On Sunday morning, Annie M. Brooks, mother of Andrew Brooks, went to Heaven to be with Our Heavenly Father. Please keep our family in your prayers as we go through this difficult time. We are continuing to work as much as we can but our hearts are heavy but joyful that Annie/Anne is no longer in pain from colorectal cancer. She fought a good fight for a year and a half, along with a heart attack and stroke during that time period. She must be overjoyed at meeting Kayde, her first great grandchild, for the first time and reuniting with Henry, her husband, and Margaret, her daughter. Anne was a wonderful person who touched everyone’s lives with her generosity and kindness. ~Chris Brooks
Annie was everybody’s mother, so her family is extensive. There were no brief encounters in her life, everyone she met was a personal friend from then on, from dogcatchers to mayors.
She considered it her personal responsibility to feed every hungry mouth she came across. She called herself a simple country woman from Georgia, and had an entire repertoire of the strangest country axioms you ever heard to prove it. But she was comfortable anywhere with anyone, and became the darling of any group she joined. “Everybody loves Annie” is a refrain I grew accustomed to hearing, as I accompanied her in our various adventures together.
She even won friends at our last adventure, weekly chemotherapy for her cancer. She was her doctor’s prize patient, and chemo nurses and patients alike greeted her warmly every time, exchanging Rays Baseball stories and making frequent stops by her chair to make sure she was all right. I’m married to a physician, but I’ve never seen so many doctors cry as I did in Annie’s last few days.
Everybody loved Annie, and I did too.
Barbara Sinnott