Barbara Seaman

Barbara Seaman, 77, Lawrence, went to be with the Lord August 11, 2023, after a long illness.

Barbara was born September 30, 1945, in McPherson, Kansas to LeRoy and Frances Ellwood. She grew up on a wheat farm near Windom and often wore overalls later in life in honor of her father. She had a natural affinity with the prairie and filled her home with prairie grasses and grains.

At an early age, she began picking out her mother’s piano pieces on the keyboard by ear and started lessons at age 5. By age 6, she was entering competitions. In 1967 she graduated from the Conservatory of Music, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois, with a major in piano. In addition to teaching private piano students, she taught public school elementary and high school music in suburban Chicago, Kansas, and an American dependent school in Incirlik, Turkey. Barbara loved choral music and choral conducting, which she studied at Wheaton. She was a member of the Wheaton Concert Choir and later directed school and church choirs.

Always a bookworm, Barbara found her second career when she discovered that words could make music too. She wrote and published poems, essays, feature articles and short stories in literary and mainstream magazines, and received various writing awards, including an Evangelical Press Association award and the 1999 Ezra Pound Poetry Award for her poetry manuscript Night Harvest. She was the first recipient of the Langston Hughes Poetry Award from the Lawrence Arts Center.

Barbara had an unusual spiritual curiosity as a child which her mother fostered by telling Bible stories by the hour. At her own insistence, she was baptized at age 5 by Pastor Ross Wood in the First Baptist Church of McPherson, Kansas, where her family fellowshipped. Her faith in God continued to grow through the years of increasing illness. She looked to God not for easy answers but for strength and perseverance. One of her favorite Scripture passages was Psalm 139. Her favorite hymn was “O the Deep, Deep Love of Jesus,” which she considered the perfect melding of music and text. She often repeated the first verse to herself for comfort.

Barbara founded an international patient support group for people with the same rare disorder. She had personal contact with several hundred patients, providing information about treatment and medical care. In one case, she was able to facilitate getting an orphan drug to a patient in Macedonia. In a unique collaboration, she worked with a NY research scientist to develop a patient newsletter and website. She also volunteered for several research studies, donating tissue and time.

Barbara met Thomas Seaman while they were both students at Wheaton College and they were married in 1968. They have one son, Derek, born in 1974.

A memorial service of music and readings will be held at the Lawrence Bible Chapel on Sunday, August 13, 2023, at 5 pm. Memorial donations may be sent to the United Mitochondrial Disease Foundation.