Jean Isobel Shaw

Jean Isobel Shaw, a long-time resident of the Kalispell area, died Saturday, Feb. 27, 2010, at the Village Healthcare Center of Missoula. Born in 1928 in Sorrento, B.C., to Herbert Bert and Sadie Anderson, Jean was raised tending a lakeside apple orchard and grew to love all living things. Bert s father was a physician in Dundee, Scotland, but Bert felt there were opportunities in Canada and immigrated around 1910, where he met Sadie Forbes a year or two later. When the Great War arrived and Canada entered on the side of Britain, Bert volunteered to drive an ambulance on the front lines and served until the Armistice. Sadie s family had farmed the lands of central Canada for a hundred years, so after Bert was decommissioned and returned to Canada with damaged lungs, it seemed right that they should move to British Columbia to tend apple trees and start a family. Jean was born into these twin traditions of farming and medicine, but too soon she and Bert lost Sadie to illness. Sadie s sister Mary then came into their lives becoming Bert s wife and Jean s Mother. While in school, Jean excelled in biology and received a Certificate in Nursing Education from Royal Inland Hospital, Kamloops, B.C., in 1951. She had a lifelong love of gardening and tending to the sick and hurt, with a special touch with both her roses and the premature babies born into her care. Soon after becoming a nurse, Jean met a young, brooding cowboy named Jim Shaw, who was up from Wyoming scouting ranch investments with his father. They were soon married, and with a new life in the United States, Jean set to nursing humans and horses and raising a family in Lander, Wyo. After the first two sons were born and a third on the way, Jim and Jean moved to Montana and eventually settled in Kalispell, where Jim established a private practice as a land surveyor and Jean resumed her work as a nurse. She came to hold a great respect for the medical profession of the Flathead Valley. She taught tolerance, understanding and the power of education. Her calm in crisis and her first-aid kit were especially important raising her three sons. Jean was preceded in death by her husband Jim, whom she nursed for many years. She is survived by her three children, James Scott Shaw of Missoula, William Ross Shaw of Idaho Falls, Idaho, and Duncan Stuart Shaw of Berthoud, Colo.; and her four grandchildren, Ross, Graham, Isobel and Rachel. The family suggests memorials to the Glacier Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, 1515 Trumble Creek Road, Kalispell, MT, 59901-6743.