Remembering a deacon’s wife: “A friend to everyone”

A deacon in Ohio sent this my way: a moving tribute to life well-lived, marking the passing of a wife, school teacher and mother who, among other things, was the wife of a deacon.

From the Toledo Blade: 

Lois Quinn, a former Catholic school teacher in East and South Toledo, died Thursday in Hospice of Northwest Ohio in Toledo after a years-long struggle with cancer. She was 80.

She taught second grade for eight years at St. Thomas Aquinas in East Toledo and preschool for eight years at St. Charles Borromeo in South Toledo, as well as substitute teaching for Our Lady of Perpetual Help in South Toledo.

She also taught religion classes at OLPH for public-school children for 25 years, and she was a Girl Scout leader.

The former Lois Wuest married Daniel Quinn in 1958. Before the couple started raising their own family, they were foster parents for a number of children and adopted one child.

As a teen, the adopted child returned to her birth family. But Mrs. Quinn maintained contact with her and helped provide for her when she had a family of her own, said the Quinns’ daughter Cheryl Schramm.

Mrs. Schramm said her mother made prayer blankets in recent years while battling a recurrence of cancer from her 40s.

She and two friends and her sister, Mary, made more than 500 blankets that they donated to hospital patients and others.

They would stitch together two pieces of fleece and then cut fringes. With each cut of the fringe they said a Hail Mary. The blanket would then be blessed by Mr. Quinn, an ordained deacon at OLPH.

“She tried to be a friend to everyone. Very caring and compassionate,” Mrs. Schramm said.

Deacon Quinn said his wife got requests from out of town, so they boxed them up and sent them off.

“She just wanted to reach out to people. She’s been giving them to people she feels need them and then people have been asking for them,” Mr. Quinn said.

He said she wouldn’t sell the blankets or take money, but accepted contributions of fleece cloth.

Read it all.  

Eternal rest grant unto her, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon her…