Santo Subito!
Several people have wondered why I have yet to post about the 2008 Amsterdam High School graduation, the last one for our family for a long time, when my darling Louisa Marie walked across the makeshift stage and beamingly accepted her diploma. It certainly ranks as a great and wonderful moment for me.
But something else was happening. Absent from the stage was Assistant Principal John Davey, who ordinarily might have been expected to be up there when his kid brother graduated. Bryan Davey went through with the ceremony, and the handsome, popular star athlete received a well-deserved ovation, took a deep breath and walked quickly down the aisle to his seat, exhaling only once.
A week earlier and he might have been awaiting with fond anticipation the raucous cheers of his younger sister and his fourteen older siblings, but no shouts came from the Davey family on Saturday. Instead, Bryan’s dad Jack and the others sat numbly in the upper bleachers. Bryan’s mom had been found dead a couple of days earlier at 61.
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It is impossible to calculate how many lives Joanne Davey touched over the years, directly or indirectly. She produced by far the largest Amsterdam family of her generation. And she raised those kids well, every one a credit to their parents and the community.
And she did it while maintaining her career as a nurse at St. Mary’s Hospital. Not just a nurse, but the best nurse in the place: caring, compassionate, competent beyond words. Organized.
Organized! But then she’d have to be. I remember running into her in the supermarket about midway through her brood and seeing her cart stacked with three gallons of milk, multiple loaves of bread and all kinds of other stuff.
“Joanne, just out of curiosity,” (the whole town was curious),”how often do you have to shop?”
“Oh, every day.” There just wasn’t enough storage room anywhere to hold food enough for that many.
When we were having kids ourselves (they already had about eleven) Joanne served as the head night nurse and often participated in the deliveries. Mary was going through the usual trauma with one of ours and when she looked up and saw who was in the room she said, “Oh, thank God you’re here, Joanne! Knowing how many times you went through this makes it easier for me to get through this once!”
I’ve seen her tired many times. I never once saw her slow down.
She was a very pretty woman when she married Jack at 21, and her beauty endured and grew deeper and deeper until it extended to the very core of her being.
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Forty years after their marriage, Jack and the kids received hundreds of mourners in a line that extended from the chapel of St. Mary’s Church, down the hallway, through the church proper, out the main door and back down East Main Street.
The wait gave me some time to reflect.
Jack Davey was a high school junior basketball star when I first attended St. Mary’s Institute in 4th grade. Mom, his English teacher, used to comment on what a nice boy he was.
Jack was my hero. I’d follow him around the school and even took his picture once on the basketball court at the Armory, with a cheap plastic camera and a flash bulb. It came out pretty good. I gave it to his oldest son when he was seventeen to remind him that beneath every father is a seventeen year old kid.
By the time I was getting ready to turn seventeen myself, Jack was coaching varsity baseball at Bishop Scully High School (and I think already in the early years of his long teaching career at Fonda-Fultonville), and I was the team manager and scorekeeper (I helped Jim LaBate and Joe Riley into the record books). Jack and I ended up talking a lot of baseball and about pretty much everything else.
Very often he would give me a ride home to Trinity Place after a game. “Bobby, don’t ever stop with your education. Get as much of it as you can. Education is its own reward. Remember that.”
You could just tell that he was looking forward in fond anticipation to his pending nuptials with the 21 year old beauty Joanne. The baseball season ended just a few weeks before the ceremony.
“Have a nice marriage!” I said to him as I exited the car after the last game.
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I looked around the church. Sixteen baptisms, first communions, confirmations, weddings, then starting all over again with the grandchildren. They had a big van, but after a while they would take the kids to Mass in shifts.
Parents were required to attend special classes prior to the big sacramental occasions. I’d laugh to see Joanne there in later years. “I think maybe you should be teaching this.”
But an obligation is an obligation, and she dutifully participated each time.
Aisle shuffling companion turned to me.
“You know, Bob, Joanne is a saint. Everybody knows it. You should start a committee for her canonization. Skip all the preliminaries. Tell the Vatican not to wait. Get it started now.
“Put it on your blog.”
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Your Holiness, on behalf of the parishioners of St. Mary’s Parish, Amsterdam, NY USA, I present to you the cause of Joanne Davey: wife, mother, nurse, friend. She led a life of heroic virtue, kept God first, and by her work, teaching and example provided a perfect archetype of the Christian life, such that many have profited and will profit from her shining goodness.
Santo subito!
Sainthood now!
