Pearl Hasenbank

Pearl Hasenbank, 96, of Maple Bend, died at home on Saturday, May 23, 2026, ninety-six years and five months after she arrived on a Christmas Eve in the same township — a present, her father liked to say, that nobody had budgeted for and nobody sent back.

She was born December 24, 1929, the fourth of Jacob and Wilhelmina Broekhuis's seven children, in a farmhouse north of Maple Bend that had no electricity and, on the night she came, no doctor who could get through the snow. She was delivered by her grandmother and an aunt by lamplight, and she liked to say she had been turning up at inconvenient hours ever since.

In 1949 she married Clarence Hasenbank, home from the Navy and farming his father's ground on Cypress Road, and they were married fifty-one years. She raised six children, kept the farm's books at the kitchen table in a hand no bank ever questioned, put up enough beans and tomatoes each August to bury the cellar shelves, and ran the household with a plain competence that never once asked to be noticed and never once failed.

But it was cards that made her famous. For something like seventy years Pearl held the corner seat at the euchre table — Thursday nights, church basements, the Maple Bend grange, kitchen tables all over the county — and she kept the score herself, in ink, in a spiral notebook she guarded like scripture. She did not cheat, did not tolerate cheating, and did not lose with any grace worth mentioning. Four generations of this family learned the game at her elbow: learned that you lead trump when you're sure and never when you're only hoping, and learned that Grandma Pearl counting up your tricks was the nearest thing to a final judgment most of them would meet this side of the grave.

She was ninety-six, a great-great-grandmother five generations deep, and she had outlived nearly everyone who ever sat across a table from her. Some months ago she wrote her wishes on the back of a church bulletin and handed it to her granddaughter without comment. It read, in full: no fuss, one hymn, everybody home by noon. This family intends to honor it to the letter, that being the only way she ever accepted anything being done at all.

She is survived by her children, Janice (Ron) Timmer of Maple Bend, Gary (Sue) Hasenbank of Newaygo, Larry Hasenbank of White Cloud, Ruth (Dave) Sikkema of Grand Rapids, and Cheryl Hasenbank of Maple Bend; seventeen grandchildren; thirty-one great-grandchildren; nine great-great-grandchildren, the newest of them three weeks old; and a euchre deck that will have to keep its own honest score now. Flowers are welcome — she liked peonies, and said so, at length, to anyone who would sit still for it.

She was preceded in death by her husband, Clarence, in 2000; a son, Wayne, in 2019; her parents; and all six of her brothers and sisters.

Flowers are welcome and can be sent to either chapel — Maple Bend Floral ((231) 555-0121) times deliveries to the visitation. More on flowers and remembrances.