A Service of Remembrance for the Life of Wanda Gowler Thiele

January 3, 1933—December 8, 2021

December 11, 2021 2:00 pm Union Church 

Rev. Kent Gilbert, Pastor

Bernardo Scarambone, Organist

Prelude

Welcome Rev. Kent Gilbert

Opening Prayer  

Song  Amazing Grace   Philip Hearn

Reading  “Let Evening Come” by Jane Kenyon        Stephanie Gowler 

Reading  “Starlings in Winter” by Mary Oliver          Rebekah Gowler

Words of Remembrance

Steve Gowler

Kent Gilbert

A Life in Pictures Morning Has Broken

Reading Psalm 23 Eddie Kennedy

Song “Just a Closer Walk with Thee” Al & Alice White

Prayers of Rest and Release    

Benediction    

Closing Music  

Wanda Gowler Thiele

Wanda Lee Thiele, 88, of Florence Kentucky, passed away on December 8, 2021. She was born in Mt. Vernon, Illinois, on January 3, 1933, to Charles Everett and Iva Myrtle (Scott) Shelton. The year following her graduation from Mt. Vernon Township High School, Wanda married Ronald Lee Gowler on January 25, 1952. After Ronald’s death in 1990, she was single for ten years before marrying Kurt Robert Thiele on August 23, 2000. Kurt died on January 27, 2021.

Wanda is survived by her children, Steve (Teresa) Gowler of Berea, Kentucky, and Rhonda (Gary) Gowler Greene of Orchard Lake, Michigan; seven grandchildren; seven great-grandchildren; and many stepchildren, step-grandchildren, and step-great-grandchildren. In addition to her parents and husbands, Wanda was preceded in death by six older siblings: Charles Hall Shelton, Hazel Shelton, Gladys (Shelton) Estes, Vera (Shelton) Scott, Raymond Shelton, and Myrtle Mae (Shelton) Lipe.

For the past fifty years Wanda was an active member of Florence Baptist Church in Florence, Kentucky. She participated in Sunday School and the Women’s Missionary Union, worked in the nursery, and was always ready to help others through the church’s outreach programs.

A homemaker and a successful, self-employed saleswoman, Wanda was a longtime Avon Representative. For several years she served as a Volunteer Ambassador at the International Cincinnati Airport. Wanda loved to travel. She sometimes flew in the small plane piloted by her husband, Kurt, and she especially enjoyed her travels to Alaska, Hawaii, and Europe.

Beloved wife, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, sister, aunt, and friend, she will be sorely missed.

There will be a brief graveside service at Mt. Vernon Memorial Gardens in Woodlawn, Illinois, on Tuesday, December 14, at 11:00 am (CST) prior to interment.

Donations honoring Wanda may be made to Hope Ministries of Northern Kentucky, 263 Main St., Florence, Kentucky 41042 (www.hopenky.org) or to the American Heart Association (www.heart.org).

Let Evening Come

Let the light of late afternoon

shine through chinks in the barn, moving   

up the bales as the sun moves down.

Let the cricket take up chafing   

as a woman takes up her needles   

and her yarn. Let evening come.

Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned   

in long grass. Let the stars appear

and the moon disclose her silver horn.

Let the fox go back to its sandy den.   

Let the wind die down. Let the shed   

go black inside. Let evening come.

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop   

in the oats, to air in the lung   

let evening come.

Let it come, as it will, and don’t   

be afraid. God does not leave us   

comfortless, so let evening come.

— Jane Kenyon

Starlings in Winter

Chunky and noisy,
but with stars in their black feathers,
they spring from the telephone wire
and instantly

they are acrobats
in the freezing wind.
And now, in the theater of air,
they swing over buildings,

dipping and rising;
they float like one stippled star
that opens,
becomes for a moment fragmented,

then closes again;
and you watch
and you try
but you simply can’t imagine

how they do it
with no articulated instruction, no pause,
only the silent confirmation
that they are this notable thing,

this wheel of many parts, that can rise and spin
over and over again,
full of gorgeous life.

Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,
even in the leafless winter,
even in the ashy city.
I am thinking now
of grief, and of getting past it;

I feel my boots
trying to leave the ground,
I feel my heart
pumping hard. I want

to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.

— Mary Oliver