Rose Alita Harper

Rose was born an O’Dwyer in Kansas City, Missouri on March 27, 1949 to Frank & Ruth. Sister to Marie, Vince, John and Mike, she was a precious child, not necessarily precocious, but a Norman Rockwall portrayal. Leaving for Texas to brighten its Lone Star, she returned to Missouri as a teenager, accompanied by new nomenclature and a growing affinity for adventure. I first encountered her through a binocular view: sweet, in pink short shorts and top, crisp white tennis shoes giving life to the green tennis court underneath. Divine intervention put me on a new course, so immediate in its direction, and so pleasant in its effect.

My family first met her, my 10-year old sister hearing from the front door a knock of gentle persuasion. Theresa looked up at her up, slowly…and gradually, down…black Mary Jane shoes…light yellow colored dress, a sleeveless shift…a yellow scarf announcing her brunette hair. “She let her in…she must be ok…” my Mother recalled…”…Randy’s first date…My goodness…I knew this to be special…”

I left for Annapolis shortly thereafter. Two years later Rose packed up her studies, and with $100 and a Corvair caboose, drove overnight to Maryland. I spent just as much time “Over the Wall”* as inside it, Rose outwitting the Jimmylegs** securing the Yard***, as well as Officers of the Day. Enthralled with her, I lost my focus as a Midshipman, my performance looking back judged by truly patriotic officers as too naïve to properly perform, but too in love to care.

Rose was overjoyed at our June Week 1971 graduation, our formal marriage three days hence. “No more aptitude now, Lieutenant.” she said as over 900 hats were catapulted through the sky, the school boy transition complete. My parents squeezed her hands in unison as she stood between them. I was released from a three week probation just shortly before, my performance as Master of Ceremonies for the required After Dinner Speaking condemned in a typed Communique from the wife of a Navy Commander, the couple enthroned at the affair. “Midshipman Harper’s conduct was not that of a future officer and gentleman,” Lucretia Deville transcribed. “His date was not in the formal attire necessary and expected. She wore a yellow, sleeveless dress and an ugly yellow scarf.” It had remained the best outfit Rose could afford.

Given “at ease” to read these remarks in front of my Company (“Club 34”) Officer, he acknowledged the closure of the correspondence.

“I have no choice Mr. Harper, but to place you immediately on probation for…aptitude.”

“May I speak frankly, sir?”

I folded the diatribe angry, and deliberate.

“Certainly.”

“With all due respect, sir, why are you taking orders from a civilian?”

He smiled, slightly. Rose admired him for that.

“Hmm… you’ve got a point there…do something to redeem yourself…now, GET OUT OF MY SIGHT!!”

More than redemption was proffered during the subsequent twenty years, the civilian spouse as much in service, active and reserve, to our country as the military one. After every F-4 exploit or other “clandestine mission” she didn’t want details, just…”How was your aptitude?” She cherished the rumor of the clumsy Midshipman who, too wrapped up in cramming for a final in Thermal Dynamics, looked at amazement at the A+ given on “his” paper about Tektite II, an undersea living experiment with emphasis on the first all-female saturation dive team. Rose was a lousy scuba diver.

The Iron Woman was the most resolute and courageous person I have known, and I have crossed paths with many. A loving Mother, kind and firm while parenting three kids, and later the two children we adopted and with a husband who was often abroad, she often greeted a new day at four in the morning running for marathons, hours before going to work with American Airlines. Our children though were her first priority, and wretched be anyone that interfere with their good upbringing.

Late in the afternoon of an otherwise quiet day in 1993, American Airlines called me at work to come to their Headquarters Building immediately. Rose, collapsed in the hall en-route to giving an important report to the airline president, was refusing treatment until delivery was sure. Ruled permanently and totally disabled eighteen months later, she would endure ever growing suffering drilled into her at random and without compromise for over twenty-five years. She was hospitalized or treated in an emergency room 110 times beginning in 2015.

She never once questioned her faith, offering up her medical condition as she put it, “for all those in purgatory” and for the living, “all those in need”. She faced her difficulties with grace, dignity and without complaint, and also with what we both called her “Celtic Fire”, together with her bastion of will, relentless determination and irascible sense of humor. The character played by Maureen O’Hara in “The Quiet Man” - that’s Rose. The only error in comparison is that it wouldn’t be Maureen O’Hara being hauled about - oh no, it would be John Wayne.

Did I say the Iron Woman? Here are but a few of many recollections:

• With absolutely no mountaineering experience, Rose made it with me past The Keyhole on Longs Peak in Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado. The Keyhole Route has been described as a “classic mountaineering route that should not be underestimated.” This, on our honeymoon.

• I found her bent over, gasping in the Recovery Tent, after finishing slightly off her usual time in the 1984 Dallas White Rock Marathon. Two medics picked her up and laid her on a table mattress. As the X-Ray in the ER later confirmed, she completed the marathon with a stress fracture: fibula, right leg. Rose felt a “snap…then sharp pain” at mile 10. The marathon as you know, is 26.2 miles long.

• Rose was the overall Female Wheelchair Champion in Austin’s 2001 Capital 10K run.

She completed the 2002 3M Half Marathon shortly thereafter in Female First Place and two weeks later, on February 17th, the Motorola Marathon. That it was with a rickety, “non - sports chair” with split-gashed wheels and duct-tape for all three of the events, it remains incomprehensible that she completed 26.2 miles in four hours, twenty four minutes and…one second. A runner posted comments after the race, “Who is this Rose Harper? Going all the way in some beat-up wheelchair? No way was that possible - no way! But by God, she did it!” Gingerly removing her hand gloves after her last marathon, the light grey color of the leather palm material had changed to dark with shreds of red.

• Rose was released from a two week hospital stay in July of 2018. Unstoppable and undeterred, shortly thereafter we were in Lajitas, Texas. Lajitas features four spectacular, very long zip-lines stretched over deep canyons. Rose wanted to do them all…and she did. Rose was treated at the ER upon our return for a rib-cage muscle strain, but she said it was well worth it. “I hope to run again,” she said to the ER nurse “…someday…”

• In the fall of 2019, a Good Samaritan knocked at the door. Rose was in the front passenger seat of his car, her walker, a top-of-the-line model, bungled haphazardly in the back. She was supposed to call me when her nail salon appointment was done. “I saw her walking past the library,” he said, squeamishly. “She fell off into the grass. I stopped and watched her try to get up. I had to do something after the third time. She said not to tell you.” Rose, successfully navigating the Valley of Death at the intersection of Route 620 and Lohman’s Crossing in Lakeway, walked another half-a-mile. She had already spent most of the month of October in the hospital. In a matter of days after this latest entreaty, she was back again.

• Eleven days before she passed, upset at seeing an unattended walker, I asked her how she had managed to get to the weight machine in our garage after I had lifted her away from that walker and placed her in her favorite living room chair twenty minutes earlier.

“I crawled.”

Playing her guitar and singing, accompanied by a chorus of inmates who fondly sung along with “Alabare!”, Rose devoted several years to a ministry at Del Valle Prison. A special connection, an aura… hardened criminals some, they called her “Saint Rose”. The services ending, they left, guarded and closely watched, but shielded, however brief, by peace and enjoyment.

Rose comforted many dying AIDS patients with understanding, warmth, acceptance, prayers…and by just listening.

The family would like to recognize the following doctors: Thiru Latschman, Richard DeBhenke, Michael Schindel, Rajeev Prakosh, Kshitij Shah, Martin Thai, Dan Cohen, Gary Glass, Jose Mejia, Sherwin Yen, John Salas, Karen Acosta, Maria Shepler, Krystal Limsiaco, Garima Gandhir, Mohan Gadam, Vikram Suraparaju, Ibrahim Mansour, Derek LeJeune and Kate Tindall. Additionally, Diana Wagner of Hospice Austin and Radhika Nayak of Austin Palliative Care were kind to Rose near journey’s end. We offer thanks and gratitude to all the other doctors and nursing staff, nursing assistants, personal attendants and other personnel assigned to the third and fourth floors in the north and east wings of St. David’s North Medical Center in Austin. Rose at one time or another was hospitalized in every room there, with overflow into the Baylor Scott & White Lakeway Hospital, brought there twice by 911 ambulances.

Released from the Lakeway ICU only three weeks before her passing, on the way home a plaintive voice spoke with a long sigh:

“I don’t know how much longer I can do this. We’re gonna get through this, right?”

Her plea excoriated inside of me. An abnormal, deep thorn, ragged and sharp in its pierce, took me to the edge: no doubt as to her resolve, but her body simply could no longer endure.

Suddenly, she slammed the dashboard above the glove box with her right hand.

“I…”

She pounded again.

”…AM…”

and again,

”…GOING…”

punching harder,

”…TO…”

increasing in force, now with both fists into the glove box face,

“...FIGHT…”

harder,

“… TO…”

Fierce intensity…

“…THE…”

Fiery Celtic…

“…END…”

BOOM!

“I AM GOING TO FIGHT TO THE END!!”

She had said those exact words to me, quietly and with moderation, twenty-seven years earlier, under the American Airline logo displayed proudly in a corporate hall.

Hell hath no fury, like a woman scorned…” sayeth Shakespeare. “I would go through hell on Sunday…to see my Rose in paradise…” sang Waylon Jennings. Carrying me on her shoulders, Rose strode through that malevolent abyss seemingly forever and while not ignoring the agony, would in her toughest hours embrace it, challenging disease and despair with the well-known Texas mantra of “Come and Take It!!” She would not stop to let me down. We cherished her remissions so, her magnificent resolve rekindled, unbridled - never yielding.

Doctor Shah called me late on the first night of Rose’s last hospital stay. Rose was deteriorating…badly. She had declined during the past two years, which I lacked the courage to accept. She might not make it to dawn. “I want to get her home…with dignity,” he said, his words weighted down by COVID-19 instability. He did not want her to die alone.

“I wrote down exactly what she said,” Dr. Shah intoned with sympathy, sweet and not obscure. I was allowed into the ER earlier due to good fortune and extreme intensity. I “appropriated” a white coat to accompany her portage upstairs, but was captured by a charge nurse who recognizing me, was reluctant in her apprehension.

Driving home, a lonely man fearful of being left behind, I pulled over to the side of the road to listen to Doctor Shah. The tone of his good voice, while serious, was soothing as he read what Rose said to him before drifting into exhaustion:

“Doctor, I appreciate all the good medical attention you, Dr. Prakosh and so many other doctors and nurses here have given me for such a long time. I accept my medical attention. I am ready to go to heaven.”

Two days later I removed my mask and hers, kissing her intensely after she was wheeled out of St. David’s for the final time. “You are the best kisser,” she said, faintly, her vulnerable smile blending with kind sunlight. “Another miraculous recovery!!” I exclaimed. Left unsaid, we both knew it would be her last.

She collapsed, barely conscious, three times in my arms. “Please, let me go,” she said, the day before she died. She passed at home on August 29th, surrounded by her loving family and wrapped in faith, having consecrated herself to the Blessed Virgin Mary a long time ago. Reaching out, her gaunt face aglow, her last word to me was “Beautiful.”

- Randy Harper

Lakeway, Texas

September, 2020

A Memorial Service and Internment will be held at Saint John Neumann Catholic Church, 5455 Bee Caves Road, Austin, Texas on Saturday, September 26th, beginning at 1:00 PM. All are welcome. Proper and safe COVID-19 protocol. This celebration will be video-graphed and available shortly thereafter at https://www.mykeeper.com/momentos/RoseHarper/. Contributions in lieu of flowers may be sent in Rose’s memory to: United Ostomy Associations of America, Inc., a 501 (c) (3) non-profit: PO Box 525, Kennebunk, ME 04043. Unfortunately due to COVID-19 there will not be a reception after the Memorial Service.

Rose is survived by: her husband Randy; five children: Stella with husband Sean, Dorothy with husband Steve, Joel with wife Lindsay and their two children, Henry and Kate; Joey; and, Theresa. She also is survived by her brother Vince O’Dwyer and his wife Celia; her brother Mike O’Dwyer and his family; five Harper sisters-in-law and their families: Theresa Valeriote, Sally Walitsch, Susie Spurgeon, Jackie Harper and Mary Beth Petersen; her brother-in-law Richard, his wife Patti and their five children; her sister-in-law Lynn and her sons Adam, Bill, Nathan, Phillip and their families; nephews Derek and Colin Bailey and their families; sister-in-law Joy Hillier and family; cousins Kathy Sackett & Joe O’Dwyer, along with a host of the O’Dwyer and Waisner clans and other ancestral progeny throughout Missouri; and a legion of bridge-playing Tuscan Villagers and other godly women, experts with the rosary, united by faith and blessed by the company of The Yellow Rose of Texas.

*Large stone wall and chain link fence, topped by barbed wire in some places

**Slang for Naval Academy security personnel

***Naval Academy campus