Sometimes the bonds between friends can be stronger than that of family. Our friend Juanita was one of those friends. She was kind and loving and also had a wicked sense of humor, was irreverent and full of life.
My husband and I didn’t have big sisters, but Juanita became that to us. We met at church when she started dating our friend, Charles Thomas, about the same time she and my husband started working at Argonne. The Thomases were almost a generation older than us, yet we clicked.
As godparents for both our girls, they were there for all the important milestones: baptisms, confirmations and high school graduation for our oldest. By the time our youngest graduated from high school; however, they were both living in the same facility for memory loss.
Charles was a football All-American at Wisconsin, played with the Green Bay Packers for a year, and then became a nationally recognized educator. President of the Wisconsin Alumni Association, he was proud that our oldest daughter attended Wisconsin. We now suspect that football contributed to his health problems via TBI (Traumatic Brain Injury).
Unfortunately, we have not been able to visit with Juanita for the last eight years. After Charles passed, she was moved to Pennsylvania to be closer to her daughter. Our conversations since then have been mostly monosyllabic with her daughter placing the phone call for her. She recently succumbed to Alzheimer’s.
We are sad that they are gone, but that is just the sadness that comes with every loss. The JOY we had in knowing them and sharing our lives with them makes us forever grateful that this couple embraced a young, at the time, childless couple. Our lives and the lives of our girls are richer for it. They were family without the biology.
