Margaret Walker

Margaret Cureton Walker came face to face with her Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, on December 4, 2025. She spent eighty-four years on this earth loving and being loved by her family, friends, co-workers, and those she came into contact with on a daily basis including her care team for the last year and a half from SouthernCare New Beacon Hospice. To know Margaret was to love her. Her kindness to others, her servant heart and her warm and beautiful smile had the power to bring joy and light to those around her. Though she faced many health struggles in the last ten years of her life, she never lost her ability to love and be kind to others even when she was in pain. 

She was born in Greenville, Alabama on March 15, 1941, to Marguerite and Jacob Lander Cureton. She was joined by a baby brother, Jake, with whom she shared a childhood filled with love but marked by tragedy when their beloved father died of a heart attack in June 1951. Margaret attended the University of Alabama where she met her future husband, Chester H. Walker, Jr. They were married on June 24, 1967, and over the course of their fifty-eight year marriage, they welcomed to their family three children (Chester III, Margaret, and John), a daughter-in-law, Sandra(Chester) and two grandsons (Reid and Ryan). 

Margaret and Chester shared a love of opera, classical music and popular music. Chester also taught her how to fish which was something they loved to do together early in their marriage, but also later on as a family with their own children. In addition to a busy life with her family, she worked briefly as a school teacher in Huntsville but mostly as a public servant in a forty-two year long career at the Social Security Administration(SSA) in Birmingham. She was a teacher at heart and was lucky enough to get to teach many of her coworkers at SSA how to perform their technical claims processing jobs. She loved helping her co-workers and making complex technical issues understandable to them. 

After her retirement, she loved to sleep late, spend time with her family and go to Barnes & Noble to buy as many books as she could carry from the store to read. She had a lifelong love of reading that sustained her especially the last year and a half of her life when she was bedridden. Margaret and her husband were members of Dawson Memorial Baptist Church, and when she was no longer able to attend church, she watched services on television almost every Sunday morning. Her love language was food, and she loved to cook meals and bake treats for and with her family. One of the most special things, fondly remembered by her children, that she did every morning before school was to make them breakfast in bed and to pack their lunches all while getting herself ready to go to work. She made the most wonderful desserts and loved making snacks for her grandchildren when they would come over after school. She could cook anything and taught her children how to cook as well. 

She loved her family with all her heart, and the void she leaves behind will never be filled.