Dear Class of 1966:


    I appreciate being asked to write something about my wife/your classmate
Anna Catherine Jones Hope. The first thing I want you to know is how much Anna enjoyed the reunions she went to. I was with her at one several years ago at the Sheraton and also at the picnic this summer. She enjoyed catching up with what everyone was doing and only wished more classmates would attend. I know she had some thoughts on ways to entice others to come but doubt she ever got to share them with the reunion committee.

    Anna and I planted 21 roses in our back yard this summer to mark the 21 years we were married. We each learned a lot about what to do and not do from our first marriages and both believed we got it right this time. I’ve been going through a lot of old pictures to prepare for the celebrations of her life on December 1 and 2 (I hope as many of you as can will join us at Sisco’s and/or the Quaker Meetinghouse) and can see how much we meant to each other. You sometimes lose sight of that in the minutiae of daily living but we were crazy in love and devoted to each other.

     I brought five sons to the mix and she brought three. We had up to six of them living with us some of the time and in the last few years have tried unsuccessfully to remember how we managed to juggle two full-time jobs, homework, lunch money, baseball teams, Trapper Keepers, laundry, and all the rest. Somehow we all survived and remained close to each other. We have been very proud of our sons and their families.

   
When we married, Anna was employed at the Harrisburg School District as an administrative assistant responsible for the non-professional personnel. Another of your classmates, Shirl Kehler (Worthington) was her partner in crime, responsible for the professional personnel.

    When her mother suffered a stroke, we brought her to our home and Anna retired to be able to care for her mother. Bea lived with us for 19 months before her death and it was a time that we never forgot for how close it brought us in our efforts to take care of Bea and how much Bea taught us about handling a situation like that.

     Anna had always loved music and for many years had been performing with an acoustic trio she helped found called Sweet Heritage. But it was during that period that her love of music became even more important as she started to teach in our home and then joined Old World Folk Band and ultimately was their pianist for several years. The band had an active performance schedule and I often went along to sell CDs during intermission and after the concerts. They were good times that I will always cherish.

After the travel schedule got to be too much and she left the band, she threw herself into harp teaching and performing, as well as biking, canoeing, hiking, and caring for our pets and our garden and home. Much as I often wanted to drag her someplace, unless it was to the ocean she generally preferred to be in our house where she felt she had everything she needed and was at peace.

     Several years ago we started watching young grandchildren each day while their parents were at work. We maintained our self-employment at the same time and so balanced each other’s
schedules and abilities. Earlier this year, we decided it was becoming too difficult to keep up with three active children and asked that other arrangements be made. We saw this as a time for ourselves and started to talk about when we might go the shore, whether a winter trip to Florida would make sense, and what movies we could curl up with and watch at home.

     Little did we know that as we lived our lives and made our plans, lung cancer was gradually growing stronger within her and would soon make its presence felt.

The diagnosis at the end of August was a shock because she looked and felt so healthy, although it wasn’t a surprise because she had smoked for 45 years. What amazed us was how quickly she went downhill. Two days after receiving the lung biopsy report, she got the report from an MRI she had because of severe headaches indicating the lung cancer was also in her brain.

     The next day she had two serious falls and was always very weak from them on and had increasing difficulty with mobility and with memory and other mental functioning. She had several weeks of brain and then lung radiation in hopes of buying some time for a better quality of life, but it didn’t work out that way. We thought we still had quite a few months left, but she developed a blood clot in her leg that broke free and went to the lung and she was unable to recover from that.

      Like many of us, Anna had areas of insecurity and often questioned how much she really meant to people. The outpouring of sympathy since she died has reinforced for me what I always knew and tried to tell her—she was a one-of-a-kind person who meant a great deal to so many people in so many different ways.


John Hope   

November 9, 2007

 

Anna Catherine (Jones) Hope