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Light a Candle
JoAnn Dora Sitchler was born in 1936 in Hot Springs, Arkansas. She would live in Louisiana briefly as a small child and she was put into a Catholic boarding school in Texas for most of her childhood and adolescence. She endured her family’s disassociation through a childhood fraught with worry and confusion.
She joined her family in Colorado after her graduation, thrust into a world she didn’t exactly understand or know.
She married in her early twenties and had a son in 1958, only to lose her husband unexpectedly. She lived and worked in the 60s as a single mother at a time when the world was a much worse place, and together with family she made it work. There were lots of missteps and bumblings and some successes, too. Fourteen years later she met and loved and married again.
JoAnn and Bill would have a son in 1972 and would spend the next 51 years living and working, laughing and crying, doing all the things that people who have found each other have done for centuries, but in their own special and wonderful way.
JoAnn was a creator of things. Whether that was stories, quilts, dolls, or ideas, she crafted things she felt would bring joy. She loved her husband Bill and the rest of her family fiercely.
JoAnn absolutely loved talking and coffee. Coffee was the great equalizer and socializer. Emergency? Sit down and have a cup of coffee. Celebration? Come have a cup of coffee and some cake. She loved to talk about everything great and small.
JoAnn was altogether crafty, shrewd, and naïve, and retained the qualities of childhood wonder well into her later life.
JoAnn died peacefully with the smell of coffee and the sound of good conversation in the air, keeping her own schedule to the very end. She is survived by her husband, Bill, as well as her sons, Richard, and Bill Jr, and a veritable host of grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
