Hawley, MA – Joyce Marie Charland (née White), 86, passed away peacefully on March 17 at her home in Hawley, MA.
Joyce was born on June 5, 1939, in Greenfield, MA, the youngest of four children born to Harold and Willa White (née McCunn) and grew up on the family farm in Hawley. She attended elementary school at the one-room schoolhouse in Hawley (now the Town Hall), so precocious that the teacher put her straight into second grade as a classmate for its only other pupil. Given a choice by her father between a wedding and a college education (college was still a rarity for women at the time, and her father could not afford both), she chose the latter, earning a degree as a Dietician from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1960.
There she met her husband, Edmund G. Charland, Jr., a Navy veteran just back from the Korean War on the GI Bill. While he finished up his degree in Electrical Engineering, she worked as a Dietician at Newton-Wellesley Hospital. They married in Wellesley, MA in 1961.
They moved to Long Island, NY, for his work at the then start-up Grumman Aerospace Corporation, where their son Frank was born in Port Jefferson in 1963. When Grumman was awarded the NASA contract to help jump-start the Space Race, they moved to Las Cruces, NM, where their daughter Paula was born in 1965. There they loved hosting both their families on long car trips through National Parks out west. Grumman moved them back to Long Island where their daughter Karen was born in Blue Point in 1966. They eventually settled in Selden where Joyce worked for the public schools and libraries while they raised their family.
In 1988, Joyce and Ed relocated to Melbourne, FL for Ed’s work at Cape Canaveral where they lived very happily until his early death in 1999. Reluctant to leave the sunshine and the golf courses, but eager to be back with her extended family, Joyce moved herself back up to Hawley in 2002, taking over the house on ‘The Hill’ left to her by her father. She lived there, surrounded by family and friends as a staple of town life, for the next 24 years.
Joyce was a gifted athlete, although she wouldn’t have said so. She got her start skiing on ‘Snow White’ ski hill as a child, which was run on her family’s land, then took it back up effortlessly again in her 60s. At 16, she was chosen to lead Charlemont’s Yankee Doodle Days parade on horseback as Yankee Doodle. In high school, she astonished her elder brothers and the rest of the men in town when she won the basketball free-throw contest by sinking 25 shots in a row. She was the first golfer in the family, picking it up in her 40s and quickly becoming a scratch player; Ed loved to bring her along when his dubious colleagues needed to complete a foursome. At their golf club in Melbourne, FL, she was the women’s champion for so many years in a row that she took herself out of the running twice just to give somebody else a chance. When she and Ed played at Saint Andrews in Scotland, she laughed when the wind took the ball backwards off the first tee-and then shocked the ghillie by posting up a respectable score nonetheless. Well into her late 70s, you would find her golfing on the rolling hills of Ashfield Community Golf Course, undaunted by the steepness of the greens.
Her tremendous physical fortitude and energy meant that, until the very last summer of her life, she was mowing her own lawn, doing her own gardening, helping her nephew boil maple syrup at his sugarhouse out back, and stacking her own firewood (the second floor of her house has no heat). She often said how privileged she was to live in a place so beautiful.
Animals were drawn to her. As a child, her pet lamb would follow her to school, and there was no horse she couldn’t ride. She was the unquestionable favourite of all the family cats and dogs. The porcupine who took up residence in the tree just outside her picture window would eat apples all day long not six feet from where she sat doing crosswords. Although she grumbled about the effort it took to feed her hummingbirds, calling them ‘greedy’, she loved them. Everyone who visited her on the hill would marvel at their aerial acrobatics and how they would dive-bomb her to let her know when their feeder was empty. She did not love the bear that left claw marks on her back door, nor the one that helped itself to the contents of the freezer in her basement.
An innate sense of justice and fairness for all, deep empathy, and a drive to help others meant that you would often find her at Town Hall, working at the polls or helping to run the Council on Aging. She had been kept busy of late keeping appraised of politics and had firm opinions about all of it which she mostly kept to herself. At family gatherings, after delivering the homemade desserts she was volunteered to bring along by others, you’d find her in the kitchen doing the dishes so that no one else would have to.
Her aptitude for precision and love of beauty also made her an exceptional craftswoman. After the premature death of her mother when she was 11, it was her beloved Aunt Ethel who passed down to Joyce the skills of sewing, knitting, lace making, quilting, wreath making, jam and jelly making, and canning that had been perfected by the women in her family over so many generations. To those, she added wood working and stained glass, specializing in Tiffany-stye lamps. Many family and friends now cherish as family heirlooms the museum-quality pieces that she casually gifted to them over the years, just because ‘she was looking for something to do’.
Joyce lived life on her own terms, jealously guarding her independence and remaining self-sufficient right to the end, so as not to ‘be a bother’ (as she would put it) to others. She was deeply loved and will be greatly missed.
She is survived by her three children and their partners (Frank and Anna Charland, Paula and Tony de Fougerolles, and Karen Green and Doug Hunt), seven grandchildren (Valery, Artiom, and Denis Charland, Mila and Simon de Fougerolles, and Lindsey and Richie Green), her sister (Alice Reinhardt), her sister-in-law (Camille White), her life-long family friend (Joanne Gannon), and many cousins, nieces, and nephews and their families.
On October 11, 2026, after interment of her ashes at Leavitt Cemetery in Charlemont with her husband Ed, a celebration of her life will be held at Pudding Hollow Farm, Hawley.
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