On Joan Durante

Today is the celebration of the birth of my mother in law Joan Durante. We lost her to colon cancer that spread a few years ago. To me it seems like yesterday. She was diagnosed at the same time as my Aunt Sarah and both of them died within 6 months of each other. I didn't know what to say at the time, colon cancer claimed two very beautiful people way before their time.
My husband wrote a little bit about his mother today and I want to place it here because my blog is such an eclectic collection of things in my days. He was thinking about her.
It really suits her. Joan was many things, actress, mother, many things. Hard to capture.



Joan Durante was born on Sunday, July 14, 1935. The White Sox beat the Yankees 3 to 1 that day and Lou Gehrig went 0 for 4. That was 76 years ago, or 27,760 days ago. Monopoly, the game, came out in 1935 and FDR dedicated the Hoover Dam. Babe Ruth played in his last game the same year and a little girl named Joan was born In Newark New Jersey.

Joan is hard to find on the Internet though, she’s there as ”Aunt Alicia,” nominated for best featured actress in a musical for her role in the Vienna Theater Company’s 2002 production of Gigi. She never did musicals because she didn’t think she could sing but she stretched on this one, on several levels. Joan was a dancer from the core; an artist and a creator, a thinker, an individual spirit and intellect, a bit of a ‘force of nature” (whatever that means), she was a mother because she felt she was called to be a mother, she was a lover of people and especially children. She was a reader and an actress. She was a wife and an adult of great integrity but she was a little girl. She was a cook when she wanted to and a lover of clothes and style. She loved art for what art should be. She was a hummingbird.

I am sure, regardless of how science and the new neuroscience and physics would like to tell us otherwise, that she is not only alive in her children and her grandchildren, (for I have seen this with my own two eyes) but she is also aloft as a spirit. She is and has always been part of what is good in this world. She, like all of us, had many faults, vulnerabilities, and fears she probably hid from us, but she was deeply tuned to what is good in humanity and in life in the universe.

I know she is free to dance.

Joan’s son

Jack

Joan Durante