Our father Earl Armstrong passed June 25, 2018, and our mother, Cecile Kay Armstrong, passed away six months later, Dec. 18, 2018.

We are all so very proud of our father. Earl spent 25 years in the U.S. Navy. He went from an enlisted man to becoming a proud officer, working his way up to lieutenant.

Cecile stayed at home and worked hard raising six kids. Cecile also spent 25 years working in advertising for the newspapers in cities my father and our family were stationed while he was serving in the Navy.

Earl and Cecile raised their six children in Poway, Calif. When Earl retired from the Navy, the family moved to Oak Harbor on Whidbey Island. Earl started building homes and built his family a beautiful home that looks over the Puget Sound facing the Olympic mountains. Later they moved to Maple Falls near the bottom of Mount Baker, then spent the last year of their life living with my oldest brother, Glenn, and his wife, Sheilah.

Earl and Cecile spent their lives loving their family. The love that they felt for each other and the love for their kids could not be measured by words. They spent their life teaching their kids all that they could, always uplifting them and letting them know they could always do better. They had ways of teaching from the smallest things to the most emotional lessons in life.

Nothing Earl or Cecile taught their children could prepare them for losing their parents and best friends.

They built their lives around their kids, from family outings camping and fishing to garages sales, or just sitting around the table sharing the times that meant the most. Those are the times our parents loved the most.

Our laughter and love, the stories, the memories we each can share will go on for a life time.

We kids and spouses Glenn (Sheilah), Daniel (Terri), Thomas (Becky), Susan (passed in 1998), Gary (Calina) and Jennifer (Raymond) and 54 grandchildren and great grandchildren, were our parents’ lives; we were their whole world. Right and wrong, my father and my mother, Earl and Kay Armstrong, made sure us kids came first, even before them.

Arrangements are under the care of Hawthorne Funeral Home, Mount Vernon, Wash.