Josephine Jean Davis

Jean grew up in Joliet, Illinois, in the center of her Slovenian-American community and graduated from the College of St. Francis. She built a thirty-year career as a medical technologist at St. Francis Hospital, forming lifelong friendships. A highlight of her life was meeting her husband, Jim Davis, a civil engineer with the Illinois Department of Transportation, to whom she was happily married for 40 years until his passing. Together, they gathered friends across miles and seasons and traveled to Alaska, Peru, and all over the country to visit their children and grandchildren.

Jean was a loving daughter, sister, and wife. She was also a nurturing, affectionate, and fiercely protective mother to Jeff, Rob, and Jayme, for whom she was always the loudest cheerleader at any ball game and whom she enveloped with love and support. She was a deeply beloved, quintessential, flour-on-the-nose, cooking-baking grandmother who doted on her seven grandchildren, the delights of her life, and sources of tremendous pride. Fun and funny, she was a truly charming woman who loved drinking coffee and chatting, especially on her backyard deck with friends and family, having a good laugh, rooting for Bradley basketball and the Bears, watching procedural crime dramas and documentaries about mysteries and cryptids, and sneaking an occasional purloined bite of a Hershey bar with almonds. Her profound love, care, and generosity for her friends and family will echo for generations: a life well-lived by a woman well-loved.

She was preceded in death by her husband, James Allen Davis; her sisters, Viola and Betty; and her nephew, Dan Thayer.

She is survived by her eldest sister, Geri Thayer; her children, Jeffrey Allen Davis, Robert Edward Davis, and Jayme Lyn Davis; her daughter-in-law, Vanessa Davis; her nieces and nephews Ron, Bobby, Lou, and Michael Pico, Jim, Tim and Chuck Thayer, Mike McCarthy, Erin Trinka, and Tracy Harper; and by her grandchildren Taylor, Garrett, Jenna, Nicole, Chris, Beckett, and Rowan Davis.

Family services will be private. There will be a Celebration of Jeans's life in the spring.