With Grace...
The last year in the life of Fairhaven's Grace Frasier
An introduction.....
Text by Robert Lovinger,
Standard-Times staff writer
 Sometimes the photos we shoot and the stories we write
do concern life and death. Such assignments can be troubling and painful, and sometimes
they remind us of why we got into this business in the first place: to move people and be
moved by them.
In February of 1996. Standard-Times features editor
Anne Humphrey floated a notion past chief photographer Jack Iddon. Her idea: a pictorial
essay that would help demystify death and dying by following a person through the hospice
experience, to the end.
Jack said yes, but had no inkling of what he was about
to experience.
Soon after, the hospice staff at the Community Nurse
Association of Fairhaven approached terminally ill patient Grace Frasier with the idea.
She and her husband Stanley, who lived in the Fairhaven Village Apartments, said yes.
Jack and Grace had actually met in the early 1980's
when he was a free-lance photographer for the Fairhaven Advocate and was assigned to shoot
Grace's works of needlepoint.
In March of 1996, not long after Grace was diagnosed
with cancer, Jack began what would become an intense, year long relationship with the
Frasiers. At first, he just dropped by, without cameras, getting acquainted and explaining
what he would be doing. Soon, he began to shoot. Over the next 14 months, he visited more
than 50 times and took hundreds of photos. Sometimes he just stopped in to say hi or drop
something off. All along, Jack sandwiched his trips to the Frasiers in between other
assignments that he continued to do for the newspaper.
Grace died on April 18, 1997. NEXT
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