[Magdalen] R.I.P. Gail Shipp

[Grace Cangialosi]

Prayers for her soul and for you, Gail. She sounds like an amazing woman!

> On Nov 30, 2019, at 1:39 PM, Jay Weigel <jay.weigel at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Prayers, please, for the repose of my friend Gail Shipp, who died on
> Thanksgiving Day. Gail and I were longtime friends, going back to my first
> days of home health in 1990. Gail was the epitome of Shakespeare's "Though
> she be but little, she is fierce." Standing barely 4'11, she was determined
> not to be ignored. She was a tireless and fearless fighter for the rights
> of her patients, a terrific psych nurse (she took the patients the rest of
> us didn't really want and was great with them), and great with hospice
> patients also. She was the bane of supervisors as she didn't put up with BS
> and would argue with them if she thought they were wrong, which was often.
> However, she spoke up for the rest of us, so we liked that! She worked in
> home health long after the rest of us had gone elsewhere or retired....and
> she was older than the other two of our triumvirate, which I think would
> have made her 81 or 82 at her death. Gail had been a lapsed Catholic for
> many years and somehow had connected with a large and active Methodist
> church about 18 years ago. This led her to become an active and committed
> Christian and eventually a lay minister. She did medical missionary work in
> Africa and the Philippines for the church and loved doing it. Gail and I
> were on opposite sides of the political spectrum but didn't discuss it
> much. The only argument we ever had was over pharmaceutical stocks.....I
> wouldn't invest in them because I said the companies behaved in immoral
> ways and she argued they were profitable and it didn't matter to her what
> they did. About a year after she had become a committed Christian, we were
> having lunch and she told me she had divested her portfolio of all
> pharmaceutical stocks. She said, "You were right all along and I can't call
> myself a Christian and support them." I hadn't seen her the last couple of
> times I was in Tennessee because I flew down and didn't have a car at my
> disposal, but I knew that her health wasn't good. I'll miss my tough,
> fierce friend. She's survived by her husband Jim, 6 kids by her first
> marriage, an adopted daughter, and innumerable grandchildren and
> great-grandchildren.