Oct 26, 2014 4 min read

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Matt Uram reflected on the life of his mother, Julie Uram, who died as a result of complications from Alzheimer's. In the background is a portrait of Julie and her husband, Andrew. The couple celebrated 65 years of marriage a few weeks before her death.

Katie Roupe/Observer-Reporter

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Julie Uram with pop singer and Canonsburg native Bobby Vinton

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Julie Uram with former President George W. Bush and son Tom Uram

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Julie Uram with Oliver North

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For decades, Sunday afternoons were a time the Uram family devoted to volunteer work in their East Washington home, and that work often meant stuffing envelopes for mailings.

Anyone who has done this knows the routine: crisply fold a letter so it fits snugly into a business-sized envelope.

Julie Uram, who many in the community knew as a human dynamo because she was involved in so many activities, from church to charity to politics, sat down one Sunday afternoon nearly five years ago to stuff envelopes and produced a pile of papers that was helter-skelter rather than precisely prepared. Neither could she seal the envelopes.

“That Sunday, I can picture it,” Matt Uram recalled about his mother’s Alzheimer’s disease. “That’s when I knew. I looked, and I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t think we were there yet. The changes were subtle The doctors realized it. I looked at her eyes, and she was proud that she had done it. That’s when I knew what we were up against. It was a jolt. We needed to get that jolt, and we responded to it.”

Julie Uram was a nurse and former hospital administrator. In Washington, she was a leading organizer of annual Health-o-Rama screenings that began in 1969. She was the first woman to the lead both the local United Way campaign and the Washington County Republican Party. She was active politically at the local, state and national level. She was a president and secretary of St. Lucy’s Auxiliary to the Blind, sponsor of the annual Medallion Ball in Pittsburgh.

In the 1980s, she was president of the Washington & Jefferson College Women’s Auxiliary, which hosted a popular house tour fundraiser. In the next decade, she was a member of a committee that raised $240,000 from the private sector for the Washington Park capital improvement drive, which included structural repairs, painting and cleaning of the Main Pavilion.

“Perfectly groomed and always gracious, Juliana J. Uram sallied forth to meet each day brightly clad, sometimes in patriotic red, white and blue, or other times in bright orange or yellow, colors that mirrored her sunny attitude,” read her obituary in June 2012 when she died at age 87.

In 2007, the Washington County Community Foundation, of which she was a founding member, honored her that year with a Woman of Philanthropy Award for her 40 years of service to community organizations. A headline in the Observer-Reporter about it that year read, “Her charitable work is never done.” The year before, she attended the annual holiday dinner hosted by the Pennsylvania Society, a centuries-old, nonprofit charitable organization.

A fall during a shopping trip led to hip replacement surgery.

“She came back strong after that,” her son recalled.

Matt Uram, job developer for the Southwestern Pennsylvania Area Agency on Aging, is used to working with the elderly. But in early 2008, when he realized his mother could no longer carry out the tasks to prepare a mailing, he was confronting aging on a different level.

“What did we call it back in the day – senility?” Matt Uram asked this past summer at a kickoff at Southpointe for the Walk to End Alzheimer’s.

“She’s the only one who didn’t realize what she was going through. It’s a tough one for me to talk about. It breaks my heart.”

For the last eight months of her life, Julie Uram was a resident of Hawthorne Woods Assisted Living because of complications from Alzheimer’s. It is a comfort to the family that she continued to recognize them, and that she and her husband, Andrew, celebrated their 65th wedding anniversary with Mass at Immaculate Conception just a few weeks before her death.

“I want to remember my mother when she was strong,” Matt Uram said. “To see her cut down by this illness, it shakes you to the core. We’ve got to remember the good times with our loved ones.

“This disease stole our loved one’s memory, but we can remember them.”