The Joans

My family lived in a suburb south of Chicago – minutes actually from the city limits. Prior to that, my mom and dad lived in an apartment with three small boys that was bursting at the seams. I don’t know much about those years except that my mom talked so fondly of their neighbors, Gladys and Al, that I felt like I knew them even though I never did. My dad credits my Uncle Moe (the never-married brother of my grandma who lived with her and my grandpa until his death) with giving them the means to buy a house. My dad said his uncle watched them struggle to keep things afloat and gave them money for a down payment on the house we all grew up in. My Uncle Moe was mostly an elusive figure in my life. He wasn’t in many family photos as he worked nights at the steel mill, but I knew my dad was grateful to him his entire life for the help he gave him when he was a young father.

The house by any standard was a starter home. Small, no basement, one full bath, another with a sink, toilet, hot water heater, freezer, and a plastic bucket taped to a vent in the ceiling to keep the birds out. Eight people were crammed into that little house – it’s saving grace a big backyard where we all played.

We spent the first eight years of our school lives at St. Jude the Apostle – an actual barn when my parents first moved there. For all of us life revolved around the church and school and Mom and Dad volunteered for a lot. How with six kids they found the time I do not know. But because of that nearly all of their friends were fellow parishioners, fellow parents with many kids, fellow adults who knew how to be of service and have fun doing it.

One of those friends was named Joan Kelly. Her husband, David, ran a drywall business and they had eight kids. Many of their kids were the same age as some of us so the Kellys were part of our lives for a very long time. Mrs. Kelly knew everything about everyone. My sister and I were a year apart and nobody could get our names straight except Mrs. Kelly. She never even had to guess – she just knew. She knew each one of my brother’s names, who their teachers were, which one of them were the same age as one of hers. My mom loved Mrs. Kelly – if she told us that once she told us a hundred times. Joan was funny, she was a spitfire, and she was a dear friend. Mom would cross paths with her and hear one of her kooky stories and would retell us at dinner. “That David is a saint,” Mom would say. My dad was the first of their large group of friends to die and years later David and many others would follow. I was so sad for Mrs. Kelly when I heard the news. From the stories my mom and dad told it seemed that David was the straight guy to her comedy routine. What was Lucy supposed to do without her Ricky?

Years later the people who started that church and school started moving further west (my mom included) and they would have yearly reunions. When she would see Mrs. Kelly at one of those (or more likely a funeral) she would fill us in on what she was up to – it was like getting an update on your Auntie Mame.

When you live to be my mom’s age you don’t have many friends left and the ones who are either don’t get around very well or are in assisted living. Most of the people who came to her wake were people who knew my mom through all of us which was our own sort of reunion. A few hours into the visitation and balancing on two canes, in came Mrs. Kelly with her niece. News of her arrival spread fast. My sisters talked to her first and then I made my way over to her as she sat in a chair in the front row. She had hardly changed, her eyes the kind of blue that looked like a pool you could dive into. She watched the screen with tears in her eyes as it showed photo after photo of my mom’s life and said, “Oh will you look at our girl? She was beautiful inside and out.” I sat on the floor at her feet and she turned to me and said, “I loved your mom and dad.” “It was mutual,” I said and pulled my grade school friend over and told Mrs. Kelly her name. “Oh, yes, of course I know you Pat. You’re Chuck and Helen’s daughter, aren’t you,” she said and then listed family after family that she knew who lived on the street Pat grew up on. We had a long talk with her and caught up on Peggy, the daughter of hers that was in our class. Will was standing nearby and I motioned him over to meet her, “My god, you look just like your grandfather,” she said when she laid eyes on him. She was the same Mrs. Kelly we had always known and told us a story of becoming the girls softball coach because somebody asked her if she could. She agreed without have any idea what she was doing, pushed a stroller with one of her babies across the field, and winged it from there. “That’s what we did back then,” she said, “and nobody cared if you knew what you were doing or not.” She filled us in on the rest of her kids, grandkids, and great grandkids. I’m not sure if I was distracted or someone I knew was leaving and I got up to thank them for coming, but when I looked again Mrs. Kelly was gone. I hoped she would be at the funeral the next day but if she was I never saw her.

I think most families have a Joan – the relative or family friend who lights up the room with their stories, their interest in your life, their humor and kindness. To have my mom and dad gone and see Joan walk through the doors of that funeral home, which like my mom for many years was a too regular occurance, was a beam of light on years gone by. She knew things about both of them as her and David’s friends, carried stories within her we could never know, and hobbled in with her niece and canes to tell us.

If you ever have a fleeting thought that your presence at a funeral is not necessary I hope you realize that you are the living record keeper of a story that a family may have never heard, a story that will bring light and a smile as you say farewell. How else would I have known that the time our not-even-five-foot mom played Tattoo, dressed in a white tux with her short dark hair and pointing to the sky saying, “De plane, de plane,” in a Fantasy Island spoof that was a church fundraiser, would be talked about by Joan and all my parents’ friends for years. As she lay in a casket just feet away it was Mrs. Kelly’s storytelling that erased the dementia and made Mom shine again.

If there was a prayer I had after that night was over it was gratitude followed by a plea to the universe to protect The Joans in our lives at all costs.