Joan and Ron: a love story
Newlyweds Joan and Ron Arias in Los Angeles in 1966. Photo courtesy the Arias family Second of two parts. See part one here. On the fifth to last day of her life, Joan Arias had begun to sink into silence. The doctors described a CT scan as showing cancers “everywhere” but her shortness of breath made chemotherapy inadvisable. She’d decided, at any rate, that enough was enough. She was going home the next day, for hospice care. “This is no way to live,” Joan said. Her husband of 51 years, Ron Arias, was camped out in her hospital room. What was most disturbing to him was the feeling of slow retreat he felt from Joan. No matter the circumstance, she’d always possessed the gift of engagement. It was how they had met 52 years earlier when she engaged him in a playful argument at a library at UCLA, ostensibly about an obscure Spanish poem; it was how they traveled the world together, voyages to far flung locales where friends would marvel at her ability to learn dialects, befriend strangers, and find the nooks and crannies of places most tourists never penetrate; it was how in two decades living in Hermosa Beach her impact was such that, a week after her passing, Councilman Hany…
Read this story on easyreadernews.com