Dianne Hager

She was born on October 20, 1946, in Chicago, but grew up in Decatur, Alabama, the only child of Walter and Stella Murphree. She loved spending time on the family farm and in the family store with grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins. She loved shooting mistletoe out of trees with her grandfather and cooking biscuits with her grandmother. She came from a big extended family with cousins who were more like siblings, and she remained close to them her entire life.

She was a skilled waterskier on the Tennessee River, a talented drummer in the Decatur High School band, and accomplished pianist who -- despite a ligament impairment in six of her fingers that greatly limited her range and mobility -- won numerous competitions. Her favorite piece to play was Tchaikovsky’s Concerto No. 1 in B-flat minor. She loved playing it, she said, “To prove I could.” When asked how she handled all the octaves in the piece, she once shrugged, “You just do what you can do.”

As much as Dianne excelled at piano, she always preferred voice, and she studied math and vocal performance at the University of Alabama before switching her major to elementary education. She was a soloist with numerous choruses from grade school to college, and she enjoyed all of them -- except the times she had to solo on “How Beautiful Are the Feet of Them that Preach the Gospel of Peace” from Handel’s Messiah because she found it hard to sing that song without giggling.

She used her voice often in her first grade classroom and in the countless Sunday School classes she taught over the decades because she felt it was important to teach the way children learn, and children learn naturally, she always said, when you make it interesting and fun. So she taught with games and music...so much so that it became a family joke that if someone came upon something new or strange, they should tell Dianne because she “probably had a song for that.”

Without a doubt, Dianne’s favorite place to sing was in church. She grew up at Grant Street Church of Christ in Decatur, and for the past eighteen years worshipped at Riverchase Church of Christ in Birmingham. In the midst of four-part harmony a cappella worship, Dianne’s soprano would hover throughout the sanctuary like it was straight out of heaven...which it was. If you never heard her sing, you missed out.

Dianne was diagnosed with MS in 1975. Soon after, the family moved to Birmingham permanently. She was legally blind for several years, then once her sight came back, she began to lose the ability to walk. In 1998, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, and in 2007, she had a stroke. If anyone had an excuse to be bitter with the world, it was Dianne.

But she wasn’t. Instead, she chose to make the most of her time here, to be a blessing to others any way she could. No matter what kind of day she was having, she always had a smile and a kind word for everyone. She never met a stranger, and she excelled at entertaining fussy children in waiting rooms, hair salons, and checkout lines so their frazzled mamas could get done what they needed to do. It was an amazing gift. She made a difference.

Dianne was blessed with four children, two she gave birth to and two who married in -- but Dianne didn’t much care for terms like “in-laws” so she called them all hers. Jeff and Bama Hager (Mountain Brook) and Kelly and Clint Jacobs (Indian Springs) were her pride and joy.

That is, until she had grandchildren. Dianne was born to be a grandmother, and if you never heard a story about how amazing, funny, kind, and smart her grandchildren were, then you must not have talked to her for longer than 30 seconds. According to Dianne, Ellie Hager, Henley Hager, Kadie Jacobs, Lillian Jacobs, and Henry Jacobs could do no wrong; they were perfect in every way. And, of course, she was correct.

If you were to ask Dianne why she was happy despite such challenging circumstances, she’d tell you two reasons. First, she’d credit her husband, Kenneth Hager. For 44 years, they made a great team, handling every obstacle that came their way, each of them always thinking of the other first. InThe Sound of Music , Maria sings: “Somewhere in my youth or childhood, I must have done something good.” Dianne loved that song and thought of it as “their” song. She sang it often and twice on Iron Bowl Saturdays when Kenneth in his orange and blue and Dianne in her crimson and white would stay on opposite ends of the house and avoid all eye contact. His football loyalties, she often said, were his only real flaw.

The other reason Dianne would say she was able to smile was because she knew God loved her and that nothing -- not cancer nor stroke nor MS, not walkers or wheelchairs, not hospital beds or feeding tubes, not life and certainly not death -- would be able to separate her from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. She believed that.

The family would like to extend their deepest gratitude to the army of friends and family who helped care for them over the years. Without such help with driving, shopping, childcare, cleaning house, errands, food preparation, and Dianne’s health care, living with MS would have been a whole lot harder. Thank you. Listing you all by name would be impossible...well, probably not for Dianne. She probably had a song for that.

A memorial service honoring Dianne’s amazing life will be held at 2pm on Saturday, March 7th at CrossBridge Church, located at 3039 Brook Highland Parkway, Birmingham, AL 35242, with visitation beforehand starting at 1pm.

In lieu of flowers, the family requests donations be made to the Autism Society of Alabama (4217 Dolly Ridge Road, Birmingham, AL 35243 www.autism-alabama.org ) or the Alabama chapter of the National MS Society (813 Shades Creek Parkway, Suite 100B, Birmingham, AL 35209 http://www.nationalmssociety.org/Chapters/ALC).