Joan Dunn Bichan was born in Coronado, California, to Joseph Brantley Dunn, later Admiral Dunn, USN, and Gleaves Patterson Dunn on July 19, 1933. She lived in many exciting places as a child including Panama and Guam. She grew up with two half sisters, Corinne and Jackie. She married Gary (Bud) Carlton Callaway in 1951, and had two daughters, Cathy and Jana. Joan and Bud later divorced, and she married Lieutenant , later Captain, Leo Twyman Profilet, USN, and had two sons, Joseph Peter (Pierre) and Leo. As a Navy wife, she continued moving throughout her adult life as well, enduring the effects of her husband's MIA/POW status during the Viet Nam War for five and a half years. Joan and Leo Profilet divorced soon after his return from Viet Nam. After the break-up of that marriage, she married, and eventually divorced Robert Cormack Bichan.
Joan Dunn Bichan was a remarkable aggregate of opposites. Her mother was a debutante, and her father, a submarine officer, commander of a Naval destroyer and a fighter pilot. She was a girl named after her father. As a teenager, she earned “sharpshooter” status among the Marines on Guam, and was elected “Most Beautiful” during her junior year of high school. She was a mother of four, and a free spirit; a loving and loyal friend, and a fierce adversary. She married a man she loved who was too often and too long gone in his service to the Nation. She handled many important life events, like births, graduations and marriages of her children on her own.
While raising her children, she served as Brownie and Girl Scout leader for her girls and Cub Scout den mother for the boys. She had a quick wit and a quirky, relentless sense of humor. Her daughter, Cathy, recalls, "she had dresses made for me and my sister for our most special occasions - by a dressmaker - rather than buying them off-the-rack. I don't think many mothers did that back then. She also taught us to sing show tunes, which we did along with our kitchen chores many evenings." Joan enjoyed art, and did some painting herself. She loved cats so much, she would say "I have a cat on my lap" during especially happy times even though there was no cat in the house. When her health continued to fail, she consented to leave her home and her friends in Michigan, and moved to Mercer Island, Washington, where her daughter Cathy could look after her. She was a member of the Cascade Chapter of Daughters of the American Revolution in Bellevue, WA.
Nicknamed PeeWee, her father-in-law called her his “little race horse”. A race horse is exactly the image she presented through her struggles with peripheral neuropathy, COPD, osteoarthritis and cardiomyopathy. She was determined to finish the race her way, with stubbornness and style. She did. She died peacefully in her sleep, in her own apartment on January 19, 2011. Joan Dunn Bichan was never a whiner, and always wild at heart.
Obituary
After a rich and adventurous life, Joan Dunn Bichan passed away peacefully in her sleep in her own bed in her apartment at Island House on Mercer Island, Washington. She struggled with peripheral neuropathy, cardio myopathy, COPD and osteoarthritis. She leaves behind her four children and their spouses, four grandchildren, one great grandchild, two aunts, several cousins and her older sister, Jackie Jones. Joan Bichan was seventy-eight.
Joan Bichan's family sends out big THANKS to those who eased her physical pain toward the end for their attentive and competent care, to Lance Barendse at the Elbo Room restaurant in Saugatuck, for cooking, salting and cutting her food when she was too weak to do it herself, to Carole Herweyer for her faithful friendship through thick and thin, to great aunt Jane for love and wisdom to the end, to all deep and casual friends for the meaning each added to her life sharing stories and listening to hers, and to all the cats who ever sat on her lap or even gave her a passing nod.
Arrangements under the direction of Sunset Hills Funeral Home, Bellevue, WA.
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