Joyce (Denny) Hausmann

Joyce S. (Denny) Hausmann, 81, of Charlton and formally of Connecticut, passed away on December 29, 2024, at UMass Memorial, Worcester, after a short illness.

She was born in Derby, Connecticut, the daughter of the late Nelson and Ruth (Pardee) Denny.

Joyce is survived by her two sons, Keith L Hausmann Jr. and his wife Lainie Blodgett and Kevin J Hausmann and his wife Marlene.  She is also survived by her two grandchildren, Asa Hausmann and Jonah Hausmann and a daughter-in-law, Jennifer Hausmann. 

She was predeceased by her brother, Nelson John Denny.

Throughout most of her adult life, Joyce lived in Tolland, Connecticut on Robin Circle, which was a wonderful, close community for her.  Since 2023, Joyce lived at The Overlook in Charlton, Massachusetts where the staff took excellent care of her and the other residents, who she came to be good friends with over the last 18 months. 

Joyce attended the University of Connecticut (which of course made her a huge Huskies basketball fan) and Eastern Connecticut State University for undergraduate and graduate degrees.  She spent her career as a proud and passionate educator of children, first at Pleasant Valley Elementary School in South Windsor Connecticut and then at Kramer Middle School in Willimantic Connecticut where she was a specialist in teaching reading, often to children with disabilities or learning English for the first time. 

Besides raising her sons and enjoying watching the growth of her grandchildren, Joyce had a number of passions.  She loved all types of gardening and horticulture, building and maintaining beautiful gardens at her home and filling her internal space with innumerable exotic and common plants, which often made you feel like you were visiting a greenhouse.   She greatly enjoyed planning and participating in talks and garden visits with the Tolland Garden Paths.

She also was a talented artist working in pottery, textiles and her biggest passion, painting.  Her favorite thing to paint was New England landscapes from the shores to the mountains to historical town greens.  She’d often challenge herself with topics she felt less comfortable with such as animals and portraits of people.   She took considerable pride in the sheer number of walls in the homes of family and friends that were filled with her artwork.   Her most recent commission was a series of paintings of a family trip to Spain where she painted over half a dozen landscapes of the Basque region of Spain, a place she had unfortunately never visited, but developed an appreciation for through the paint and brushes.

True to the passion she displayed in her career as a reading teacher, she read thousands of books of every imaginable type and sponsored the annual Christmas book exchange the family held.  She also wrote a biography and a number of short stories that she hopes her family will read one day as documentation of her legacy.

Mom/Grammy will be greatly missed, and a Remembrance Celebration will be set for the Spring of 2025 as she would at least expect the earliest crocuses to be coming up before family and friends gathered to celebrate her life.

In honor of Joyce’s life, donations can be made in her name to The American Lung Association. https://bealungsaver.funraise.org/fundraiser/keith-hausmann

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