Honoring Polly Bingham Arnold

9/6/1942 - 5/25/2015

Location: Ashland, Oregon

Visits: 18,133

Polly Bingham Arnold has died. She was a wife, mother, grandmother, sibling, mother-in-law, friend, Humanist, rational thinker, nurse, Peace Corps Volunteer, world traveler, Soroptimist, rosarian and Democrat.

She attended school through the eighth grade in a two room schoolhouse in rural Tennessee. Her jobs on the family farm included bringing in the cows for milking and, along with her sister, chopping 40 acres of cotton twice a season.

She joined the Peace Corps in 1964 immediately after graduation from college and spent five years in Nepal serving others. In 1969 she hiked to the Everest base camp area and then toured Europe for four months, pregnant, with her two young daughters and husband in tow.

Her second degree was in Nursing. After getting her Masters in Nursing she taught at Memphis State University and then Southern Oregon State College. She became the Director of Nursing and Patient Services at Ashland Community Hospital, a job she held for 26 years.

She traveled extensively. Her last foreign trip, taken after her initial treatment for cancer, was to hike long days, including reaching a height of 10,000 feet, in the Himalayas of Bhutan, visiting yak herder villages amid the mountain sides of rhododendron. She then spent 14 days in Nepal.

Phil, her husband of 51 years, her three daughters Shanti, Jackie and Belle, and her grandchildren Lillie, Mathilde and Roman will miss her acutely, but her memory and the lessons she taught them will remain.

Hers was an examined life, well lived and always guided by her clear internal moral compass.

You are invited to share a toast to Polly with other friends and family at Dana Campbell Vineyards, 1320 N. Mountain Ave., Ashland, on Saturday, June 6 from 6 to 8 PM.

Please go to http://www.never-gone.com/Memorials/Polly.Bingham.Arnold and record your memories of Polly and read what others have said about her.

Her family requests you make a donation in her honor to a vetted Nepal earthquake relief fund such as The Gorkha Foundation http://gorkhafoundation.org or Save the Children http://tinyurl.com/nwxa5w8.