Gabriel Smith (daughter) and Norman Kehling (friend) reflect on the life and legacy of Joanne V. Smith (1942-2021). Joanne was a dedicated restorative justice volunteer and “champion for people she believed in.”
The family of Joanne Smith have established the Joanne Smith Fund for Restorative Reentry, to carry forward Joanne’s legacy of care.
Work infused with love
My mom, Joanne V. Smith, valued her work with RJP immensely and knew it was valued by the people she supported through mentorship. Part of why I think the work was meaningful to her was that she was able to bring so many parts of herself to it. She was a wonderful daughter, wife, mother, and grandmother. She was also a friend with a fantastic sense of humor, a voracious reader, a thoughtful writer, a careful editor, a skilled nurse, a remarkable bread-baker, a passionate activist, and a discerning movie lover. She infused all of these parts of her identity with love, which prepared her well to be an extraordinary and effective champion for people she believed in.
Norman, one of the people she mentored, wrote a play titled For the Next Guy and dedicated the premiere performances in Rockland to her. He sent our family a letter soon after my mom died. He titled it, “An unstoppable force meets an immovable object.” His description of my mom as an unstoppable force resonates with us as an apt description of who she was and what her work meant to him.
— Gabriel Smith
An unstoppable force meets an immovable object
I first met Joanne Smith through the efforts of two very good people. At the time I was incarcerated in Maine State Prison and three years out from the end of a thirty-year bid. I had three years to go to freedom. I was excited, afraid, eager, energized, happy …and did I say terrified? The one thing I knew for sure was that I wanted to get out at the first possible moment, and to me that meant acquiring my own apartment immediately on impact and undergoing home confinement. I wanted it so badly I could almost taste it. Freedom.
I will explain here that I was something of a force in Maine State Prison: it’s not possible to survive a thirty-year bid, thirty years behind bars, without learning ways to get along and get your own way in important matters. If you don’t learn that, then you don’t survive. But this is about Joanne and the meeting of an impossible, unstoppable force with a gracious, kind, loving immovable object.
I say I ‘met’ Joanne when I had three years to go—I mean that we began writing to each other. I learned early in those letters that Joanne had a notion that people like me, who’d been in prison for decades, needed help and mentoring long before we hit the streets. She felt that it would be wrong to throw us in the deep end of life without the basic skills that we’d either never learned or had long forgotten. I didn’t know how to work a telephone, order from a menu, pump gas, or open a computer. I hadn’t even seen a car driving down a street for decades; they looked like spacecrafts to me. I had daily panic attacks at the thought of entering real life. For some reason Joanne understood all this without me telling her and a lot of times she understood when I didn’t even know what I didn’t know. Joanne knew.
Once she sent me a picture of a rowboat resting on land that had big Christmas lights on it. She said she wanted me to have it just because it was beautiful and she knew I hadn’t seen lights like that ever.
Our first disagreement was a big one. Joanne felt strongly that I needed more than her help to reenter society safely. She felt that I needed to go to a reentry center and forgo having my own apartment until I had spent some time walking alone around city streets, working and doing community service, and returning to the relative safety of the center. I thought that was ridiculous and there was no way I was going for it. I had been holed up, and jammed up, for decades too long already. I needed air and breath and freedom. And that’s when I met the immovable object that was my kind, patient, implacable mentor Joanne Smith. My Guardian Angel. Every letter, bit by bit, she would explain to me why I needed the support, why I wasn’t quite ready to live alone. She would research and send me statistics on who made it and why, and who didn’t and why. Letter after letter piling up in my cell like fragile snowflakes that take you by surprise when you notice they have the strength of a silent snowstorm, a force of facts and patience.
I went to the reentry center, and I finally really met Joanne in person. (Though she didn’t particularly like driving the hour each way—she did it regularly because she was my mentor.) I walked the streets alone. I had my panic attacks in the company of others. I learned how to order from a menu and open a computer. Joanne was there through all of it… and I loved and appreciated her for her goodness and kindness. And when she didn’t think I was getting a fair shake, she would be there right away. On my side, defending me. It happened several times and she was a woman who effortlessly and without fuss spoke truth to power. I had never met anyone like her. She moved and inspired me with her caring, her kindness, and her willingness to back her beliefs with action. She was a true advocate.
I became busy doing things for my community. I told Joanne and she always let me know how proud she was. I believe she knew that my success was based in her persistent belief in me. I hadn’t seen Joanne for a couple of years but she was never long out of my thoughts, and never once out of my heart.
When I thank people for helping me to change in profound and necessary ways, Joanne is, and will ever be, on that very short list. Meeting her, having her in my life, helps me to understand the word, the concept, “Godsend.” She was a ‘send’ directly to me from a God that has sometimes seemed unkind, but managed to redeem me when He sent along Joanne Smith.
— Norman Kehling