05/18/2026
Ellen W. Lee
Ellen Lee left this life on Thursday, May 14, 2026. A memorial service will be held at 12:00 p.m. Saturday, June 6, 2026, at Wilkirson-Hatch-Bailey Funeral Home at 6101 Bosque Blvd in Waco officiated by The Rev. Lance Ousley and The Rt. Rev. Todd Ousley, once the little boys who lived next door and loved Ellen as a second mother. The service will be followed by a reception with food and wishes for favorite stories. If you’d like to wear pink to honor Ellen, her family would heartily encourage that.
Above all, she was a beloved wife, mother and a nurturer of that which gives love and light. Ellen was modeled from kindness, humility, grace and a strong sense of place – stemming both from the ground on which she stood and the purpose she employed in her life. She was tall, dark-haired and beautiful; and, in a singular remarkable way, she never raised her voice in anger. She seemed instinctually to know who might need help, encouragement or loving kindnesses; and she offered these without pause.
In this way, she remained untouched when she left this broken body and mind, stifled by a decade of incremental degradation of function, through Alzheimer’s disease. Her spirit survived unblemished.
As her illness progressed, her children loved her with a renewed urgency of patience, deepened resilience, and with vigilance in allowing her voice to be heard and her security to be felt. Salvation came in whispers of joy and shows of delight, recognition of faces and never-lost utterances of love. Deep calls unto deep, as the Psalm says.
Ellen Jane Waddle, sister to Robert and daughter of Nelle and Howard Waddle was born into this world on April 30, 1942, in Atlanta, Georgia. Through her birth and her mother’s lineage she was a child of the Old South, by way of a long ancestral line of Joels and Johns and one Miss Alice, a trumpeter – all ministers seeking to follow the Methodist dictum of John Wesley. “Do all the good that you can, By all the means that you can, In all the ways that you can, To all the people you can, As long as you can.”
Through her father’s Midwestern and Pennsylvania Dutch beginnings, Ellen learned optimism from struggle. Her father’s childhood was populated with stories of true hardship and real dangers. Howard Waddle became an organic chemist – a man of science, a fierce defender of the common humanity of all people. He was at his core a pragmatist. Howard once suggested to the First Methodist Boy’s Sunday School Class of West Point, Georgia that we humans just might have had our origins when lightning struck the ocean millions, maybe billions, of years ago. (He was a substitute teacher.) Howard had a sign on his office wall quoting Lord Kelvin, which posits that “when a subject cannot be expressed in numbers, it may be the beginning of knowledge, but has scarcely advanced to the stage of science, whatever the matter may be.” Ellen quoted it, religiously. Howard helped design spacesuits for NASA and proffered advice to his children and grandchildren from Piglet and Winnie the Pooh. When Ellen was born, he posted a birth announcement on the bulletin board of the Chemistry Department at Georgia Tech, listing her basic properties: pink in color, insolvent in H20, does not melt.
Her upbringing was the stuff that yields resolute character, a defendable intellect, and a certain step-to-it-tive-ness. Soft and fierce, both.
Leading up to Ellen’s Senior Piano Recital, Miss Estelle told her not to play Liebestraum, by Franz Liszt. She wasn’t ready, said Miss Estelle. But when that day came, Ellen played her designated piece, stood and bowed and then announced: “And now, I shall play Liebestraum.” Miss Estelle needed smelling salts.
This strong sense of place followed her in several ways. It announced itself when she spoke in her beautiful Southern drawl. It defined the time of her youth in her growing- up place of West Point Georgia – a mill town in a time of segregation, as well as her education and time spent at Agnes Scott College and Vanderbilt University. There she won the honor of Miss Vanderbilt Nurse of 1965 – a title telling of its time. Ellen completely ruined the curve in Microbiology class consisting mostly of medical students. She made a 98 on the final. Sorry fellas.
Ellen met her husband of 57 years in Nursing School when they both took care of a baby in the birth defect unit. Ellen was wearing sterile gowns and Dr. Ed Lee, the Chief Resident in Urology at Vanderbilt Hospital, continued to come back to the room, checking the baby’s bandages. His aim was to get a glimpse of her name tag. After their first date at a steeplechase and a Shoney’s Big Boy, their fate was sealed. They married in West Point in 1965 and made their way to Texas.
Ellen endured Ed’s departure to Vietnam and the death of her mother in the same week in 1967. She took herself and her new baby back to West Point to the embrace of her Daddy, her neighbors, and the house on top of Chinaberry Hill -- a place where the mailman went in on Sundays to gather stacks of Airmail that had not been there the day before, tied them up in a bundle with string, and brought them to the front door, announcing to Ellen: “There is news from your husband.”
In a year, Ed returned from overseas. He and Ellen made their home in Waco where they both lived out the rest of their lives. Above all, Ellen was a mother, a wife and a supporter – making a home, secure and loving, from which the path of potential emerged for those who lived and breathed within those walls.
She owned and operated a shop in Waco named for the hill on which she grew up, with her friend and partner Paula Wash. “Like walking into paradise,” someone recently said. She brought comfort to many through her volunteer work at Hillcrest Hospital and her 18 years of leadership at First Baptist Church with her Sunday School class devoted to helping people with intellectual disabilities.
Ellen and Ed gave the world three children --Amy, Jeff and Loren -- who value the presence of dignity above all else. She raised her children to love laughter, give plenty of hugs, find beauty in life and shapes in clouds. She cherished and reveled in the gifts of Allison and Clark and of her grandchildren, of which she had five: Andrew, Ben, Jonathan, Cate and Madeleine, who will no doubt continue her beautiful legacy. This realistically should include serving their own grandchildren Coca-Cola from crystal glasses as soon as they are able to sit in a highchair.
On Thursday, the 14th, Ellen departed swiftly. She was nestled in love and incomparable tenderness by her caregivers at The Residences of Ridgewood. Her children’s voices and arms surrounded her and she knew their presence.
Talitha Cumi “Rise Up, Little Girl,” Jesus said.
Your place is a place of resurrection.
She was preceded in death by her husband of 57 years, Edward M. Lee, MD; her brother Robert Waddle; her parents Nelle and Howard Waddle; as well as her friend and Howard’s second wife, Sarah Beck Waddle.
Ellen is survived by her children Loren Lee of Waco, Amy Lee-Lovelady of Vero Beach, Florida, and Jeff Lee of Frisco; their spouses, Clark Lovelady and Allison Lee; her grandchildren, Andrew, Ben and Cate Lovelady and Jonathan and Madeleine Lee; her nieces, Wendy Waddle and Christy Pernat and their families; her sister-in-law, Susan C. Waddle and her dear cousins.
The family invites you to leave a message or memory of Ellen on her “Tribute Wall” at www.WHBfamily.com
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