Jann Hickey’s “bucket list”
 Jann Hickey and her "bucket list" |
On a perfect September day in 2007, Jann Hickey and her husband Ed were tooling around the river on their personal watercraft. They stopped to have lunch and enjoy the weather when Jann had an impulse to fulfill a dream she had shared with her late brother. She would swim across the Ohio, in his honor, that very day.
A learning specialist in Academic Skills, Hickey was 57 years old and recovering from knee surgery. She’d had a defibrillator and pacemaker implanted three years earlier.
Thirteen years ago, her brother Chuck died of a sudden heart attack while playing tennis. An athletic 46-year-old and “the picture of health,” she said, he was her only sibling and her best friend. Their mother died of the same cause at age 40.
Chuck and Jann grew up water-skiing on the Ohio and were competitive swimmers. “We used to say we’d swim across that river some day,” she said.
On that day last September, she told Ed she wanted to complete the goal she and Chuck had set as teenagers. “And I just did it.”
Ed took her to the Kentucky side of the river and as she back-stroked toward Newburgh, he hovered nearby. “He circled around in case I needed him, but I got ‘er done,” she said.
She focused on a cell phone tower to help her swim in a straight line against the current. It took her 20 minutes. “I never thought about not making it,” she said. “I knew I could. I wanted to show my daughters you can do anything you set your mind to, even with health problems.”
Hickey makes a habit of fulfilling her dreams. Her motto is: “We can choose to dwell on yesterday, or we can see life through the eyes of a child – with newness, joy, and the thrill of adventure.”
She’s already checked several items off of her “bucket list,” or list of things she wants to do before she “kicks the bucket.”
Two months after she swam across the Ohio, she was in Albuquerque, New Mexico, riding horseback along the Rio Grande. This spring she rode a bicycle around New York City’s Central Park with her daughters during a trip Hickey dubbed a “Mother-Daughter Celebration of Life and Good Health.”
“In less than a year I accomplished three things that I have always wanted to do,” she said.
“Every year, I do what I can to prove to myself and my family that I have a positive outlook about whatever the next day can bring. I treasure every day as a gift and a way to celebrate being above ground and vertical.”
Hickey has been a learning specialist at USI since 1996. She trains and supervises the study skills tutors, academic coaches, and subject-based tutors, and teaches courses in general studies and education. She holds a master’s degree in reading education from Western Illinois University and a bachelor’s degree in elementary education from Indiana State University. The Student Government Association selected her as the 2008 Administrator of the Year.
Wendy Knipe Bredhold
News & Information Services
812/461-5259 or wkbredhold@usi.edu
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