The Shadow
Doris Lea (Kesler) Metzler
Doris Lea (Kesler) Metzler, 92, of Bridgewater, died peacefully on Sunday, July 23, 2023. The daughter of the late Walter and Ruth (Miller) Kesler, Doris was born October 25, 1930, in the house her father built near the town of Quinter, on the prairie of western Kansas.
Growing up on her parent’s farm, Doris learned the values of honesty, hard work, perseverance, and community with others. Doris witnessed the Dust Bowl years firsthand as she grew up, and she kept an eye on the weather the rest of her life. She told her children, grandchildren. and great-grandchildren stories of dust storms turning day into night, clouds of locusts destroying her mother’s garden (and then eating the paint off the house!), and of the dust shadow made by her baby brother sleeping in his crib. From her parents she also inherited an appreciation for the beauty to be found in the world — birdsong and flowers, a well-kept garden large enough to feed a family, wide blue skies and cloudy ones too, falling rain, music.
After graduating from high school, Doris attended McPherson College in Kansas where she earned a B.A. in English and met and married her first husband David G. Metzler (August 26, 1951), to whom she was married for 59 years. David and Doris together created a home in which they raised a noisy family of five children. They gave each of their children the gift of a secure and loving home in which to grow up, and the living example of two parents who were best friends to each other. Doris is remembered by her children’s friends as a welcoming presence and a wonderful cook whose kitchen door was always open. A favorite time for friends to show up often seemed to coincide with suppertime; there was always room at her table, and food enough.
Doris worked as a second-grade teacher most of her life, and former students remember her classroom as a kind and welcoming place. Particularly important to her was helping her students to learn to read, and not just that, but (as she put it) to love to read. At home, most evenings before bedtime, she would read stories to her sleepy children – and later – to sleepy grandchildren. Down through the years a favorite gift of hers to family members was children’s books, and her great-grandchildren now hear stories at bedtime, too. Doris was a reader herself, of books old and new, fiction and nonfiction, of poetry, and her Bible.
After David died in early 2011, Doris remarried in 2012, to Dr. Dale Vernon Ulrich. Before Dales’s passing in 2021, Doris and Dale had nine good years together, traveling to new places – and familiar ones – to the birthdays, reunions, weddings, and funerals of a family suddenly twice as large as it had been. Both families were blessed by their marriage.
Doris is survived by her children; Laurel Byler (and the late) Joseph, Suzanne Peterson (David), and Steven Metzler (Karen Glick). She is also survived by daughters-in-law Gwen (Slavik) and Diane (Hess); sister Carol Hess, grandchildren; John Metzler, Jenica Huffman, David Metzler, Genita Nolan, Megan Carano, Joey Metzler, Clara Metzler, Riley Metzler, Samantha Maffett, Taylor Metzler, and Nicholas Peterson. Add to that thirteen great-grandchildren, and counting! She is predeceased by daughter Lucinda Ellen Metzler, sons Daniel Wayne, David Burton, and Timothy John Metzler, sisters Lera Kesler and Vivian Norton, and brothers Roland and Sylvan Kesler.
The family will receive friends 6 – 8 p.m. on Friday, July 28, 2023, at Johnson Funeral Home in Bridgewater. A Memorial Service will be held on Saturday, August 26, 2023, at 10 a.m. at Bridgewater Church of the Brethren. In lieu of flowers, the family suggests that memorial contributions be made to Heifer Project International, 1 World Avenue, Little Rock, AR 72202 or Bridgewater Church of the Brethren, 420 College View Drive, Bridgewater, VA 22812.
