Frances suggested I post this. I have so many stories about Jeanne. She was my teacher, mentor, friend, and fellow gardener and bird-watcher. I took her writing with children class twice, and taught with her more than once. The most important aspects of teaching, I learned from her. This is a little long, but I wrote it this past week.From Linnea
December 2024 “And that’s the way it is..”
Walter Cronkite, the television newscaster once considered “the most trusted man in America,” signed off his broadcasts with, “And that’s the way it is.”
I still cry when I recall his announcement of the death of President John F. Kennedy. Struggling to control his emotions, he removed his glasses and looked at the clock before resuming his report. Kennedy’s assassination was the defining traumatic event of my generation, as Pearl Harbor had been for our parents, and 9/11 was for the generation that followed.
I was reminded of Cronkite when my dear friend, writer, mentor, and teacher, Jeanne Whitehouse Peterson, repeatedly said, “It is what it is,” when she grew too tired to say more. As cancer diminished her body, Jeanne entered hospice and eventually stayed in bed. A storyteller to the end, she described the antics of the cheeky squirrels she watched through her window. She imagined what they must be thinking as they ran across the cul de sac, posing on their hind legs, risking death from the occasional car, chasing and challenging each other against the backdrop of the Sandia Mountains in the distance.
In her final weeks, she told some beautiful, cogent stories. There was one long one from her childhood about her teacher-mother and another teacher, both with their children, driving in tandem from Washington state to Philadelphia for a conference, staying in roadside motels they found along the way in those pre-freeway, pre-cellphone, pre-internet days. Her details were vivid, and the characters, including the boy Billy with whom she made faces, came alive in her telling.
I offered to record and transcribe the story if she’d tell it again. “Are you still in touch with any of your editors at HarperCollins? It would be a great children’s book!” She had written and published several books for young people.
“Maybe. We’ll see.” But she had no energy, even for that, and I didn’t pursue it.
Other stories centered on her mothering years. She remembered Frances (or was it Ellen or Cathy? -- no one is quite sure) throwing open the door to our mutual teacher-friend Lucy, who arrived for the mandatory kindergarten-teacher home visit. Dressed only in her underpants and smeared with cake batter, Ellen flung open the door. “We’re making a cake!” she proudly told the rather startled Lucy, who replied with aplomb, “I can see that!”
On one of our last visits, when I took her hand to say goodbye, she said, “I love you.”
“I love you, too,” I said. I sent a last text message from the Dallas airport while awaiting a flight to Paris.
“She’s no longer using her phone or tracking her visitors,” daughter Ellen texted back. A few days later, on November 1 in Cairo, I received a text from Frances, “Mom passed this morning right after sunrise; at the time of day she was always in her garden. My sisters and I were with her.”
Now, at home a month later, I miss her and think, “It is what it is,” and “That’s the way it is.”
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