Joan Elaine Wallis

Josephine Elaine Wallis died on August 30, 2018, at Brookdale Meridian Temple, in Temple, Texas. She had moved to the home only weeks before, following the death of her husband of over sixty years, Robert Wallis, in February.

Joan, as everyone knew her, was born to immigrant parents. Her father, Rosario Martino, journeyed to America as a teenager with his uncle, from Piazza Armerina, a comune in the province of Enna in Sicily. Her mother, Rosalia Perrone, whom she deeply adored, was brought from Sicily as a child. Their families settled in the East New York section of Brooklyn, New York City, where Joan was born on November 13, 1931.

Joan was raised in the vibrant New York City immigrant culture that was in full blossom by the time of her birth. She often spoke of playing in the streets with children from Italian, German, Irish, Russian, Slavic, and Eastern European Jewish families. Like Joan, these children were first generation Americans. And like them, she was somewhat embarrassed by her “foreignness.” Her youthful exposure to other ways of living would later engender an extraordinary social progressivism, evidenced, for instance, in her passionate support for the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s. Her acute awareness of the stigma of “otherness” would catalyze an almost uncanny empathy for the suffering of other people.

At the age of forty-nine, married and a mother of five children, Joan returned to school at Glassboro State College in New Jersey (now Rowan University) to finish the undergraduate degree she had begun as a young woman at St. John’s University in Queens. She eventually received an M.S.W—a Master’s in Social Work—at Rutgers University in Camden, New Jersey. This would prove to be the perfect profession for Joan. She would go on to spend the rest of her working life as a counselor and therapist to people in need. Whether at Catholic Charities in Trenton, at the alcoholism and addiction treatment center Seabrook House in Bridgeton, New Jersey, or in her private practice at home in Medford, New Jersey, Joan used her extraordinary powers of insight and empathy to enable healing.

Joan exuded a rare love and sympathy in her interactions with others. Everyone who met her felt her warmth. Joan felt acutely the pain of the world. And that pain often showed on her face. But she was also quick to flash her bright smile, and even quicker to let loose a belly laugh. She had a ribald sense of humor. She was an avid reader of anything she could get her hands on, whether a biography of Karl Marx or an issue of People Magazine. She loved equally Woody Allen movies and the opera Carmen. No one made lasagna like her, and her pecan pie at Thanksgiving was unrivalled. Most of all, she loved the simple presence of other people, their company and companionship. It is difficult to imagine a more dynamic, generous, and sensuous spirit than that of Joan Wallis.

A mother of two daughters and three sons, and a grandmother of three girls and five boys, Joan was an unusually loving, maternal woman. In her last years, she had the fortune of having the most compassionate and skilled caregivers that anyone could wish for: Valerie Ava and Fia Savini, whom she loved dearly.

She will be missed.