Hello to Louann’s Facebook friends. This is Joe. I want to summarize for you the events that led up to Louann’s departure to Heaven:
Louann Boese Fawcett Born April 23, 1955:
On November 2, 2019 at 2:27 AM… Louann was tenderly and lovingly embraced by our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
Louann and I had just returned from a wonderful fun filled all-family trip to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho for seven glorious days late June. But when we got back to Texas in early July, Louann suddenly began feeling very tired and for no apparent reason. She was also having sharp, stabbing, intermittent severe pain in her gut. She thought it might have been a muscle strain from all the walking and biking we’d done. Also, she manifested a red dotted sash like rash around her lower torso and as a large circle on her upper back shoulder. At first, we thought it might be shingles because she’d had bouts with it off and on for the last five years. Later we learned in the hospital from an infectious disease specialist that what she was manifesting wasn’t shingles but rather “something”. He didn’t know what it was because none of his diagnostic tests showed what it could be. After Louann passed I discovered that the rash was from her liver throwing off excessive toxins due to the cancer.
Throughout July her tiredness got worse. Come August she was so exhausted that she took the 2nd off from her beloved office work in Plano, Texas at the Collin County Vital Statistics. During her almost 16 years with them she rarely took sick days off. August 2nd was our 45th wedding anniversary. We went to her primary care doctor for initial diagnostic tests that morning. Louann was also referred out to several specialists to try to find out what was going on with her. After all the doctor’s visits: No one knew. I too was utterly baffled and totally frustrated. Louann asked me if I thought it might be cancer. I told her that her diagnostic tests were all negative for cancer. We spent the entire month of August going from doctor to doctor and waiting for more test results. She had to take the month of August off from her office that went into September. She wasn’t feeling better… only worse.
Another blood test was performed on September 11.
The next day, I got a mid-morning phone call for us to come to the Plano Presbyterian Hospital’s emergency room as quick as possible because her white blood cell count was four times the normal high reading. Six hours later, in the ER, she was diagnosed from all their extensive testing with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer. After she was admitted into the hospital, the oncologist, told me that Louann had two months to live but only IF she were to have chemo; two weeks if she didn’t. I was shocked. It was surreal. It was numbing. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I wept. How could this be? Our world turned upside down. I was a weeping mess the whole time. Louann did not react like I did. Just the opposite. She was calm and very matter of fact. She never cried, never got depressed. She never complained about the diagnosis or anything about what all she was going through from the start to finish. She never complained about the pain and disability brought on by that terrible disease. Louann was ever true to her deep abiding faith and strong character, even since the day I first met her, never complained about anything. Absolutely amazing.
A few days later she had her first chemo in the hospital and the second one in early October, as an outpatient. Two weeks after that second chemo the cancer was determined to be far too aggressive so the oncologist Virginia Kinsella (a Christian woman) told us that any further treatments (of any kind) would be useless.
On October 15, the oncologist told me and Louann in her hospital room the gut-wrenching shocking news that Louann had two weeks to live. Again, Louann accepted her earthly fate with quiet dignity. Not me. I became an emotional wreck. We left the hospital two days later and were flown on a private jet to Memphis, Tennessee where we’d be surrounded by family and loved ones first in the small community of Eads and then in nearby Collierville.
Hospice services were provided from day one at our daughter’s in-law’s beautiful home in Eads where we’ve stayed at several times a year for the last 10 years. Hospice was excellent… all Christians. After 10 days of being there, Louann was moved to a rent house in Collierville that I got less than a mile away from where our youngest daughter Whitney and her husband Brandon and their three children live.
The rent house is one that Louann and I have passed by multiple times every time we came to Collierville. In fact, the house next door is the one we were looking to buy in 2016 when we thought we were ready to move to Collierville. My rent house is less than a mile from the heart of beautiful, historical downtown Collierville that she and I loved to walk around so very much. There’s a coffee shop there called Square Beans where we’d always visit. We’d sit and talk and enjoy the beauty of the area. I walked there a few days after she’d passed to get a hot chocolate. Inside I was overcome with grief and had to quickly leave. I forced myself to go back the next day.
Our son Jonathan from Plano, Texas and oldest daughter Sommer from Coeur d’Alene, Idaho flew in on October 18. They lived with me in the three-bedroom, two baths, rent house for Louann’s last 16 days. Excellent hospice care was provided for Louann around the clock as she was now completely bed ridden.
Jonathan, Whitney, Sommer and I were with her during her last moments. Her last words to me were, “I love you.” We each spent a few minutes in private telling her how much we loved her and that it was okay to leave us and to let go and be with Jesus. At 2:27 AM, we saw her take her last breath. Her soul instantly stepped into eternity leaving behind her body with a smile and a glow about her that brought us great peace.
Much weeping has taken place since September 12… and it continues to this very time that you are reading this. We deeply miss this remarkably wonderful faithful wife, mother, grandmother, and best friend who had a solid, deep abiding faith, service and love in and to our Lord.
From June through October those months had been leading up to something horribly surreal. But from October 17 to November 2, it became a constant weeping, numbing, dark, surreal terrible nightmare for me. I can’t even begin to compare this to that dreadful soul scar left on me when our 17-year-old son Jack Tabor died instantly in that April 9, 1997 car crash that I physically survived. His middle name of Tabor came from the beloved college in Hillsboro, Kansas where Louann and I had first met in mid-August of 1973.
I miss my precious, loving faithful beautiful Louann so terribly, terribly much. We were inseparable. I loved her so, so very very much ever since the first day I met her. My heart is torn to pieces. It is broken and I feel like it’s beyond repair. At times I can barely function. At times I don’t even want to live anymore. I’m numb… this all has happened way too fast. I weep. I cry out to GOD. The pain in my soul rips at me in waves of tormented grief.
BUT GOD is GOOD. I trust Him no matter what. And I know that I must grieve my terrible loss. But I also know that it is for just another season in my life and then I will move on… I must or else I will have created an idolatrous dangerous pity party thing. But still… I grieve… I mourn… I weep. I slowly move on with God’s loving, gracious, patient, ever-present help. I’m asking GOD to shorten my grieving process. I’ve been told that the greater the love, the deeper the grief. I know that to be true.
I’m all alone… by myself here at the rent house. The loneliness is horrible. I must force myself to exercise, to eat (I’ve lost weight), to go to bed at night, to get up in the mornings, to get dressed, to be with the grandkids, to do even the simplest of things. When the weather is good, I force myself to go on walks or ride my bike. I often cry wishing Louann was with me holding her hand. I sit on a park bench and wish she was next to me with my arm around her. We loved to walk nature trails and then sit and take it all in. We always praised God for His magnificent beauty, but we also would say that all this beauty is like a garbage heap compared to the beauty of Paradise.
Our favorite thing to do was to drive the back roads of Grayson County Texas on Saturdays and some Sundays. As we’d slowly drive, Louann and I talked about Heaven a lot especially more than ever during those last six months before all this happened. We’d also talk about death a lot, too and going Home to be with the Lord. I’d tell her that it will absolutely be me to go first before her because I’m older (by five years) and genetically prone to a shorter life. I’d remind her that her genetic background is solid in that her mother is still living (almost 90), her grandmother lived to be in her late 90’s, and on her dad’s side there was longevity, too even though her dad died from heart failure in his 70’s. But she always insisted that she’d be going to Heaven well before me. I couldn’t convince her otherwise and found it to be very frustrating. Now that I look back at that, I wonder if the Lord was preparing her and me for this?
I receive grief counseling at a nearby church through the GriefShare.org ministry. I have immersed myself in God’s healing Word. I’ve also been rereading the book I wrote 14 years ago, “From Grief to Glory when a Father Loses a Child” which has been of significant help to me. You can get the downloadable PDF version of the book for free at www.LuLu.com – simply type in my name Dr. Joe Fawcett in their search bar and there it is for you to download for free. Please feel free to refer others to it, too.
I have no real plans other than continuing the slow and painful process of healing my mind and emotions. I do plan on going back to Plano and to my beloved hometown of Sherman for two weeks or so to take care of some matters sometime maybe in mid-March. I’ll also visit there again sometime in May and probably later in the Summer. I do plan on visiting friends in the Fresno/ Clovis California area later this year as well as friends at Tabor College.
Louann and I had long ago decided not to have any kind of a memorial or funeral service for either one of us. We also decided to be cremated because we did not personally like the thought of being buried in the ground, but rather having an urn that could always go wherever we or the other would go. Jack Tabor’s beautiful flying eagle bronze urn has always gone with us wherever we’ve gone to live. I picked up Louann’s temporary urn containing her ashes Friday, November 8. I wept bitterly throughout the day and night.
It’s now early February 2020, it’s been a little over three months since she went Home. Grief is brutally blowing me around like a tattered dead leaf. The 2019 holidays were horrifying: Every day and every night I wept bitterly. Nighttime after the holidays is beyond terrible… loneliness! Especially at night. Louann and I would usually read from the Bible, pray and then kiss goodnight. All that is gone. Gone. The reality of her “never coming back” has pierced my heart and soul. A major part of me, of who I was… is gone. I’m not the “me” I used to be for the last 46 years. And I won’t be “me” for quite a while… maybe in a year or two… or possibly longer until the grief will become bearable, so please… hang in there with me.
In closing, I absolutely covet yours and the many people’s prayers and thoughts that are directed toward me and my family.
Sincerely heart broken,
joe
Hello, this is Joe. Since Louann went to Heaven on November 2, 2019 – people may want to ask me, “Joe, how are you doing?” But the reality is that most really don’t know what to ask me or what to say to me or anyone who is grieving the loss of a spouse. So, here’s what I need for you to know that I’ve learned from the weekly gathering I’ve been attending called GriefShare:
• If you knew her, please talk to me about Louann.
• Be a quiet listener and let me talk about Louann and share memories.
• Ignoring my grief does not make it go away.
• If I’m sad, let me be sad. Don’t try to cheer me up. It’s important for me to feel the emotions I’m feeling.
• Sometimes it may appear that I’m functioning fine and that I’m doing well. Understand that outward appearances can be deceiving. More likely I’m crying on the inside.
• Don’t make comments about next year being better or time healing my deep wounds; my concerns are focused on the here and now.
• Understand that I can’t do everything I used to do in the past, but don’t hesitate to invite me to do things anyway. If I can’t go it may be due to my schedule or it may be due to me just needing to be alone at that time.
• Let me cry if I need to. Yes, grieving men do cry, we even weep. You don’t have to say anything – just hand me tissues and be there for me.
• Understand that grief can go on for a number of years. There’s no established time limit. I do pray that the Lord will shorten the process. Regardless, I trust Him.
• Please don’t make judgments about how long it’s taking me to grieve.
• If your loved one has passed, I’d love to talk to you about the similar things we’ve experienced and are experiencing right now.
