Joan Higgins Beckman, BSN’71, and Gary R. Beckman
The Heather Bernadette and April Lynn Beckman Nursing Scholarship In Memory of Jeanne Corrinne and Bernard J. Higgins
When Joan Higgins left her 24 classmates and her Iowa farm home in Great Oak Township to come to Creighton, she knew she could count on her family to see her through.
Her dad Bernard would put a little more money into the checking account when grain was sold. And her mother Jeanne was there by phone each night of Joan’s first semester when her daughter was homesick or worried.
“Mom deftly distracted me with conversation about her day’s events and mine. She knew how to encourage and challenge me. Mom shared events of her early years in bits and pieces at unexpected times and usually with a purpose – to help me see the blessings I had in life.”
In fact, Beckman didn’t find out until her junior year at Creighton that her mother had quietly dreamed of going to nursing school. Grandfather’s answer, even when her mother offered to return the help to her siblings, was “no. I have eight children,” said Grandpa, “and I don’t think I can do that for all of you.”
Quietly giving and doing for others was “typical of my mother,” Joan says. In fact, on the day before her mother died of an apparent heart attack last Easter, “Mom had been doing what she did routinely: visit with family, take food to the home of someone who had died and attend church.”
Joan’s parents’ lives have motivated the Beckmans to pass on this special spirit of “doing for others” by helping Creighton nursing students.
But the scholarship also commemorates two other special people, Joan and Gary’s twin daughters born 14 weeks prematurely, who survived only one day, Oct. 14, 1980.
“They impacted our lives but we wanted others to know of them and be touched somehow by them,” Joan confides. Thus, the scholarship is named for Heather and April, as well.
Joan’s mother’s life insurance policy provided the seed money to establish the endowed scholarship. It will help support many more Creighton students from the Midwest as they work to become nurses, the Beckmans say.
“We want to help provide great nurses to care for people with COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease), heart disease, premature births, cancer and MS (multiple sclerosis), the many illnesses that have touched our family,” Joan adds.
“It was with great joy,” said the Beckmans, “that we presented the first scholarship” to Creighton student Jessica M. Lammers, an outstanding senior from Hartford, S.D., last September.
“We and our children after us will look forward to presenting an annual scholarship to a Creighton BSN or Master’s student … We know that today nursing skills and technology would have greatly improved the chance of survival for Heather and April.”
Gary and Joan say they have “been blessed” to raise Jasen, an Air Force Major and pilot who lives in South Dakota with his wife JoAnn and the Beckmans’ grandchildren Ryan (7), Connor (5) and Annie (1); Christanna, a pediatric nurse at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, who with husband Kyle lives in North Liberty, Iowa; and David, an Air Force Second Lieutenant assigned as a project manager at Edwards Air Force Base in California.