We’ve lost a giant among us, and she didn’t know that we knew it.
I met Joan while she was an art teacher in the Memphis City Schools. My wife, the school’s librarian, who has an eye for good educators, spoke highly of Joan. Though I only knew Joan for about a dozen years, I really saw her talents at contra dances and in her developing art.
Joan Kelly”s stature was evident when she would light up a dance floor with her grace and giggle. She loved to dance, and anyone who learned to dance well quickly learned that she was one of the best. Plus she had passed along that grace, quick response, and light-footed touch to her daughter, Erin. When those two were nearby on the dance floor, it was special—for Erin was so special to Joan, and vice versa.
We saw Joan grow up as a caller. She applied that teaching experience and ploughed through those three familiar stages of calling: joyful playfulness, irritation with those who keep messing up the normal flow of the dance, then the acceptance of a seasoned caller coupled with clarity and authority. When Joan took her turn as our caller, we could expect the best dances of the evening.
We saw it in her participation in the choir her brother leads at Balmoral Presbyterian Church where she found community that embraced her wonderful contributions.
We saw it in her progress as a wood-turner. Those early simple, beautiful bowls had evolved into complex, magnetic pieces of art. All those years of artistic expression were finding a medium she was mastering.
Alas, the very medium that had become home for her blossoming expression betrayed her. Working with a difficult piece of cedar, it exploded from the lathe and killed her in the prime of her creative life. The consolation is that she died doing what she loved.
The tragedy is that she left us wondering what more she would have done and created, and, though she felt loved by many, she somehow felt underappreciated and unrecognized. We now know that the gratefulness for her gifts that are so talked about as she passes on, were just on the verge of the recognition and honor she deserved. She lived a wonderful life.
Her legacy might be contained in a query: why not work on the most complex and difficult pieces so that our creativity is a deeper expression of life, love, and God? That’s what she was doing at the point of her death, exclaiming to Ernest minutes before the accident that it was the most difficult wood she’d worked with.
It took two weeks for that chunk to fully take her life, during which time we circled together in a dance of love and sadness that some felt was being called by Joan—she saved the last dance for all of her friends and family.
Joan Kelly, our loved one, died in her blossoming years at 59. We miss her.