The Obituary By Cher Stonestreet Carly Jane Sloan Nelson 80 years - born September 16, 1943, died January 12, 2024. Daughter of Phylis (Gearwood) Sloan and Herbert H. Sloan of Carbondale, IL. Carly’s first love was the forest and nature. As a child she spent many hours in the woods and along creeks and riverbanks observing nature and the animals. She could identify every type of tree and plant and loved to teach others. She graduated in 1963 with a bachelor’s degree in biology from Northwestern University. Then became one of the first female Forest Rangers for the State of Illinois. She wrote many of the pamphlets and travel guides for the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, many of which are still in publication today. Along with writing, her pet projects were planning and executing population counts for creatures in the State of Illinois. Many an evening you could find Carly leading crews into the woods with flashlights shining into the trees looking for specific breeds of owls, or in the daytime turning over rotten logs in search of salamanders or certain insects. Carly met Richard Lawrence Nelson at a conference in Denver, CO. Richard was a Forest Ranger for the state of Missouri. Their letter correspondence and telephone calls soon led to in person visits which within a year led to Richard’s proposal. Carly said she would not live in Missouri, so Richard accepted a job offer with the Illinois DNR, and Carly accepted his proposal. They had a casual outdoor wedding on June 19th, 1965, at Carly’s parents home in Carbondale. Both of them continued working for the Illinois DNR until Richard was tragically killed by a falling tree in the fall of 1972. No children were produced from the marriage. After a period of mourning Carly began her professional writing career. Carly purchased a plot of land that she loved along Clear Creek where she wrote from her hilltop cottage until her death at home. She wrote short stories, children’s books, and then gothic novels and murder mysteries. Carly’s books were published under the pseudonym of Richard CJ Nelson. Her most popular book titles being: Murphy’s Point, The Owls Have It, Situation Unclear, and Done to Death. Carly is survived by her sister Stacy Sloan Davis, brother in law, Jarred Davis, and nephew Phillip Davis. She is mourned by many cousins, friends, fans, and creatures of the woods and streams. Memorial services with Grahm Brothers Mortuary are pending, to be later announced. Her body was immediately interred next to Richard L. Nelson at the Gearwood Family Cemetery outside of Carbondale, Illinois. Memorial contributions can be sent to the Richard CJ Nelson Nature and Environmental Foundation through the Grahm Brothers Mortuary. *** “Stacy did not write this. She may have been available to fill in names and dates, but she didn’t get the gene for wordsmithing, much less for kindness. If she had a hand in any of this obituary it was the sentence, “No children were produced from the marriage.” It always irked her that I could choose not to have children. She didn’t get the gene to say, “No.”. Instead, she got bitter. Perhaps her son wrote this obituary. Phillip being a copy editor in Chicago for a company that manages websites. Phillip, who got his kindness from his grandmother's namesake, Phylis, and certainly not from either of his parents, nor from the Sloans. Scottish roughians, the Sloans say it was their clan who convinced Hadrian to build the wall between Rome and Scotland. Historians say the wall marked the northern border of the Roman Empire. The Sloan’s family narrative says it marked the place where Roman soldiers began pissing on their own feet. The Sloans were mean bastards. “And Grahm Brothers Mortuary? Good luck to the foundation receiving any memorial contributions. The Grahms were rumored to steal false teeth from bodies and sell them in the hollers of Kentucky. Then there was that incident where Grandma Grahm was spotted wearing a scarf Marcia Higgins swore her aunt was buried in. It was a handmade scarf, not store bought. The very public kerfuffle made the local newspaper and caused quite a stir. Editorial opinions were printed in four weekly editions, some opinions teetered on the brink of libel. To appease the community, the Grahms offered to exhume the aunt to prove Marcia wrong, but calmer heads prevailed and no backhoe was required. It’s good to be the only funeral home in the area. “Richard, the kindest man ever to walk upright. Children and animals were magnetically attracted to him. If he had been a woman, he would have been the witch who lived in the forest that the village children brought their sick and injured animals to for healing. But he had no fear, and having no fear kept him in a perpetual state of healing from this wound and that broken bone. Something of a loner, he was usually in his own world, in his own head. Nature did to him what it always does to the stragglers on the periphery. Odd thing to use a tree, though. “I never read any of Richard’s personal journals or diary entries while he was alive. After he died I spent months going through his notebooks, and I mourned not knowing the man in those pages. During our courtship he impressed me with his depth of thought in his letters, but his external life was much simpler. With Richard, what you saw is what you got, so I thought. “I did not plagiarize his work, however his writings were often my inspirations. He was my muse. I wrote to him; I wrote for him. When I was writing something that was initially inspired by him, it gave me comfort and a feeling of closeness to him. We were still a team. “I used his name as a pseudonym not because I needed a male name for my publisher’s solace, (it helped, though), but because I wanted to pay homage to him. The by-product was that I got to maintain my privacy. I wasn’t forced to do book tours. I was able to stay in my own cocoon and live totally in my own world. I became another one of nature’s stragglers. Happily so. “Now in this other existence, Richard and I are once again a team. He found me. Together again we know each other even better, even deeper. And we are off together to new adventures. Happy trails, lovelies!”