Joan Elizabeth Schwartz was born in Highland Park, IL in 1948 to Morris Schwartz and Eugenia Moore Schwartz. She grew up in the affluent Chicago suburbs where her happiest memories were of spending time in the water and on the beaches of Lake Michigan. She loved being in nature and playing with her two older brothers, Bill and Tom. She graduated from the prestigious New Trier High School in Winnetka and went onto earn an English Literature degree from Grinnell College in Iowa. She was also passionate about art and dance and had once dreamed of being a professional ballet dancer.
After college she joined the Back to the Land movement and moved to Olympia to help establish a school for the children of the professors of the Evergreen State College. She then moved to Day Creek and worked at another school while buying 10 acres with her first husband, Tom Smith. She raised sheep, goats and pigs, made cheese, sheared sheep and spun their wool into yarn, planted a huge garden and learned to preserve food. She ground her own grain and wove her own cloth on her loom, brewed beer, and worked at a dairy and a plant nursery.
In 1979 she moved to Guemes Island with her second husband Joseph Miller and two year old daughter Clarity and finished a partially built log house on five acres in the woods on No Name Road. She put in an huge garden with an orchard. Their son Asa was born at home in 1984. She practiced the same skills she’d mastered (minus the farm animals), and passed many of these down to her children. Her cooking was legendary- tortillas made from scratch, incredible birthday cakes, soufflés and cream puffs. Every vegetable was harvested from her epic garden. She made her own jam and baked her own bread. She sewed her own clothes and taught her kids to sew clothes for their dolls and teddy bears. She taught her children that they could do or make anything they set their minds to and follow the things they felt passionate about.
She was still passionate about education and got her Montessori teacher certification. She worked at a couple local schools before opening her own, A New Day Montessori. She was beloved by every student who passed through the doors, and even at age 75 she would run into former students around town and they would remember her and tell her how much they loved being in her classes.
She met her lifelong friends Bernice, Claire, Charmaine and Nan on Guemes Island. She was a steadfast and intensely loyal friend. She helped run the Guemes summer camp programs, marched in the 4th of July parade, and took bellydancing classes at the Community Hall. She loved the nature of Guemes- hiking in the woods, running a tofu business, walking at Kelly’s Point, picking blackberries, and even adopting a mysterious dove, Luna, that appeared at the house one day and became a beloved pet. Although she left the island after 20 years, it remained in her heart.
Once her children had grown up, she traveled, living in Vancouver, Canada, Sedona, AZ, and Petaluma, CA. She made friends in each place, beloved friends who checked in daily during her final months of life. During these years she found a second career in nutrition education and worked as a personal chef as well as authoring two cookbooks, Choose to Thrive and A Sweet Life Without Sugar. She taught classes, worked as a personal chef, and loved helping people make delicious food while eating a cleaner diet.
She settled in Portland, OR for several years to spend time with Asa and his wife Kat and their two children. She deeply loved her four grandchildren, May, Lucinda, Aviel and Cypress with same ferocity she did her children. She loved taking nature walks with May, having extravagant tea parties with Lulu, taking rainy walks around Portland and saying hi to the flowers with Aviel, and spending hours holding baby Cypress. Her grandchildren could not get enough Lala (her grandmother name) time.
In Portland, she found a wonderful group of kind people at Koru, the community house she shared, and where she hosted many potlucks and activities with friends. She volunteered to prune roses in the public rose gardens of Ladd’s Addition. She loved Sufi dancing and taking long walks to look at the gardens in her neighborhood. As always, she found and made strong friendships that lasted even after she moved from Portland.
She had a deep interest in spirituality that began when she was a child and continued throughout her life. Her father was Jewish and her mother was an atheist, but she was encouraged to learn about all kinds of spiritual life and her parents took her to temples and churches to explore different faiths. She read hundreds of books and listened to many lectures by many experts on the subject. She studied with Dr. David Hawkins and Eckhart Tolle, and was passionate about the Sufi poet Rumi.
She spent the last two years of her life in Anacortes, living in a small house behind Clarity’s family home. She reconnected with old friends, helped with Clarity’s massive garden, and took care of her grandkids when Clarity had a kidney transplant. She was diagnosed with triple negative breast cancer nine months before her death, and although it was not treatable, she did have time to connect with the people who deeply loved her. Every day she would get emails, texts, calls and cards from friends. Some she had known for decades, others for just a few years. The sheer abundance of love that people had for her showed what a kind, strong and loyal person she was. She died on February 12, 2024, with Asa and Clarity holding her hands and her friends Bernice and Elke at her side.
“My mom was more than a series of places, dates and experiences- she was incredibly loving, humble, intelligent, kind, and, supportive. She was the person I talked to every day of my life. She was the person who would belly laugh with me until we were both in tears. She was the person who was there every time I woke up from surgery and when I gave birth. She was the only person I wanted with me when I was sick, heartbroken, or celebrating. She was THE PERSON to me. It’s impossible to sum up a person’s life in a few paragraphs, or even to describe a person using only words. My mom would want to be remembered for the love she put out into the world and the love that came back to her, which was immeasurable.”-Clarity
She is survived by her son Asa and daughter in law Kat, her daughter Clarity and son in law Ben, and her grandchildren May, Lucinda and Aviel, and her brother Tom. She was preceded in death by her parents, brother Bill, and grandson Cypress.
