A Eulogy For Kristine Erickson

By Her Husband of (Almost) Fifty-Nine Years

Kristine Claire Dykema was born on September 27, 1943 in Flint, Michigan, to Warren and Mary Sinclair Dykema. The family moved to Texas when she was 12. She graduated from Thomas Jefferson High School in Dallas and attended the University of Texas, graduating in 1967 with a degree in interior design. She took classes in art, modern dance, and pottery-making, and sang in the University Chorus.

Kris and I met at UT and in some ways, we were an odd match. She was a city girl who loved to dance. I came from a place that was Very Texas Panhandle and grew up in a Baptist church that scowled on dancing. Nevertheless, she often said that, from the start, she knew that she would marry me.

We began dating in the fall of 1965. I recognized that she was beautiful, intelligent, honest, and graceful. She even had common sense, which was in short supply at UT. In August of 1966, she came to Perryton to meet my parents, Joe and Anna Beth. They adored her. Joe ushered me into a back room and closed the door. “If you don’t marry that girl, you’re crazy.”

Yes, well…I wasn’t quite ready to accept the responsibility of supporting a family. I’d gotten a fellowship for a year’s study at Harvard Divinity School and off I went on a grand adventure. But during the fall semester, my thoughts were never far from Kris, and I gained a new appreciation for her soft, Southern, feminine beauty when I saw the girls around Harvard Square. Some of them, when they walked, reminded me of camels.

Over the Christmas break, I flew to Dallas and late one night, in her mother’s living room, with a quiver in my voice, I asked if she might…would she…well…consider…maybe… perhaps …uh… marrying me?

I was shocked. She screamed! But then she threw her arms around my neck and cried, “YES, YES!” It was the luckiest day of my life, and I was scared to the bone. Oddly enough, she wasn’t. We were married in Dallas on August 26, 1967.

We could choose many words to describe Kris. Let’s start with courageous, resourceful, and adventurous.

After the wedding, we moved all the way across country to Boston. We made our first home in a tiny one-bedroom apartment near Fenway Park. At that time, she thought she was going to be a minister’s wife, living in a big city, a long way from Texas.

Surprise! In 1970, we moved to Perryton and she adapted to life in a small town on the wind-swept Plains. She loved Perryton and never complained that her husband was working at jobs that brought in very little income and had no social status.

She knew that I was trying to write books in the early morning hours and she believed that’s what I was supposed to do. She never doubted it.

In 1974, we moved to Beaver County and she became a cowboy’s wife. She made a home in a trailer house on the Beaver River, 30 miles and 13 cattleguards from town. Before she married me, she had never heard of a cattleguard.

She drove Ashley and Scottie to Vacation Bible School in a little Ford Pinto with no air conditioner, honking the horn at Leland Barby’s cattle and muttering, “Get out of the road, I’m already late!”

Bless her heart, she was always late. The only reason she wasn’t late to her own wedding was that her brother drove eighty miles an hour down LBJ Freeway. She was still sewing lace flowers on her wedding veil.

Kris made her own wedding dress and clothes for the children, but she also had the grit and courage of a pioneer woman. When I needed ranch help, she saddled up and rode with the cowboys. In 2017, a wildfire destroyed our home and everything in it: clothes, shoes, handmade quilts, kitchen, dishes, photographs, books, and a whole galaxy of memories. She cried over the ruins and started again, wearing clothes donated by friends in Perryton.

When I was bitten by a rattlesnake, she drove me forty miles to the emergency room and stayed at my side for two days and nights.

One evening at the ranch, when I was gone on a trip, a coyote came up on the back porch and got into a fight with our dogs. Kris rushed outside, pinned him down with a lawn chair, and managed to trap him in the garage.

Trembling, she called Mark in Amarillo and reported that his mother had just wrestled with a coyote. Silence. Then, “You did WHAT?!!”

In quieter times, she prepared meals for branding crews, worked on archeology digs, and homeschooled Mark and Ashley. For 59 years, she was my barber.

In 1982, her courage received a stern test. After years of failure, trying to get my novels published in New York, I decided to start a publishing company…in our garage…in Perryton…with borrowed money. She should have been scared to death. She could have said:

“Listen, my dear, darling husband. Do you know why nobody has ever started a publishing company in Perryton? Because it’s an incredibly bad, bonehead idea. You might have noticed that we’re paupers…which reminds me, I’m getting a little weary of buying clothes at the KC Shoppe and driving down Main Street in your father’s old cars. Here’s an idea: Why don’t you get a real job and let someone in New York take care of the publishing?”

She didn’t say that. Somehow, she wasn’t afraid and stepped up to help. Pregnant with Mark, she answered the phone, filled book orders, and hauled packages to the post office. She designed the Maverick Books logo. At book signings, she ran the booth, took money, and talked to customers.

When I needed a photographer to illustrate my books, she bought a Nikon camera and figured out how to use it. She found that she had a passion for photography and was good at it. She built her own darkroom and developed her own photographs. She spent decades with a camera in her hands, recording our adventures and preserving memories for our young family.

When I started doing school programs with Hank songs, she bought a mandolin and a chord book and joined me onstage. She played on dozens of Hank songs and lent her beautiful soprano voice to many of them.

When I needed editorial help on the first Hank book, she became my editor, the one who had to say, “John, I’m sorry to tell you this, but this passage is crude. Women who read it will be turned off. Your cowboy pals might laugh, but they don’t buy books. Women buy the books.”

She was also the first to say, “This would make a great children’s story.” It took courage for her to say that because I still aspired to be Ernest Hemingway. In a huff of anger, I roared, “I don’t write children’s books!” It was one of the most misguided statements of my life.

I had always been a slow-learner. The Hank books sparkle with Kris’s humor, wisdom, and good judgment.

Another word that describes her is beautiful. When she walked into a room, ugliness ran for cover. She was beautiful in the usual feminine way (her eyes, smile, and hair) but she also expressed beauty in the things she did every day: teaching her children, preparing meals, decorating her home, making wild plum jelly, tending her plants, quilting, and singing in the church choir.

Other words that come to mind are loving, strong, and godly. She studied her Bible every morning but didn’t talk much about her Christian faith. She lived it. Wherever she was became a holy place. She gave strength to everyone around her, like the sun giving life to flowers.

She made people better than they were before. To conceal from her who I really was, I became who I should have been. It was the kind of strength we tend not to notice because the people who have it don’t talk about it.

The last word we can use to describe Kris is serene. It captures her response to Stage Four pancreatic cancer, a very cruel disease. She endured months of pain, nausea, and chemotherapy. She watched as her body grew frail and her beautiful hair fell out. She never whimpered or complained. She faced it with the serenity she had brought to everything in her life.

Her main concern was that she had become a burden to her family. When Mark and I sat in silence in her hospital room, she said, “Quit staring at me! Why don’t you go do something?”

After teaching us how to live, she gave us a tutorial on how to face death with courage and dignity. Today, in her beloved church, we remember that she was a lovely, luminous part of God’s grand design. The author of Proverbs might have been thinking of her when he wrote:

“She opens her mouth with wisdom and the teaching of kindness is on her tongue…Her children rise up and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praises her. Many women have done excellently, but you surpass them all.” Proverbs 31:26-29

Amen. We were so blessed to have known her!