A Gentle Death: Part 2 - Joan
By Barbara O'Neil Ross
Part 2: Joan
Next morning I phone the hospice volunteer office: “I'm so sorry to tell you this but the social worker who came to visit yesterday just doesn't seem like the right person for us. Are there other possibilities?”
“Oh yes, please don't worry, there are other choices. Someone I think you might like is our Chaplain, Joan Weber. She's a lovely person. Should I have her call you?”
A few days later there's a ring at the door. On the other side is a middle-aged woman in a mauve wool jacket. She has a soft southern accent and a kind approachable face. I feel a rush of relief. I lead her into the living room and introduce her to my husband. John is wrapped in his flannel plaid bathrobe leaning back in his favorite dark blue reading chair.
Joan tactfully inquires about our religious preferences. “ We are spiritual but not in a conventional ritualistic way.” Wisely she does not push the subject. Later we will talk about memorial service plans, but right now she seems to be here to learn about John and to affirm the value of his life.
[Barbara O'Neil Ross and John H. Ross, 1967]
Over the weeks Joan comes and talks to John about his family and childhood memories. He describes the time he was in the woods with his father trying to chop wood. A slip of the axe sends the blade into John's knee. “Pa” he calls out, “I think a Band-Aid might be needed.” At the hospital John's knee is decorated with more than a dozen stitches.
She hears about his high school football days, and the embarrassment of having his petite mother running back and forth along the sidelines calling out, “Gentle, Johnny. Gentle!”
John tells Joan about our life in a remote part of Colorado where we made furniture and a terrace out of available Aspen trees and red rock and waited in the dark of evening for deer and beaver to appear.
She asks him about his teaching. “How many years have you been a teacher?”
“Oh, about 40 years.”
“And how many students a year?” “Let’s see.....probably 200.” “That would make about 8,000 young people you have influenced over your lifetime. John, you are a born teacher. You have such a calm acceptance of your illness and such a generous spirit and positive outlook. You are still teaching. You are teaching people how to die.”
