For my buddy JoAn 1930 - 2013 JoAn’s Eulogy JoAn was a pistol. She asked me, several months ago, if I would do her the favor of speaking at her funeral and I said I’d be honored, but those would be the first words out of my mouth. She was okay with that. I met JoAn about a decade ago. We attended a weeklong Blandin Retreat together and I was immediately attracted to the wicked gleam in her eye and the occasional subversive comment she would interject. She had been added to the group in an effort to bring age diversity to the discussions, but in many ways she was the youngest person there. I liked the way she looked at the world with fresh eyes, seeing things very clearly. It was an admirable trait, but sometimes not a very comfortable one when her gaze came your way. The first piece of her art she gave me was a sketch she’d made on hot summer’s day when I was a speaker at a park dedication. I was just one of many dignitaries sitting on a hay rack in the summer sun and she was immediately aware and attracted to the way my bald head was beginning to gleam the longer the other guys spoke. The sketch was a fairly accurate portrayal of me in my good suit, with my head glowing red. I still have the picture and I still remember the mischievous look on her face when she gave it to me. And I may have passed some slight test with her when I was able to laugh out loud at myself, because she had little patience with people who couldn’t. It wasn’t long after the painting when she told me the story that made me adore her. She was telling me about her childhood. As she told me, her father lost everything in the Depression and it ruined him. That sort of thing happens – if hard times hit when you’re young you feel like you can work your way through it and if they come when you’re old you can just kind of coast to the finish line, but if they hit you at a certain age, it breaks your heart. Apparently, her father was one of those people and he started to drink a great deal. Her clearest memory of Christmas as a child was that she and her mother would sit around the house waiting and her father would stumble in around midnight, drunk and crying. Drunk because that’s what he did and crying because he’d spent all the money for Christmas presents on booze. They’d get him to bed and then exchange dime store bottles of hand lotion and call it a night. She told me she was once part of a writer’s group composed mainly of older women and one week their assignment was to write down their favorite Christmas memory. The next week the other ladies all read aloud their stories of making gingerbread men with their grandmothers or long sleigh rides through the woods. When everyone else was done JoAn read hers. “JoAn,” I said, “how did that go over?” “Like a turd in the punch bowl,” she said. It was after that I began to learn more about her, about her years spent raising her children and working at almost every job available to do so, about how she’d wanted to go to art school right out of high school and had been talked out of it and so after she retired she looked for the cheapest place to live she could find so she could finally devote her time to finding out if she was in fact a painter. And she was. That was just so cool…so inspirational. She took her art seriously, worked at it like it was a job and was getting better at it right up until the very end. We live in a world where so many folks aspire to hit 62 and spend the rest of their lives working on their golf game, but JoAn was so much more than that. So much more. I remember when I first met her cousin, Garry Ion. JoAn had some sort of operation – a knee replacement or the like – and I’d smuggled her in a chicken strip dinner from Dairy Queen to take away the curse of the healthy food she was being fed and I asked her if there was anything else I could do for her and she mentioned that her cousin from England was coming in by way of Uganda and could I please pick him up at the Watertown Airport? How could I say no to that? It was February and after I picked Garry up I was apologizing to him for the South Dakota in winter landscape and he looked around and said, “No land mines. That’s a plus.” I heard from Garry last week. He was eight the first time he met JoAn and she was an exotic creature to him. She came bearing gifts – he described her as seeming like Mother Christmas and she knew far more about every branch of his family than he did. Scamming rides across the countryside with various distant relatives she was a whirlwind of activity as she painted and dug into her genealogical research. Later as they both moved onto the Internet she became his wise council. Although they only met in person five times he counted her as one of his closest advisers. He shared with me the last email she sent him. It reads, in part, “You, dear Garry, have expanded my horizons as well. And know that I come from a long line of tough old broads. My grandma Edna was widowed at a young age and left with six kids to raise. She was not educated so she hung wallpaper or took care of the sick for a dollar a day to feed her children. She then worked in a nursing home until she was older than all her patients. She had had colon cancer and survived that. Finally, she had breast cancer and that did her in. I was out to see her in the hospital and she was hooked up to all sorts of tubes and I started to sniffle and she just bawled me out. She told me, “Don’t cry for me. I have had a good life. You take care of your own life and raise your kids. I have never forgotten her message. I don’t want anyone crying for me, either. I’ve had a great life. If I have been able to give young people a hand that I have met along the way I am glad. Take care, live good, love you, JoAn.” The last visit we had with JoAn was very good. She got up, pretended to eat a little, told stories, laughed at memories and we were able to say our goodbyes before she faded with pain. I fretted about whether we should go back and visit more, but in the end decided not to because even though she clearly did come from a long line of tough old broads I didn’t see the point of making her pause in her long painful trip. I don’t know if that was a correct decision or not, but it’s past now, and all I can suggest is that we all follow her advice. Take care and live good. We love you, JoAn.
Posted on: Mon, 29 Jul 2013 19:39:01 +0000
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