Linda Rosann Pearson
Linda, a long time resident of Brookfield, Wis., was received in God’s loving embrace on February 7th, 2017 at the young age of 54.
She is survived and dearly missed by her loving parents, Jack and Margaret Pearson, her sister Jennifer Niemi (Eric) and her cherished nieces, Elinor and Aanikka.
Linda is survived by many relatives in California and her dear uncles Werner and Alfred Berkenstraeter and their families in Germany. She is further survived by many good friends and her loving collie Amber.
Visitation will be held on Tuesday February 14th from 4:00PM to 6:00PM with service to follow at Schramka Funeral Home. For more information please visit the Schramka website http://www.schramkafuneralhome.com/

By Jack Pearson

Goodbye Dear Linda;
You’re With God Now

Our beloved daughter, Linda, an absolutely beautiful human being, tragically lost her life in a fire on February 7th.
I realize that just about everyone who reads this publication has lost a loved one at some time or another, and have had all the heartache and grief my wife Margaret, myself and other daughter Jennifer are now going through. But heartache and grief are intensely personal matters. Thus I feel it’s sort of presumptuous for me to bother anyone else wit ours. But Maureen Slattery, the publisher of this publication, has known Margaret and myself and our daughters for many years, and asked me to put together a few words.
Linda had so many wonderful traits; yet on specifically I always so admired; and it is, sadly, the one which in all likelihood was the cause of her death. She had an almost unbelievable empathy for animals, and all of God’s furry and feathered creatures. Once she saw a tiny baby mouse in our back yard, struggling to move. She picked it up and placed it on a pillow in her room, and even found an eyedropper to feed it a little milk. After a few weeks it had grown stronger and bigger and she took it out into the woods and released it. She was that way with all animals and birds. During her lifetime we had five collie dogs; each of them loved her and fussed over her far more than they did me. Animals have an inner sense of who to trust, which is why so many of them came to her, even animals from the wild.
But despite all this, Linda also had a difficult life. From teenage on she was afflicted with alcoholism. That was the reason she still lived at home with us. She was also a member of the AA and the Waukesha Alano Club.
When the police came to our home afterwards to inform us of what happened, they told us that she had been visiting at a friend’s home, that at the time he had been away at this night job, and that she and the friends’ adult son and the family dog all were in the house when the fire broke out. They said that Linda and the dog had been killed, and that the son was badly burned but alive. They said the son told them that he and Linda had managed to get out of the burning house, but that for some reason she had bashed back in, and of course never got out again. It was at first I assumed that she had gone back in to retrieve something, such as her purse or jacket. I just could not agree with that assumption; that she would have re-entered a burning blaze for such things. Then, in my troubled sleep that night, it came to me. After she was safely outside, she undoubtedly heard the wails and screams of the small dog, trapped inside. Which is why she ran back into the terrible inferno to save the dog. And lost her own life. I do not know this for a fact, naturally. But if you had known Linda at all, you’d know that’s what she would have done.
And now, our darling Linda is gone. She was not a child; she was past 50 in age. But our children are always our children. We will always love and cherish her memory, and miss her more than words can ever say.
Linda is in heaven now, and if there are animals there, she’s probably helping to care for them. God willing, we’ll see her some day, and be together again.

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