In Memory of Joanie Williamson Cushing
On Sunday morning, October 24, 1999, Joanie lost her hard fought battle with cancer.
She will be greatly missed by her family and friends.
A message from Joanie's husband
If felt the touch of the angel
very early this morning it was just Joanie
stopping by to say farewell on her way to heaven.
Joanie left gently and at peace.
As I sit here with tears streaming down
my cheeks, I want to thank you from the bottom
of my heart for all have meant to the both of us.
-All my love, Frank
"Thy word is a lamp unto my feet
and a light unto my path.
When I feel afraid, think I've lost my way,
still you're there right beside me,
And nothing will I fear as long as you are near
Please be near me to the end"
-Amy Grant
Joanie, your strength, happiness and unfailing love
in your time of pain and suffering.
You will always be a lamp unto our feet.
May we all learn from what you endured.
You will be missed by all of us
and we will always love you.
-Durk Jones '57
Joanie was a wonderful lady. She knew
no lines of distinction between people.
Everyone was welcome as a friend,
until they proved otherwise. I will
never forget her spirit. To me, she
was the embodiment of Narimasu spirit.
I can not imagine the world without her.
-Sue Moore '57
- by Bob Higdon '57
- In the high school yearbook on page 152, the one with the cheerleader photos, she kneels in what is probably known in the trade as position #2A --- face stage right, place hands on hips, drop to right knee, smile confidently at camera. You can almost hear the photographer saying, "Three-two-one-light up!" And she lights up. Pop. "Joan Williamson," the caption reads, but she was "Joanie" to everyone who knew her.
It was 1956. She was just sixteen but already was on top of the world. How could she not have been? The year earlier she'd been elected to the student council and to our sophomore class council. As a junior she was our class vice-president and a cheerleader. She made it look easy. That's the real mark of the pros; you know what they're doing, but you don't know how they do it.
"Remember our hard working council!" she wrote in my yearbook.
I'm sorry. I can't. My memories are fading and seem now to be filtered through a glass darkly. Still, I can't forget Joanie, lit up, eternally restless for something more to do, a dervish in full, committed whirl. In the back of a bus one night she and Curtis Kitsu locked themselves in a kiss that lasted from Pershing Heights to Washington Heights. I told Larry Ledbetter that Joanie must have been trying for a world record. No one had ever seen her sit still for that long.
I look at the photo again and smile. She has found the secret of eternal youth on this spring day. You can see it in her eyes. Pop. The camera doesn't even try to lie. Forget the Most Popular or Most Athletic or Most Likely to Succeed. You're looking at the alpha-female here. She can't miss. She won't.
Navigating through the tumultuous seas of high school is not a task for the unfit. Here one learns the basic structure of teen society: cliques, countercliques, and metacliques. One finds the proper methods to reduce fellow classmates to rubble with a cutting remark, a dismissive frown, or a pop to the head. We study rumor, propaganda, agitprop, counterintelligence, and other tools of war. A few, a precious few like Joanie, bypass those lessons in favor of simple charm. She wins office and becomes a cheerleader because she likes her classmates and they like her. The concept seems too simple to work but it works effortlessly for her. Things seem clear to her that merely baffle the rest of us.
The only thing that she doesn't understand yet is death. None of us did, not in any mature way. We were at the worst imaginable age then: too young to think straight, too old to cry. But we would learn. Everyone learns about death one day.
I saw a glimmer of it the following year when my father picked up the telephone one night. His childhood friend, maybe the only real friend he'd ever had, was dead. One minute his heart was beating, they said; the next minute it wasn't. He was 47. My father put the phone down. He looked at us blankly. A light had gone out of his eyes.
Thirty years later he too was dead. I sat on a stone bench outside the hospital, staring at the ground, unable to comprehend that he was gone. Between my feet an ant wandered aimlessly back and forth. This was straight out of the final scene of King Lear. A live ant here; a dead father there. I can talk to the ant; the cord between my father and me is broken for eternity. Thou'lt come no more. Never, never, never, never, never.
My brother and I buried him. I was 47. I could almost feel a light going out of my eyes. It was the first funeral I'd ever attended. I wanted it to be the last. It wasn't.
The disasters have recently begun to cascade. Six weeks ago, on September 12, the finest woman motorcyclist I ever knew died at 52, the victim of hospital error. On that same day a friend from Great Britain was killed in a motorcycle race in Europe. A week later his wife, grief stricken, checked into a hospital and within hours was dead. Dottie Hurd was killed on September 23 in an accident in Hungary. Days later the teen-age son of a friend was paralyzed in an automobile wreck. I was reaching a point where I was almost afraid to open mail or pick up the telephone.
We knew Joanie was under siege. Sue Moore's poignant e-mail last
year told of lesions already out of control. "She cheered for you," Sue reminded us. "Now it's your turn to cheer for her." I called Joan. She immediately cheered me up. Only later did I realize how, like Mandrake the Magician, she had quietly gestured hypnotically and turned the pep talk
upside down. As I said, she was a pro.
I hadn't been looking forward to October 24. It was to be my 60th birthday. I've always despised the ones that are evenly divisible by ten. Then I learned that Joanie had died in the early morning hours. I could not escape the feeling that even in death she was still trying to teach me something about keeping things in perspective. I'm trying, kid. Believe me.
So now our little band, the generation of displaced kids coming of age in the 1950s in a strange and often incomprehensible land, has been imperceptibly reduced again. A piece of our collective memory has vanished. It's the worst part of death, I think, that broken link. It burns a hole in our soul.
This hurts. I really cannot deal with the idea that she is not here now. Those thirty months I spent in Japan do not represent even 5% of my life, but they do represent a disproportionately large part of the happiest memories that I have ever had. That's why I find myself returning to page 152 where Joanie, sweet sixteen, is smiling for the ages. There is a wonderful light in her eyes. I want to sit here, staring at this image of inexpressible innocence, until she explodes off the page one last time to chase away this bitter irony, that when we have never needed a cheer more, our cheerleader has perished.
Go, Dragons, go.
Please.
Bob Higdon