With Grace...

Grace Frasier's life, death knit with devotion and faith

By Robert Lovinger, Standard-Times staff writer

Thread wove itself through Grace Frasier's life.
As a young woman, she worked in textile mills. When muscular sclerosis struck in 1977, she found therapy -- and a calling -- in needlepoint. When her hands would no longer allow her to stitch, she turned to genealogy, following her family's thread back through history.

After contracting lung cancer in February of 1996, life's thin strand began to fray. She died this past April 18 at the age of 65.
For more than a decade, she had channeled her creativity into needlepoint, creating seals for government agencies and leaders.
MS not only put a stop to the stitching, but robbed her of the ability to do much of anything.
"A lot of times, he even has to feed me," she said of husband Stanley, in an interview at her Fairhaven Village apartment in the spring of 1996. "When you can't even turn the page of a magazine because you have no grip ..."

When they worked, Stanley did maintenance in Fairhaven schools and elsewhere. He was also a town volunteer firefighter for 18 years. Grace did floor work for Cornell-Dubilier and served for a time as a Fairhaven school bus monitor.
During the spring 1996 interview, the couple spoke glowingly of their experience with the hospice program of the Community Nurse Association of Fairhaven.
"I don't know where we'd be without hospice," Stanley said. "They've been wonders for me." Besides medical and domestic assistance, there was the volunteer who freed him up twice a week to get out and shop.
Hospice saved them money, but more importantly allowed Grace to be home rather than institutionalized.
"Here, I only have to drive one person crazy," she said, nodding to Stanley. "He's been wonderful. There's not another man alive as good as my husband. I really do belong at home, but it all falls on his shoulders."
The hospice experience was enhanced by Grace's relationship with her doctor, Drew Nahigyan. "It's not a patient-doctor thing," Stanley said. "It's almost like family, you would say."

As her illness progressed, Grace took morphine for her pain. The side effects -- breathing difficulty, stomach problems -- were severe. But given the alternative, she took the morphine.
Genealogy became a refuge. Even under the morphine, the Rochester native's mind was sharp as she described 23 years of research into her family history, which she said extended as far back as the Mayflower.
Long before her death, the couple had accepted the reality of her situation. You could hear it in the powerful, one-word answers they gave to questions.
Asked how she felt upon learning she had cancer, Grace replied, "Useless."
She had begun to lose the will to do the genealogy. "All this work was blown away. I couldn't pursue it." Even talking was now fatiguing. And she had to learn how to swallow differently.
In the year before Grace's death, she and Stanley seemed at peace with the hand they'd been dealt.

The living room of their Fairhaven apartment was filled with knickknacks -- religious, fun, Native-American and more. Stanley's stein collection filled a large bookcase. Grace's Native-American dream catchers hung from the ceiling.
Ceramic figurines, dolls, a stuffed owl, small bells and Christian objects dotted the room.
Grace dealt with serious illness most of her life. As a child, she contracted tuberculosis. "She gave me a scare on our first date," Stanley recalled. "She started hemorrhaging. I had to get her to a doctor." He wasn't scared away. The couple would have been married 45 years in October.
"We've had good years and bad ones," Stanley said. "And I'd say the good outnumber the bad."
The good included the marriage of their only child, Patricia Ann Izzo, an emergency room nurse in New Hampshire. She has given the Frasiers two grandchildren.
Before the cancer advanced, the Frasiers frequently went out. The MS didn't slow them down. There was hardly a restaurant or religious feast they didn't hit.
Four years ago, the couple attended a convention of the Pilgrim Edward Doty Society in Plymouth. It's an event Grace treasured, and she lit up with the memory.
"Everybody called each other, 'Hey, cousin!' because we were all related," she recalled.
"I have everything," she said, pausing, "but health."

The worst thing, Stanley said, was "the waiting. You're sitting on a time bomb." While he talked, his hands moved over the cover of a photo album of Grace's needlepoint works.
The time bomb was her death. "We both know it's gonna come," he said.
To which Grace added, "I hope it's soon."
Why?
"Sickness. Dealing every day with just sitting here. I've met many people and I accomplished enough in life," she said, adding that she was proud to be passing on her family research to the grandkids.
"What's left other than going home to my Lord?" she asked. "I'm looking forward to going with my Lord; to looking down and guiding my family."

Hospice nurse Anita Long speaks of her experience.

Photographer Jack Iddon speaks of his experience.

and

The photographic journey.....

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