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Greenfield native’s pandemic memoir a study in love and grief | The Homepage
- jmartinez5135
- 3 days ago
- 5 min read
By Juliet Martinez, managing editor
In March 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic began, nursing homes closed to visitors for what was supposed to be a 14-day quarantine. When Greenfield native JoAnne Klimovich Harrop got the news, she knew where she needed to be. She left behind her husband, her South Hills home, and her job as a journalist in the busy TribLive newsroom, to move into the Charles Morris nursing home with her 93-year-old mother.
The youngest of five children, Ms. Klimovich Harrop was devoted to her parents. Her father, Paul, had died in 2015. At his funeral, Ms. Klimovich Harrop promised him she would take care of her mother, no matter what.
Her mother, Evelyn, was her best friend. For years, Ms. Klimovich Harrop visited her mom every day after work, often taking her to Big Jim’s in The Run for a dinner of $3 spaghetti on Mondays or Ms. Klimovich’s favorite Italian wedding soup.
That is how the two ended up spending 85 days in quarantine together in a 250-square-foot room. Those days turned out to be the last of her mother’s life.
Ms. Klimovich Harrop wrote about this experience in a book titled, “A Daughter’s Promise.” She spoke about it with The Homepage in October and asked The Homepage to include a note of gratitude to the family and friends who supported her through the quarantine and her mother’s final days. She is especially grateful to Debbie Winn-Horvitz, then-president and CEO of the Jewish Association on Aging for allowing her to stay with her mother at the Charles Morris nursing home, which the association managed. She is also grateful to Jennifer Bertetto, CEO and president of TribLive, for believing in her and her story.
Her answers to the following interview questions have been lightly edited.
What was it like growing up in Greenfield?
Greenfield is just a special place. My husband, Perry, and I still go to St. Rosalia church there every week, and we still hang out at Big Jim’s down the street. I still have a lot of friends there who I grew up with.
On the street where I grew up, Stanley Street, most of the houses had multiple kids, so we would play with these kids. We would walk to school with these kids. Most of the families only had one car. Your dad took the car to work, so you had to do things in the neighborhood because mom couldn’t take you even if she was home. Most of our mothers were home but they couldn’t take you anywhere. So, you found something to do on the street or spent time at Magee Field. I played softball up there, basketball. I went swimming. There are so many good memories there.
How did your Greenfield connections help as you went through quarantine with your mom and her death?
While I was in the nursing home, my friend Jane, from Greenfield, made us homemade meals, and Cindy from Big Jim’s brought us food from the restaurant.
After my mom passed away people, would come up to me at St. Rosalia’s, people I didn’t know, and they would say, “I used to watch you with your mother.” And I thought that was beautiful. My parents moved there in 1950, and there were five of us kids. So that’s a long time and a lot of connections that you make over the years.
Big Jim’s you know, they’re prominent in the book. My siblings and I had my dad’s funeral lunch there in 2015, but because my mother died during the pandemic, they weren’t open for indoor dining. They said if we could get a place, they would cater it for us. So, we got the Soldiers and Sailors in Greenfield, and Big Jim’s catered it, including my mother’s favorite Italian wedding soup, and they didn’t charge us. Five employees volunteered to serve the food.
I mean, that’s Greenfield.
A lot of people experience grief during the holidays, missing loved ones who have died. How do you handle missing your parents at this time of year?
Yeah, holidays are never the same. It’s good to still talk about the people who have passed, even if you cry. It’s OK. I have my mom’s little Christmas tree that I put up every year while she lived at Charles Morris. Even though most of the other residents were Jewish, they would come by the room, and they loved to see the tree lit at night. So, I still put up that tree every year.
My mom always made homemade spaghetti, and sometimes I make that on holidays. She also would make nut rolls and my friend Jane makes my mom’s nut roll recipe with me.
Do you think about life and death differently since your mom’s passing?
Once you lose your parents, I think it does sort of kind of make you think about your track, you know, and it’s not a terrible thing. It’s something that’s going to happen to all of us.
What’s more important is what you do until that happens. They talk about the dash (on a tombstone) between your birth date and your death date. What do you do for the dash? I think what I did and the book will outlive me. So, I think that’s kind of important to have something that you feel like, “OK, it made a difference,” no matter what it is. It doesn’t have to be a book, just something that made a difference.
People sometimes say, “How could you live in there (in a nursing home)? How could you see everything that goes on in there?” I think we all have the capacity to do something like that. It would depend on who the person is. It might not be your mother. It could be for a spouse or for a child. You never know what you’ll do until you’re in that situation.
Whenever I sign a copy of my book, I sign it, “A promise is the power of love.” In life, we make a lot of promises. Like people say, “I promise I’ll do that,” but they don’t always do it. But I think if there’s that bond, it makes the promise stronger. That’s why that line is important to me.
We all make promises in our lives, but we don’t always carry through with them. But I think that line reminds people that if you said you were going to do it, you need to do it. And I obviously didn’t realize what that meant when I made that promise to my dad to take care of my mom after he died. I didn’t think it would mean living in a nursing home for 85 days, but I made that promise and I had to do it.
What I did was rare because not a lot of other people did it. But I feel like we each have that inside of us, depending on who the person is.
More than anything, I want people to appreciate their parents. I mean, that’s the message.