then told her that she needed to move back to Ohio so that her own mother could take care of her instead. So that's what Marcena did. She told this story throughout most of her lifetime. She only worked there a year, but wonderful Mr. Hood and her success at the job was a treasured memory as a single adult. But her time in California led her to a greater blessing than just a job in a bank.
It was there that Marcena once again connected with Albert Coate, her future husband. Al and Marcena shared a common friend named Audrey Amstutz. I doubt Audrey knew just how much she was shaping their lives, but she tried to get Marcena and Al together while they were in Ohio together. That didn't work. Well Audrey found out that Marcena and Al were somehow both in Los Angeles, so she once again worked her matchmaking skills and brought the two together, and sure enough Marcena and Al fell in love. As the story goes, Al didn't want to lose Marcena, since she was such a special lady, so he set the wedding date out only a few weeks and engraved it on the wedding ring. Marcena wasn't going to get the cold feet that he feared, so they married when Marcena was 34 and Al was 37 and they happily enjoyed their lives together for the next 49 years. In the course of those 49 years of marriage, Marcena worked hard to keep the books for Al's homebuilding business, but she never failed to neglect all the responsibilities and hard work of being a full time stay at home mother and homemaker.
Because Al would sell even the houses they lived in, Perry and Linda remember the way Marcena would keep the houses prepped to sell, sometimes as fast as over the course of a weekend. But despite the chance that a house could sell, that didn't stop the houses from still being homes. Al once even built a lower island in the kitchen and lower counters and cabinets so that Marcena could more easily reach things. They had a loving relationship, one that was strong enough to hold even through tough times, thanks to the resilience that Marcena has always had. At one time, somewhere in the 1970's or so, Al's home building business struggled and they almost went bankrupt. They had to pay mortgages on 11 properties, owing far more than you would think possible to pay back. But where other people may have collapsed, Marcena's strength kicked in and she called each and every one of the lenders and promised to pay everything back. Every time Marcena and Al made money, Marcena would send some amount, even if it was just $50, to every single lender until she finally managed to have the debts cleared and still saved enough money to carry her in her old age. Marcena was a strong, resilient woman.
But don't let that fool you into thinking she didn't have a soft, sweet nature or inclination for fun. She had a Yorkshire terrier when she was a young girl, and in her 90's she was given a stuffed yorkie that she regularly took to bed with her. She also raised a baby lamb named John Henry while on her parent's farm, and she loved that lamb very much. Once she was in the Willowbrook nursing homes, she was given a stuffed beanie baby lamb that she also took to bed with her. She also had a love for card games, and Perry and Linda remember playing cards with their parents a lot. Marcena actually loved cards so much that when she was in her 80's and learned to use a computer, one of the primary purposes of that computer was to play card games. One of the programs she particularly enjoyed had animated characters that would say "hurry up" anytime Marcena took too long to play her card. The family shared a story where they remember one time she was playing that card game and was interrupted by a visit, and she told them she had to hurry back to the computer because she didn't want to make the programmed players to wait. Linda told me that the car could be down, the TV could be down, but the PC had to be functional.
Despite her love of cards one time rushing a visit, family was still incredibly important to her, and even her final years were filled with remembering her family. She would ask about her two sisters often, even when other memories faded. She remembered her childhood in Rio Grande fondly, passing on the love she had for those years to her children and grandchildren. Rio Grande embodied home for her, not because it was necessarily some amazing place, but because of the good memories with family there.
Love, Kindness, Care and Compassion well describe the qualities of Marcena Coate. And laying as a foundation for those good qualities was faith. Marcena was a believer in Jesus all of her adult life and read through the Bible (or at least the New Testament) at least twice while in her 90's. She was loved by her family and her church family. With her faith in the Savior and because of her deep love for Scripture, I'd like to close this part of our service with a reading of John 14, where Jesus speaks of the future place his followers will have in heaven. After this reading I'll turn things over to Don to lead us in another song. Reading: John 14:1-41"Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. 2 In my Father's house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? 3 And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also. 4 And you know the way to where I am going."Marcena Coate is now peacefully and happily with her Lord Jesus, in a place that has been lovingly prepared for her, and that is a comforting blessing to us.
At this time I invite Don to come lead us in Amazing Grace. Poem "Condolences"- Jim H. Family Member Sharing -
Amber Hofstetter: Three minutes to reflect on the life a person you love - the 103 year life, no less, of Marcena, my Grandmother. I thought it might be an impossible task, but as I was fumbling through it I stumbled upon the following parable that gave me clarity: "What is my purpose in life?" I asked the void in a moment of despair. my surprise, the void responded. "What if I told you that you fulfilled your purpose when you took an extra hour to talk to that kid about his life?" said the voice. "Or when you paid for that young couple at the restaurant? Or you saved that dog in traffic? Or had patience with your child when she threw that tantrum?" "Your problem is that you equate your purpose with goal-based achievement. The Universe isn't interested in your achievements, just your heart. When you choose to act out of kindness, compassion, and love, you are already aligned with your purpose."
By this most important measurement, Grandma lived a life of purpose, strongly rooted in her faith and always led by her heart. She had a smile that would light up a room, and brought joy and kindness to everyone she met. I have many wonderful memories of spending time with her growing up - she was always so patient and loving, but you also knew what was expected of you in her gentle way of encouraging you to behave. I look back on that now as a mother, and I appreciate it even more, knowing how hard it can be sometimes. I will always strive to live by her example: to love freely, have patience and offer help, hold strong to my faith for it will always guide me through life's ups and downs, and give back to the world through kindness.
Grandma chose a beautiful day as her exit, with a clear blue sky that provided beautiful views for her ascension to a higher plane. I am comforted knowing that she is back in the arms of loved ones she has long missed, including her husband Al who left us almost 20 years ago. And they are together smiling down on us now, all of us gathered here, seen and unseen, celebrating a beautiful, long life lived well.
Comments of Friends/Family - Presented by the minister of her church
At this time I'll be reading several statements and comments from family and friends.
Stephanie Eicher, a grandniece says: For as long as I've been around, every time I was in her presence, I felt loved. She was an angel on earth.
· September Tittiger, daughter of Albert's sister Shirley: Aunt Marcena and Uncle Al showed me graciousness when I was a young teen. I stayed with them for a few months and they provided stability in my time of need.
· Wendy Brenot, a niece from Albert's side says: A good memory I had was Aunt Marcena letting me stay for a 2 week visit in their home in Hamilton, Ohio when I was 6 years old. Linda was about 4 or 5 at the time.
· Grace McClain, daughter of Marcena's sister Wanda says: Aunt Marcena learned to use the computer in her 80s. She and I emailed each other for years. Aunt Marcena also taught me unconditional love. She loved everyone no matter what they did.
· Ron Sunderhaus, son of Marcena's sister Avanell said: When I think of her, I think about her sweet smile and sparkly eyes. She spread kindness and love with them. "For someone so small, Aunt Marcena stood tall in the hearts of all those she touched."
· Bill and Connie Getz, son of her sister Wanda: The most recent memory, Connie and myself were in Columbus to catch a plane, which the flight was cancelled the next morning. We contacted my 98-year-old aunt to see if we could spend the night. She was very hospitable and said for us to come over. She made up beds, towels, wash clothes and offered us breakfast the next morning. We were so amazed how alert she was for her age. She was a very special aunt and always knew Connie and myself by name until our last visit with her this past December.
· Martha Hale, a niece from Albert's side: She was a delightful, loving caring person. Albert was a very lucky man to have had her for a loving wife…and a wonderful loving mother.
· Sandy Coate, niece: Aunt Marcena, you were such an inspiration to me and I miss you and Albert so much. I know that Don was there to greet you when you arrived! I find great comfort in knowing that you and he have both spiritual and physical family to welcome you HOME!!
· Susan Wassem, niece: What a grand lady she is. I remember going to your house when I was just little and she would greet me with open arms. She always had time for me. And her laugh! It is so sweet. It is the word that I have always associated with Aunt Marcena. Sweet. God bless you especially this week and next. They are the hardest. She is with Albert now. Smiles all around.
· Jennifer Shultz, niece: Aunt Marcena, such a wonderful and caring aunt, mother, grandmother and wife. Your tender loving care of Uncle Albert brightened his life. You raised two beautiful and loving children, Linda and Perry. Your caring influence has been passed down to their children and to the generations to follow. And, you will always be the sweetest aunt I have ever had. Aunt Marcena, always remembered.
· Bob Ward, a friend from church who for several years cleaned and shopped for her, in such a heartfelt way said: She was so caring, loving and gentle. Such a special unique person.
· Peggy Kaiser, friend from church: I remember going over to visit your parents when they lived in the Karl road apartments. They told us where and how they met each other, such a neat story. Seems like they were really waiting for the other person, the right person before saying " I do". Your mom always so hospitable, with a big smile on her face. What a beautiful lady! Before we left from visiting them, I believe they gave us a slice of Chess pie, neat to try something that I had never heard of.
· From Tara Bell, a friend from church: Marcena was one of the most grateful to God people I have ever known. She accepted all that God gave her with appreciation...including the great love and care that she received from her family and her church. I always felt encouraged when I saw her . It is not easy to live in this world for 103 years, but she accepted her time as time to live in Gods plan. I always left thinking that..."Marcena is just following Jesus...may be I should try that too."
· John Chory, a close friend of Albert's from church: Marcena was a unique and remarkable person. She honored my life. I first met her over 40 years ago. She tolerated my immaturity way back when and was always very kind to me. I never doubted her unconditional love.
· Jim Hetzer, Linda's partner: She is a kind soul, and that soul is with us together forever.
· Jeremy Dudick, son of Linda: My grandmother will always be a bowl of Werther's Original and a delightful laugh while playing a round of Rummikub, a place to look forward to spending an afternoon, beloved purveyor of prune juice to young children, mentor of all card games, bringer of joy, tolerant swing dance partner to an untrained pair of feet and a loved one who will be treasured forever.
· Tyler Coate: Grandson, son of Perry and Jenny: She lived a great life. She's the sweetest lady I've ever met. I'm lucky to have had her as my Grandmother.
From Jenny Coate: What can I say about the sweetest mother-in-law anyone could ask for? That you for modeling and teaching your little boy gentleness, other-centeredness, and of course, cleanliness. When you gave him a dime every time he came home from school with his shirt tucked in, you set up a lifetime of tidiness including not throwing his clothes on the floor as well as much vacuuming and cleaning up after others. Thank you, I love you and I'll miss you.
Perry Coate, her son:
o I always considered the family we had growing up special. Both she and Dad did a great job of seeing to that. I think it was her calm loving nature that was a key to that end.
o The way she handled things when I had mis-behaved stood out. If it was something that she had to address, there was never yelling or punishment. She would talk to me and show such great concern, that I would come away having learned a heart-flt lesson. She never raised her voice to me one time that I remember. There were times when she knew I had been mis-behaving but chose to just pray about it. When I was about fifty, I made some foolish comment to her that I was a pretty good kid. Her reply was, "Oh you did some things you never fessed up to."
o I don't remember ever thinking badly of her or being frustrated by her. She made her love clear.
o I love you Mom.
Linda Coate, her daughter: Our dear Mother seemed literally to be the best Mother on Earth. She had such a gentle way about her and was loving to everyone she met. She had this gorgeous large smile that greeted you and she always said she loved you when you left. Even her caretakers at Willow Brook knew that she shared an "I love you" with everyone. Family was her life. She delighted in her children, her grandchildren and then her great grandchildren, always asking about them. She encouraged me in my pursuits to learn about our family tree and had 3 DNA tests done to leave us her legacy and find new ancestors. Her contented loving soul left the richest legacy of all. If she could give each of her descendants anything, that would be it. Thank you from our very depths, Mom! We were honored to have you in our lives for many of your 103 years. You will be so missed….
* Thank you to everyone who has joined us for the funeral, at this time I'm going to invite Don to come back up and lead us in a final song, and then Jim Robbins will close us in prayer.
Her obituary can be found at: http://www.hillfuneral.com/westerville-funeral-home/obituaries-services/archive-obits/743
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1916 - 2019 (103 years)
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