This eulogy was written by Mark, her husband. I like to think of it as a love letter ...
Barbara Jo (BJ) Hamburg-Streeter
Barbara Jo Hamburg was born October 13, 1952, the first of five children to be born to Architect/Builder David Hayes Hamburg, and Susan Lee Jones-Hamburg, mother and homemaker of Clinton and Shelby Townships, and in time, Rochester Hills, MI. BJ, as she was to come to be known to her family and friends was followed over the next nine years by Mark, Carol, Nancy and Robert. The family loved the outdoor life of Michigan, and spent summers camping from the shores of Lake Superior to the banks of the Detroit River, accompanied by their 165 pound St. Bernard, Pretty Penny. BJ attended schools in Shelby Township and finished her high school career at Rochester High School as a graduate of the class of 1970. While still in high school she worked at the historic Yates Cider Mill and is still remembered by its owners for her attentiveness and kindness to customers. After high school she worked and attended classes at Oakland Community College and Oakland University and in 1972 spent the spring semester at Grand Valley State College in Allendale, MI. There she met Mark Streeter, a fellow student with whom she became friends and who introduced her to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. In July of 1975 she became a member of the Church and on October 18, 1975 they were married in Grand Rapids, MI. They were active members of the Michigan State University Branch of the LDS church and filled various leadership roles. In August 1979 Mark and BJ were sealed for time and eternity in the Washington D.C. temple. In 1980 Mark was accepted into a Masters Program at the Marriott Graduate School of Management at BYU.
Mark received his Masters Degree in August, 1982 and on October 4 1982 BJ gave birth to a son, Colin. On January 19, 1984 A second child, a daughter, Gillian was born. In May, 1985 work took the family moved to Greenville, SC. They were members of the Greenville II ward and BJ worked in the Primary and Young Women’s organization and Mark served as a counselor in the bishopric. Colin had begun school and Gillian was in preschool when in Mark’s work took them to Sugar Land, the family’s present home. BJ was soon called to serve as a Relief Society Enrichment counselor and compassionate service leader, while working as a teller at a local credit union. With both children in school the BJ enjoyed an active church and community life. In 1995 BJ left her job to be a full time mother and homemaker, and to fill a calling as Young Women’s president in the newly formed Richmond TX ward in 1996. In 2000 BJ resumed her employment with Houston Federal Credit Union. In 2002 Colin and Gillian graduated from Stephen F. Austin High School, and Gillian went on to BYU to pursue a bachelor’s degree, and Colin took a job as an IT assistant at Houston Federal with Mom. In 2006 BJ began to complain of a persistent fatigue and dull backache she attributed to a bad office chair. In November when repeated doctor’s appointments and antibiotic treatments did not relieve her symptoms, BJ began to look for more specialized treatment. BJ was diagnosed Stage IV Inflammatory Breast Cancer with metastasis to the lymph nodes and the boney portions of 4 vertebrae on February 8, 2007. Chemo therapy, surgery, and radiation followed in the next year. Her response to treatment was called “dramatic” by her doctors and her prognosis was good. The reprieve from intense treatment afforded BJ an opportunity to visit family in Michigan in 2008 but surgery later that year was needed to arrest a recurrence of the disease. In April 2009 BJ was able to attend Gillian’s BYU graduation; however, upon her return another recurrence necessitated another round of chemo later that year. In June 2010 BJ prepared for a stem cell transplant that posed the best prospect of freeing her from her cancer. Complications with post transplant treatment resulted in BJ being hospitalized for six months. However, in weeks after her January 2011 release she walked unassisted, and improvements in energy and stamina increased daily. By the summer of 2011, however, her energy began to flag and in late September doctors reported a ‘stunning’ escalation of the tumor cells population. On Monday October 10 at 6:45 pm CDT Barbara Jo Streeter succumbed to her disease.
These are the facts of BJ’s life, accurate in every detail yet as empty of the truth of who she was as her height measurement or shoe size. BJ’s broad and deep impression on those around her over the six decades cannot be reflected in the mere chronology of the events of her life.
Those who knew her best noted four virtues that made BJ the exceptional person she was-- things those who knew her loved about her and that people who only met her in passing, noticed.
First, BJ was compassionate and caring. If anyone was ever born compassionate it would have been BJ. As a four year old, BJ would begin to save portions of her lunch sandwiches, cookies and other treats in a dresser drawer anticipating her grandparents’ Christmas visit to Michigan. Then, when Grandma Dorothy arrived back home in Iowa and unpacked her suitcase to she found well wrapped but invariably crusty sandwich halves and stale cookies provided by BJ should “Grandma get hungry on her trip back to Iowa”.
Mormon Missionaries rarely leave leftovers when they come to dinner, but when they did BJ would be sure that the food was packaged up and in their hands when they left. BJ made it a point to learn what each missionary liked and to make that dish when they came for dinner. She got to where she’d make duplicate meals: one to be shared with family and their voracious guests together and an identical meal packed up to could go home with the missionaries for later in the week.
A long time neighbor came to understand BJ’s caring when she took him to his appointment for his own cancer surgery, when his elderly parents could not. For over twenty years Holidays schedules included family dinners with him as the exclusive guest, whenever his own family’s celebrations were over.
BJ was an excellent listener and had a particular gift for making you feel as if you were the only concern in her life. Her niece noted that when BJ came to Gillian’s graduation from BYU: “She found time exclusively for me!—after all, it was Gillie’s time and here she was listening to me like I was the only person in the universe”. When she excused herself from their conversation to run after her toddler, she returned to find that BJ quietly gathered up and washed her dishes for her.
BJ never needed acquaintance to engage in her caring. While standing in a restaurant line for her order she watched a young mother wrestle with her three small children as she opened her purse to pay for her meal. BJ took a bill from the change she had just received and handed it to the counter man and said “I’ve got that” and tousled the oldest child’s hair and said, “You have a nice day with your Mom!” and merely walked away smiling.
BJ was also gracious. BJ could not stand the idea of being the cause of another’s embarrassment or see another being embarrassed or humiliated in her presence.
As a Young Women’s president BJ had a number of young women who had neither the means nor the equipment to attend the annual Girls’ camp. Two sisters who obviously wanted to attend but also didn’t want others to know their single mother could not afford the camping gear they needed, not to mention the fees to attend the camp. BJ decided to enter the girls in a “contest”: they had to compile a camp equipment list with complete with recommended models, brands and stores that stocked the items. She secured their mother’s permission to take them to local outdoor stores for “research”. She worked them hard--the girls learned a practical lesson about selecting neither the most expensive nor the cheapest, but the best for the purpose. At the next meeting, she asked the sisters to share their list of recommended equipment and sources to the rest of the girls. Later she arrived at their apartment with the gear they had identified explaining that their research had won them the gear, and their fees for girls camp. The girls have long since gone their own ways but their mother who had asked for an explanation remembered the gracious act that allowed her girls to attend well equipped and unembarrassed by an act of overt charity, and related the story.
Another women’s leader in the ward spoke of BJ’s legacy when only last week she felt drawn for an unaccountable reason to a store next to the one she intended to visit and found herself face to face with a young woman who had been one of BJ’s charges when she was a girl. She had read of BJ’s declining condition and “just needed to talk with somebody about Sister Streeter”. She said she felt blessed to have someone come into the store who knew BJ as well. As a girl she was raised on a isolated farm far from other girls in the congregation and BJ had worked hard to overcome that distance and keep her involved with visits, cards and phone calls. This young woman now married and on her own had lost touch with much that had brought her joy when she was younger, and how memories of BJ were part of that joy. Remembering BJ’s kindness and graciousness, she said, made want to sort out her life and get back to those connections that had been so valuable in her past. .
Third, BJ lived the ideal of sister hood. Blessed with two sisters, Carol and Nancy she cherished that unique relationship sisters have with each other; Carol’s early death, also due to cancer, made her relationship with Nancy all the more precious to her. Sisterhood is a pervasive idea in the life of LDS women and BJ reveled in it. A husband in grad school often meant long hours of isolation and frequent absences for her. BJ made acquaintances among the students and other student wives that lived around her. Among those were Sharon Meisner and Kelly Stank, two girls from Mark’s home town whom BJ had come to know through his family. With Sharon she formed a special, hard to define bond that BJ came to call “Sister by Choice”. When pressed to define this intense, intimate relationship, BJ could only explain that “months could pass by without contact, yet when we meet, we pick up exactly where we left off as if no time had passed,” and “there’s an assurance that a request made to another of us is as good as filled upon asking.” That unique take on sisterhood was distinctive with just a few women BJ knew and loved. To be sure others joined this intensely personal sorority over time, with varying levels of closeness and intimacy but four stood in the first circle for her: Sharon Meisner-Edvalson, Jane Dykema-Streeter, wife of Mark’s late brother Randy, Marianne Gibbons-Palmer, and Connie Camarda-Van Vliet. This was not to discredit the “second circle”, those many sisters who drove BJ to her many appointments throughout her treatments and fed her family in her absence and sat with her in her home during the long months of recovery and remaining weeks of her life, who labored with BJ in Relief Society, Young Women’s and Primary, but that these four were the special spirits that should they all have lived into their 90’s would remain the sisters of choice without whom each of their lives would have been diminished.
Finally, courage permeated BJ’s life. More often than not, it was the courage was that was the common place stuff of daily living. Mark’s decision to go to grad school in business rather than becoming the English professor she had expected to be married to baffled her. But supportiveness and commitment were part of BJ’s life too and when he was accepted, BJ, who had never lived outside the state of Michigan, and her mother, drove on ahead to Provo to find an apartment and a job while Mark packed and moved the house a few weeks later.
But BJ was acting courageously much earlier than that. On vacation in 1977, Mark convinced BJ to make a detour in their trip to visit an ancient Indian ceremonial site atop a mountain in Wyoming. It was a wet, raw day with shreds of fog clinging to a narrow road where the ground on either side fell steeply away three hundred feet or more and populated with bawling Hereford steers that suddenly appeared out of the fog. Mark suggested that they park the car and walk up. BJ trudged the first few hundred yards and gasped at a half dozen appearances of ghostly cattle when she’d had enough and headed back to the car. Mark soldiered on; savoring the adventure. In 40 minutes he reached the summit, and walked about the Medicine Wheel with reverential awe. He talked with a retired couple about the significance of the site and they cordially offered him a ride down the mountain in their car. They had just cleared the summit when out of the fog, gingerly inching its way up the narrow road came BJ in their AMC Hornet with a death grip on the wheel and tears streaming down her face. “You were gone for an hour up there!” she cried. “I was afraid that something had happened to you so I had a prayer and started up the car.” If courage is not a state of fearlessness but the determination to act in spite of fear, BJ brimmed with it. As long as someone she loved was at the center of that need for courage.
But the last five years of her life changed all that. But BJ sternly warned against giving into the temptation to make them some kind of monument that defined her life rather than the preceding fifty four. In a rare moment of uncharacteristic, overt assertion, BJ made it clear that any memorial of her needed to focus on her life and not the details of her illness and death. She had no wish to be defined by her disease.
BJ had lived by these values throughout her life, back when no one could have imagined the onset of the unimaginably cruel disease which she endured with such dignity and grace. Having lived her life in such a manner, could have faced its end in any other way? She did wrestle with the anger and the “Why Me? Questions”, with which all cancer patients appear to struggle, but only briefly. The faith she embraced 36 years before is blessed with abundance of scripture, and from the Book of Mormon came a passage that was to be her talisman through the successive re-occurrences of disease and the succession of difficult and painful treatments for them.
Wherefore, ye must press forward with a steadfastness in Christ, having a perfect brightness of hope, and a love of God and of all men. Wherefore, if ye shall press forward, feasting upon the word of Christ, and endure to the end, behold, thus saith the Father: Ye shall have eternal life.
Among the many notes and emails of condolence that Mark received in the last week was this from a friend, who had known Mark and BJ almost from the beginning of their marriage, “…to make the distinction between BJ’s physical beauty and the beauty of her soul seems to me to be superfluous and perhaps even trivializes her. Barbara was simply—beautiful”. And so she is.
