Elsa Ann Emmerich Jamison was born on February 14th 1936 in McComb, MS.  She departed this life on September 25th, 2016 in Cypress, TX.  Elsa's parents were former Methodist Missionaries to Japanese occupied Korea.  Her childhood was spent in Methodist parsonages, most of it in the Louisiana Conference of the Methodist Church.  This upbringing in a strongly religious, but intellectually demanding household, shaped a mind filled with intense creativity and curiosity.

Elsa attended Centenary College in Shreveport, LA.  As a lunchroom cashier, her difficulties making change in the cafeteria line introduced her to a pitcher on the school baseball team, Lawrence Jamison.  She and Lawrence were married in 1956.

Elsa was a creative and engaging mother of three sons; Lee, Andrew Christopher, and Dennis.  The home she made was filled with the product of her projects.  The family made frequent trips to Arkansas, usually returning heavily laden with particularly artistic rocks and driftwood she had chosen to decorate the walls and gardens of their home.  Her sensibilities as an artist had been strongly affected by her parents' service in the Orient.  Wherever the family moved, she would create a space in the yard reserved for a Japanese rock or water garden.  Elsa enlisted her sons in the production of holiday displays and encouraged them to express school work in the form of creative projects.  In the 1970's and 1980's, the Jamison family was active at Bellaire United Methodist Church where Elsa displayed her creative influence through the family's involvement in the production of summer youth choir musicals where the entire family created sets and her sons were stage-hands and cast members.  Additionally, Elsa created banners and assorted support materials for church services, including a larger-than-life-sized nativity scene that was displayed over the entrance to the sanctuary during advent and the Christmas holidays.

Added to her artistic skills, though, was an almost clockwork mastery of logic and mechanism.  It was not unusual for her sons to come home from school to find that she had spread parts of the family car or television out on a tarp on the floor of the den.  They would then be tasked to assist as she put it back together in working order.  But, most impressively, in the early 1980's she became a self-taught expert in computer programs and systems in support of Lawrence's geophysical consulting.  This was well before G.U.I. systems made it possible to simply mouse-over and click programs to run them.

As though to stabilize the universe God balanced this concentration of capability with malapropisms that became legend within the extended family.  Familial echoes of her admonition to her twin nephews to "Go out and play in the street" returned from as far away as Europe and Asia.  A son was as likely to be addressed with the name of a pet as his own name, simple instructions to clean up after an evening meal could become an exercise in hilarity, and Elsa could literally make an adventure out of boiling eggs.  In a way that could be jarring to outsiders, the easy could be a challenge but, with her, the impossible was possible.

Elsa was preceded in death by her parents, Earl and Katherine Sells Emmerich, her beloved sister, Edith Emmerich Mulling McKenty, and her first cousin, Ouida Fae Morris, who was as close to her as a sister.

Elsa is survived by her husband, Lawrence; sons, Lee Emmerich Jamison and his wife, Melinda Olson Jamison, Andrew Christopher Jamison, and Dennis O'Briant Jamison and his ex-wife Julie Swift Jamison; grandchildren, David Jamison, Amy Jamison Kramer, Amber Jamison, Wesley Jamison, Nicholas Hanson, Jonathan Swift, Kerry Jamison Moore, and Aaron Jamison; great-grandchildren, Lilly Kramer, Mason Kramer, Noah Kramer, and Justyce Moore; and a host of cousins, nieces, and nephews.