Janice Lucille Pace

Janice Lucille Pace , Nurse Extraordinaire, Dies at 82. Angels, rejoice then stick out your tongues and say ah, because a loveable health nut just stepped onto the firmament. We know you won’t need it, since y’all are perfect beings and such, but Janice Lucille Pace will insist upon checking you over and making recommendations. This is how she’ll show her love for you the way she did for us for a lifetime before shaking off her own Earthly frailties on Friday, April 27, 2018, at age 82. Sadly, they had weighed heavily upon her for a year, so we know she’s happier now. Janice was nurse extraordinaire until her last breath, even after having packed away her stethoscope decades ago. Her superior medical advice left folks at times ruffled but also healthier, not to mention having saved a few hundred patients’ lives and a couple more of her own loved ones.’ Sheesh, did she ever know it all better than the doctors did. Take that time a pediatrician was sure Janice’s son’s belly ache was just a vomiting virus, but, boy, did she ever make the doc admit that it could be a ruptured appendix. Janice carted her son to the emergency room. And she was right. And it saved him from death’s jaws at age 15. She could bandage with the best of them, too, having worked for years herself in the emergency room. And angels, one of your cupids apparently thought that a fitting place for shots to the heart because that’s where Janice met both husband number one and husband number two in the 1960s. She was quite the looker then, if not to say a stunner, with her nut-brown mane, coke-bottle curves traced through tasteful garments, and a smile somewhere between young Audrey Hepburn’s and Maureen O’Hara’s, two icons of the black-and-white classic movies she adored. “Wow!! Is that your mom??” schoolboys used to swoon to Janice’s children, who then buried their heads at the question in their book bags. We have a suspicion that’s who Janice has become again now, so there may be some double-takes when she strides with poise through the pearly gates. Janice stuck out in photos even as a child. She was born Janice Pate in Dyersburg, Tennessee, on December 12, 1935, and weathered the Great Depression and World War II there with her uncle and an aunt named Lucille, whose middle name and profession she carried forward a generation. Janice moved to Memphis at age 13 to rejoin her mother, who had been a WWII parachute seamstress, her sister, and her brother. Janice graduated from Tech High then from the St. Joseph School of Nursing at the top of her class and as her class president. You see, cherubs and seraphs, there’s substance behind her health nit-picking. Of course, she’s aware it’s lost on you, but you’ll be proud of the trail of good she left behind down here with her medical frets -- along with these appreciably healthy loved ones: Her daughter Libby Pace-Humphies, her son, Ben Brumfield, and two grandsons, Shaw and Everett. Janice is also survived by a sister, Mary Warren, 94; she was preceded in death by her brother Nelson Pate. Janice also leaves behind a large, loving extended family that always, always pulls together in the face of loss and joy. Today we have both by the bushel. The family will receive friends from 5:00 p.m. until 8:00 p.m., Monday, April 30, 2018 and a funeral service will be held at 2:00 p.m., Tuesday, May 1, 2018 at Memphis Funeral Home and Memorial Gardens, 3700 N. Germantown Rd., Bartlett, TN. Memphis Funeral Home