Geraldine (Jeri) Cardin, 79
Geraldine (Jeri) Cardin dedicated her life and her hands to making grandmothers and widows walk out of her beauty salon feeling pretty. Her days of standing behind a styling chair often lasted 14 hours or more. She once devoted an entire day to combing out a young girl’s Afro which had become horribly matted after a prolonged illness. That girl walked into Jeri’s shop terrified her head would have to be shaved. She walked out feeling pretty.
Jeri used those skilled hands to create many things. During her younger years, she loved nothing more than to be in the kitchen with her four older sisters, talking and bonding while they cooked the family dinners. As a young woman, she created a business where several other women made a living for decades to come. She started that business during an era when women owning businesses were an exception to the assumed rule.
A lover of books and all things political, she followed the inevitable path of becoming a writer herself. She wrote children’s stories and numerous opinion pieces for the local newspaper. She never shied away from a public political argument. Any man who assumed she would demurely acquiesce had another thing coming.
After raising her two children, Jeri decided to pick up a sketching pencil, mustered her courage, and joined an art class. Portraits became her expression of choice, including one hauntingly beautiful montage of her with her sisters.
Her later years were spent caring for her husband, Dennis Cardin, as he struggled with Alzheimer’s. She cared for him at home long after prudence would dictate because as she saw it, he needed her, and that was all she needed to know. After he passed, she devoted her hands and her formal retirement to knitting a zoo of stuffed animals for children in need.
Late in the eve of Sept. 11, 2020, Jeri drew her last breath on her own terms. She drew in that breath on the sofa of the home her daughter, Nicole, and son (in-law), Jody, so lovingly made for her to enjoy her final chapter. Surrounded by family, she left us to a world made better for the time she spent here. She finally joined her sisters in that other kitchen. That her heart stopped beating, or why it stopped beating feel like the least relevant details of what actually happened that September night. Jeri spent almost all of her 79 years in this world using her hands to give, to lift up others, to create beautiful and nurturing things, to touch with love and skill and to help those around her see themselves in beautiful ways. Because those hands never stopped giving her heart away, it feels far more accurate to report that on the eve of Sept. 11, Jeri Cardin outlived death.