Play. Full. Heart.

West Ashley resident Eddie Keating vividly remembers the day when the doctor and the social worker came into his wife Joan’s hospital room to give her the bad news about how far the cancer had spread.
It was in her brain and the doctor was emotional. Eddie said Joan offered the doctor the tissues he had brought for her, telling the social worker, motioning at him, “and this one doesn’t need you.”
They had God. They had each other. They were going to be fine with whatever came along.
Joan Marie Keating died Jan. 5 of this year, at 59, her birthday three days prior. She had spent the previous 18 months fighting ovarian cancer.
Eddie, sitting in the living room of their Lockheed Drive home in West Ashley, with a large statue of the Virgin Mary in the corner, remembered what he’d found in her journals after she passed.
Joan had described her final 12 months as “probably the best year of her life.”
“Every time she went in for chemo, one of her best friends in the world came and visited her,” he said. One, she hadn’t seen in 20 years, flew in from Portland, Ore.
“It was a good life,” he said.
For her funeral mass, he and Joan had requested that well-wishers in lieu of flowers, donate money to a fund to replace the playground at the downtown Charleston Catholic School.
Joan had taught upper grades first at the K3-8 school, before settling down into a job teaching kindergarten. Their youngest, a daughter, went to school there, and is now a senior at the College of Charleston.
But it was the future of their older son, now a brewmaster at a local brewery, which pulled them to West Ashley. Prior to moving to Charleston, Eddie had found a niche managing restaurants in Myrtle Beach. But there wasn’t a Catholic high school along the Grand Strand, no matter how many times it had been promised by the diocese. After visiting Charleston and Bishop England High School, Joan, turned to Eddie, saying: “You know we’re moving here?”
But it was the “artsy” Charleston Catholic that Joan immediately fell in love with. It’s 1950s brick façade, tiled floors, and ethnic diversity reminded both of them of the schools back in Rockaway Beach, Queens, New York, where the two had grown up as devout Catholics.
It’s the kind of school where kids of different colors and nationalities don’t get asked, What are you, but rather, What’s your name?
Principal Fred McKay arrived at the school within a year of Joan. He described her as a “dynamic” teacher who would help out with kids in different grades. “She loved the kids; she was always doing things for their benefit,” he said.
Five years ago, on an annual all-school trip to a county park in Mt. Pleasant, Joan grabbed the principal by the arm and led him over to the playground area. It had been resurfaced with a rubberized covering, several inches thick.
It could absorb the impact of a flailing 4-year-old better than the pellets and mulch that covered the playground at Charleston Catholic. Bordered for years by thick plastic barriers and then bricks, it tore clothes when kids tripped and hit the ground, or stained them.
“Joan said, ‘We need this at our school.’ And I agreed,” said McKay. That is, until he looked into how much it cost. “We didn’t have $25,000 to spend.”
The school was in a building phase, having torn down its music and kindergarten buildings, and raised $2 million for a new, modern 10,000-square-foot building with five new classrooms and a new science lab.
Joan’s suggestion became, in McKay’s mind, a resident of the school’s wish list. It took a backseat as the cancer took its toll on her life.
Joan had to sit out the entire 2012-2013 school year, but managed to return to teach at the beginning of last year.
“She lasted three weeks” before a major relapse forced her to retire for good, said McKay.
The idea for a new, better playground began to gain steam once Joan was diagnosed, according to Eddie. Sitting down to dinner with a couple they had been friends with from up north, the husband became entranced with how fired up Joan was about the project. He wanted to help, and said so.
Eddie spoke with McKay about the idea of raising the money and if they could set up a fund. The principal agreed, but only expected dribs and drabs of money that would have to be managed and watched over for years.
At the funeral, Eddie said donations of every size started to roll in. Some were small and some were, “woo-hooo” big.
“They raised $34,000,” said McKay. Local parishioner architects, and contractors went to work. Plans were made, the old playground ground was hauled off, and trowelling began in earnest this summer.
A day and a half before school opened on Aug. 18, the project was completed. But Mother Nature objected. The same storm that tore away the milk carton from the Coburg sign in West Ashley, also toppled an old tree near the center of the playground, tearing up some of the new spongy surface.
Crews jumped into action and the work was completed the Sunday night before school started. There was a small dedication and blessing that Monday.
“The kids love it,” said McKay.
So does Eddie.
“I don’t want anyone to forget her spirit or her smile.”
They won’t Eddie. All they have to do is see them in the kids’ faces on the playground her love helped build.