Janina Teresa Glowacki

Janina Teresa Glowacki died in Scranton on August 30, 2026. She was eighty-two. Born there on September 24, 1943, she grew up in a house where Polish was for the kitchen and English was for the street, and she kept both. She became a nurse's aide because the hospital was hiring and because she had already learned, at home, how to stand next to pain without making it a performance. She spent most of her working life at a county hospital that did not look like the brochures. Nights, weekends, the hallway that smelled of antiseptic and coffee. She was the aide who taught new hands that a call light is not an interruption. She retired later than she meant to because the floor was short and she did not like leaving a shift in worse shape than she found it. She never put her title on her checks. She put her name. She married Stanley Glowacki in 1964. He worked at the plant until the plant became a story people told about other decades. They raised a son and a daughter in a double that needed a new porch every twenty years. Stanley died in 2011. Janina kept the garden of tomatoes against the garage and the habit of bringing kolaczki to the nurses who had once been her students. Friends remember a woman who would sit with a stranger's mother until the daughter arrived from Wilkes-Barre, who hated a messy med cart, and who said we are fine in a way that actually meant the work would get done. She died in Scranton, in a late-summer week that still had heat in the shade. The hill wind continues. She always said that was the city's way of telling you to button your coat and go to work anyway.