Annette Olliff Heston

Annette Heston passed away peacefully May 12, 2026, at Angel Care Memory Unit in Land O’Lakes, FL, after a long decline due to dementia. She was born September 27, 1933, in Metter, Georgia. She was the youngest of five children born to Harvey Louis and Mabrey Watson Olliff. Annette graduated from Metter High School and then moved to Ludowici, Georgia, with her parents. While working as a waitress in the bus station in Ludowici she met and later married Air Force Sergeant Kenneth Heston. They had two sons, Jerry and Douglas. Annette made a home for her family at various Air Force stations including Bossier City, LA; Madrid, Spain; Omaha, NE; Wiesbaden, Germany; and Tampa, FL. After Ken’s retirement from the Air Force, they moved to Cedar Rapids, IA, but several years later, following their divorce, Annette moved back to Florida and then in the mid-1990’s moved to Memphis,near her son Jerry and his family. For the last year of her life she lived in Land O’Lakes at a memory unit near her other son, Doug.She worked as a logistics and customer service agent at several companies along the way, including ConAgra in Tampa, Vector Corporation in Cedar Rapids, and Leaf and Excel Logistics in Memphis. She travelled further than a small town Georgia girl could have ever imagined; everywhere she went she took her warm smile and Southern hospitality with her.

And wherever she was, her favorite place was always in the kitchen, cooking, baking, canning, or preserving food for her family and friends, as well as for ‘relatives of relatives’ and ‘friends of friends’ all of whom she considered Family. She expressed her love with fried chicken, the famous 14 layer cake, pasta salad, potato salad, canned tomatoes, spaghetti sauce, fried apple tarts, the pear tart, banana pudding, and whatever your favorite cookie was. Her second favorite thing to do was visiting family and friends and when any visit was planned, her first response was always a joyful, “I’d better start cooking.” Even at the end of her life, after dementia had erased her recipes, she often asked about who might be visiting, who was coming and who was going, and would end with, “Well, I better start cooking,” which was her way of saying she loved all of you, whether you called her Mom, Grandma, MeMa, Grams, Great-grams, Aunt ‘Net, or just Annette.

She was preceded in death by her parents and her siblings Grace, Bernard, Herman and Billy. She is survived by her sons Jerry (Pat Flynn) of Durham, NC, and Doug (Kathy) of Land O’ Lakes, FL; grandchildren Anderson Heston (Lucy) of Takoma Park, MD, Sarah Heston (Josh) of Durham, Nicholas Heston of Tampa, and Ashley Finney (Joe) of Land O’Lakes; great-grandchildren Molly, Brayden, Emmett, Louise, Evie, Leo and Brooks; and many nieces, nephews and ‘like-grandchildren’ from South Carolina to Georgia and Florida, through New Orleans and Memphis, across Tennessee, and up into Iowa and the upper mid-west.

Funeral services and burial will be held at Rosemary Primitive Baptist Church in Metter on Sunday May 31, 2026, at 2:00 PM. To honor her memory make dinner for someone you love, take someone to the best fried chicken place in town (don’t try to fry it yourself, it won’t be as good!), bake a batch of cookies for a neighbor or (and!) make a donation to your local food bank. Kennedy Funeral Homes, Hooks Chapel, of Metter is in charge of arrangements.