Shirley J. Brooks Dies; Longtime Sitkan was 89

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Category: Obituaries

Created on Tuesday, 20 August 2024 13:41

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Shirley Jean Brooks

Shirley Jean Brooks passed away August 4 at her Sitka home, in the arms of her two children.
 An unflappably optimistic person, Shirley was known for her inner strength.  Family and friends have endless stories about Shirley toughing out physical and emotional pain, such as refusing pain medication after breaking all of her ribs when a tractor flipped on top of her. She bravely attended a challenging medical school in her late 40’s so that she would have “something meaningful to do when her children went to college.”  To cope after her husband and children were gone, she began taking weekly solo kayak adventures and traveling overseas for philanthropic work in Haiti, Romania, Ukraine, the Cook Islands, and Poland.
Shirley was born in Klamath Falls, Oregon, June 6, 1935, the fourth of five children of Viola and Charles Crawford. She grew up with two sets of parents: loaned as a young child to her aunt who had only one child. Her childhood was filled with laughter, music, church, sports, and summers spent working hard on her parent’s cattle ranch.
 When she was small, Shirley took to shinnying up the leg of her horse and riding bareback. Bending stereotypes, she was equally comfortable in the fields and the kitchen, pulling double duty running the combine and making pies for her family and farmworkers.
She parlayed her childhood skills into a teaching degree, focusing on home economics and physical education at Oregon State. After her sophomore year in college, she lost her eyesight and began learning Braille.  The following year, she was one of the first patients to receive corneal transplants and spent 12 motionless weeks on her back. She continued on to earn her degree, and her first teaching post was in Southern Ccalifornia. She saved her money and spent several summers traveling in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa with her sister and friends.
After she married and had her first child, she left teaching and embraced being a stay-at-home-mom, spending her time gardening, canning, grinding wheat for bread, soap making, etc. The family lived in Cupertino, Placerville, Bishop, and Fresno in Northern California before arriving in Sitka in 1976.
 Shirley dedicated her life to social activism.  In addition to raising children, she and her husband raised awareness about world hunger through a lecture series that was the origin of their son’s lifelong career tackling food insecurity. Shirley also was known for volunteering in her community and spent time working in elder care facilities, Indigenous nutrition education programs, and providing support to refugees from war-torn Latin American countries. 
Shirley started a second career as a pediatric physician’s assistant in her 50s, and realized her lifelong dream of providing medical care to under-served populations.  She worked with low-income children in Denver, Colorado, and set up the Health Aide Training program in Nome, Alaska. Shirley was able to use her love of teaching, her social activism, and her medical knowledge to work with incredible women who dedicated their lives to providing the only medical care available to the villages of the remote Norton Sound.
Shirley was an active member of the working group that wrote the statewide Alaska Health Aide training manual. In 1990, she was hired to teach at the Sitka Health Aide training program and worked in the SEARHC pediatric clinic until her retirement to help raise her grandchildren. 
Shirley loved observing, appreciating, and creating beautiful things.  She was a talented artist, sewing and knitting clothing and quilts for her children and grandchildren.  She also loved making wholesome meals for her family (and later cookies for her grandkids). She was known for her beautiful soprano voice, singing regular solos and duets at church and in community choirs, and passed her love of music to her children. She loved the opera, passing that passion to her second grandchild. 
She is survived by her younger sister, Bonnie; her two children, Sean Brooks (Elizabeth Brooks) and Jeanine Brooks (Roger Schmidt); her four granddaughters, Anja, Mina, Elise, and Maren, whom she cherished more than anything; and 12 beloved nieces and nephews.
In her final years, she made sure to remind family, “Every day is a gift!”  If you asked, she would say her life was incredibly blessed.  Shirley appreciated the outpouring of love and support from family and friends in her last weeks and she will be missed.
A celebration of her life is planned August 7, 2025, on the campus of Sitka Fine Arts Camp.

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