Jeanette Haden

Jeanette Marie Haden née Moreau passed away late on Sunday, February 23, 2025 at Mt. Graham Regional Medical Center after her fourth battle with cancer. Jeanette was born in Detroit, Michigan on January 4, 1946 – the first wave of the tsunami that would become the Baby Boom generation. She is the youngest daughter of Joseph Moreau and Helen Rawlings. 

Jeanette is a descendant of the Lewis family, one of the oldest families in Detroit. Her father was a Comptroller for the Chrysler Corporation and her mother a nurse. Following in her mother’s footsteps, she enrolled in nursing school after high school. She studied at Cook County Hospital in Chicago in the three-year nursing program. Jeanette always said that the old three-year nursing program made the most practical and therefore best nurses – three-year nurses are the real nurses. She worked for a few years with her mother at a hospital in Detroit where she met her husband, John Pietrzyk. 

After starting a family in Detroit, and with the ongoing decline of the Motor City, they set out to the growing metropolis in Phoenix, AZ. Jeanette would spend the rest of her working life in various Emergency Departments – it’s a Department, not just a Room! – in Arizona, first at Maricopa County Hospital emergency department, then opening the new emergency department at Humana Hospital in Paradise Valley.

Although part Belgian, French and English, it was her Mother’s Irish roots she identified with the most. She had a sharp Irish tongue and taught her kids that good sarcasm was a sign of affection. She also learned from her mother the skill of cooking, which is to say of taking perfectly good food and boiling the taste out of it. Her meatloaf was the stuff of family legend, and rarely edible.

Although the emergency department was her job, her life was her family. He sacrificed to send her children to Catholic grade school and make sure they had every opportunity. She was always proud of them, boasting about her kids to anyone who would listen, and many who didn’t. She always saw them as her babies, hiding Easter baskets for them to find even into their college years.

After her divorce, she met the man who would become the love of her life, Chuck Haden. They met one Friday night at the Luke AFB Officer’s Club and began dating a short time later. They were married a year and a half later, on March 15, 1997. When even the suburbs of Phoenix got too big for the both of them, they moved out to Thatcher, Arizona. Jeanette worked for a few years at the hospitals in Gila Valley, until her age caught up with her. Chuck and Jeanette were never without their newest child, the various cocker spaniels that they spoiled. She and Chuck spent the last several years watching lots of Fox News, NASCAR, and NCIS, touring around southeast Arizona, and enjoying meals at their favorite restaurants with all their circle of “old” friends in Thatcher and Safford.

She was delighted to spend this past Christmas with Chuck and all her children, and especially her beloved grandson. It was the first time her whole family had been together for Christmas in many years, and she loved it. Jeanette always cried when her kids had to go back home. 

The last thing Jeanette would want would be people making too much of a bother over her death. She’d want people to remember her fondly, to say a prayer for her soul and for Chuck, and to live as well as she tried to live.

She is survived by her husband Chuck Haden, her older brother Joseph Moreau, her three children – John Pietrzyk, Fr. Pius Pietrzyk, OP, and Jennifer Pietrzyk – and her favorite (and only) grandson, Liam Pietrzyk.

There will be a vigil service on Tuesday, March 11, 2025 at 6:00 p.m. The Funeral will be on Wednesday March 12, 2025, it will begin with a Rosary at 10:30 a.m. and Funeral Mass will follow at 11:00 a.m. The vigil and Mass will be at St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church, 311 S Central Avenue, Safford, AZ 85546. 

In lieu of flowers, please donate to The Dominican Friars Foundation (https://dominicanfriars.org/donate/), 141 East 65th Street, New York, NY 10065.

Sermon - When I think of my mother and all the various aspects of her life and personality, there is one thing that always stands out the most: nurse. Nursing was not just what Mom did, it’s who she was. I guess I never realized what a great nurse Mom was. We’ve received so many kind notes from nurses all over the country. Mom was a legend. At her height, she could get a meth-addled skel into 4-points in less than 15 seconds. You didn’t do nursing in Phoenix in the 80s and 90s without knowing Jeanette.

She was the best there was, and not in a showy or boasting way, but she was just that good and just that dedicated. And she was a nurse’s nurse, dedicated to quality patient care. And woe to the newly minted physician with an MD-sized ego who might dare to put his ego before patient care. He’d get a tongue lashing like he’d never gotten before. But he’d be a better doctor for it, Mom would have made sure of that.

And her dedication as a nurse started early in her life. Of course, her mother, my own Nana, was a life-long nurse. But Mom’s nursing came even before she entered school. On my Mother’s obituary page, my Uncle Joe shared a story that I suppose I knew but hadn’t considered. It was about my Aunt Kathleen, whom I had the great privilege of meeting only once. You see, when Kathleen was about seven years old, she got very, very sick. Her fever became so high it caused permanent damage to her brain, and she lived the rest of her life with the mind of about a one-year-old. It devastated my Nana, but she cared for Aunt Kathleen, and so did Mom. With my Uncle away at Military school, it was up to my Mom to act as assistant Nurse to my Nana in the house. A role she would repeat years later when she got her first job as a licensed nurse. But I have to think that, as much as the example of her own mother, Mom’s experience of caring for her severely handicapped sister taught her what it meant to be a caregiver. And to be one not when it was easy, but when it was really tough.

You see, Mom wasn’t an ordinary nurse, spending quiet days on the floors. No, Mom picked the toughest nursing of all, emergency medicine. She trained at the famous Cook County Hospital School of Nursing in Chicago – at a time of race riots, and the notorious killing of 8 nurses in the summer of ‘66. She trained in a hard school, in hard times, to do a hard job. But she never showed it – or almost never. For Mom, the hard part of the job was part of the thrill. She loved it and always did.

Until her body just got too old to keep up. And she coped with it all especially with humor. The Emergency Department – it’s a Department, not a Room! – is famous for is gallows humor, and Mom was the its master. Almost nothing escaped her sarcasm, and she taught it well to all her kids. And she wasn’t afraid to use humor – and a bit of the absurd – to care for patients. She liked to tell the story of a patient who was a little out of his mind. He wouldn’t take his medicines or listen to the nurses because he was hearing voices from God. In those days Mom had very long straight black hair. So, she decided not to fight his delusions and lean into him. So, she went into the room telling the man she was the Virgin Mary, and commanded him to take his medicine. It worked, he did. And the man and the nurses were better for it.

For Mom, sarcasm of was a note of affection. If she made fun of you, it meant she liked you. Because making fun of someone you didn’t like was just plain mean. And if she really loved you, it meant she’d play jokes all the more. When I was in school and had to miss school because I was sick – and trust me, I couldn’t miss school unless my temperature was at least 102 and I was coughing up a lung, there was no faking illness with Mom – my Mom would write a note for my school. Each time she’d come up with some bizarre ailment – I think I had ebola more than once. When I complained her response was always the same – “They never read these”. And they never did. But she laughed every single time.

In all my years of growing up, Mom almost never brought the weight of work home with her. Well, she complained about the stupidity of her bosses of course, that was to be expected. But the weight of her work with her patients stayed at work, so she could focus on her family at home. I say almost, because I do remember one time when the pain of a patient’s death weighed on her even at home. I suppose I remember it because it was so odd, so unusual. I don’t remember what he died from – some accident or illness – all I remember was that it was a little boy who died. And they did everything they could to save him. It was only years later that it finally occurred to me that the boy who died was my age, the age of my sister and brother. It wasn’t just losing the boy that hurt her so deeply, it was seeing the faces of her kids in that boy that hurt so deeply. I knew in that realization something that I took – and I suppose still take – far too much for granted, the depth of my mother’s love for me. I know without even a moment of doubt that she would have undergone any trial, any suffering, any difficulty, to keep me from harm and to make sure I was happy.

In those times when I celebrate the sacrament of baptism for a couple with a new child, I always try to remind them that the child will know the love of God because he first knows the love of his parents, for him and for each other. God’s love is unconditional, he doesn’t love us because of our accomplishments or successes, he loves us because he made us and imprinted us with an image of himself. God loves us even in – and especially in – those times when we cannot love ourselves. I know this not just as an abstract away, but in the concrete reality of the love I have always known from my Mother. But God’s unconditional love isn’t a kind of uncaring passivity about what we do. Our actions aren’t irrelevant, God cares deeply about what we do, because he created us for himself and for each other.

Even if Mom loved me unconditionally, she cared about what I did. Sometimes, especially when I was younger, that came across as meddlesome and nosy. And I suppose it was. But it was born out of an intense love that she had for me and for everyone she loved in her life. My Mom inherited her own mother’s strong personality. They didn’t always agree – working for her own mother as her nurse manager was the source of many of Mom’s more colorful stories. But I know how much my Nana loved her, and she her own Mom, even when they disagreed. I sometimes think that that aspect of the mother-daughter relationship is an inherited trait in our family. But that conflict was not so much a lack of love, but usually an overabundance of it. And that wasn’t just for us kids. One of the things I’ve had to do following Mom’s death is to put her things in order, going through her things, cancelling her credit cards and Gummy Drop game subscriptions. As I was cleaning out her wallet, she had two pictures in them. One of those was a picture of her and Chuck in front of some muscle car. Chuck, you were her partner in life and very much her other half. Mom wasn’t afraid of dying, she was desperately afraid of something happening to you. It wasn’t the suffering of her cancer that caused her grief, she could handle that. It was the thought of something that might happen to you that caused her the most distress. I know you never thought that you would outlive Mom, but she could never have outlived you. And for all the suffering and pain you’ve had to endure in these weeks, you know her suffering would have been unendurable. In a sense, you’re taking on the pain of grief, so that she didn’t have to.

I mentioned two pictures in her wallet. The other one was not of her three kids. And I’m just fine with that. No, the one other picture she had in her wallet was yours, Liam. Her beloved grandson. She loved you so much, and had so much pride in everything you did. She rejoiced in the fine young man you were becoming. And she loved to talk about what you were doing to everyone who would listen, or wouldn’t – she didn’t care. Just ask them – they all know about you. You are such a loved young man, from your own Nana, from your Dad, from me, even from your aunt Jennifer. And all of us love you because of the way Mom first loved us. You yourself are a man with such a capacity for love, and you can trace it to your Nana’s unconditional love. And she loved you not because of your grades, or your success at acting, but because you were her grandson. I pray that you might grow to love as you are loved.

In our human mode, the pain of grief is the price of love. For man cursed by the death of sin, love always risks the sorrow of loss. And the depth of our sorrow is the mirror of the depth of our love. And it is the goodness and joy of love that makes the suffering something we can endure. But by itself, that pain would go to no purpose. It is our faith, our faith in the sacrificial suffering and death of Christ on the cross that makes it possible that our own suffering, borne for the sake of love, might help bring about our redemption. Without the Resurrection that follows the cross, our suffering would be mere pain, and that would be unbearable. For even in the face of the seeming finality of death, we live in hope, hope in the love that ultimately conquers all things. Hope in the promise that is Jesus Christ.

My Mom was so many things – mother, wife, daughter, and especially nurse. But what tied all of these things together is that she was one who loved. And now, as she has passed from this world to the next, our hope rooted in faith gives us the certainty that she will know the deep and abiding comfort of the love of her heavenly Father. For, I suppose it is only the eternal love of God himself that could overwhelm her own.