A light of love and joy toward others

The Boston Globe

Beverly Beckham

"May I always put the needs of others before my own. May I so love my family, friends, and co-workers that they see only Your goodness in me. May Your love and Your light shine through in everything I do." - A prayer for growing spiritually.

Beth Spence Cann may never have said this prayer. It's Catholic and she was Congregationalist. But she lived it. She put the needs of others before her own. It was the best thing about her. And, in the end, it was the worst. She was murdered two weeks ago by a man she tried to save.

She was not weak. She was not a doormat. She was not just a "divorced mother of three" with "an on-again, off-again boyfriend" - as news reports of her death described her. She was a person of faith who looked at a troubled man and remembered his kindness and sought to find again the goodness that lives within us all.

It was that man, Robert McDermott, who shot Elizabeth Spence Cann and critically wounded two of her daughters, Brittany, 12, and Danielle, 15, last month at their home in Norton. Beth Cann's attempt to save him cost her her life.

Beth's mother, Jeannette, remembers Beth as a baby and as a child, how she was always good, even back then. She made people smile, made them happy.

Last week, no one was smiling in the family's Canton living room.

It is early evening, light still. Outside the world spins. But in here, time loops. Pictures of Beth, collages that were at her wake, are everywhere. There is talk of Beth. There are memories. There is Beth's art. But no Beth. Her sister Patty leads me to a mural Beth designed for Patty’s front hall. It is bright and beautiful, a garden with a walkway and a bench. Patty shows me her manicured hands and on one nail is a tiny Adirondack chair, an umbrella and a sun, painted by Beth the Thursday before she was murdered. These are all from before, when Beth was alive.

Now it is after. And after is full of dark and long silences and the phone ringing. And waiting to see if Beth's two youngest daughters, shot by the man who killed their mother, will live. "Beth saw the best in everyone," her brother Doug says. "No one can be all bad. That's what she really believed." Beth was devout. She and her three girls attended Trinitarian Congregational Church in Norton every Sunday. She was a youth counselor. She taught Sunday school. She decorated the altar with flowers weekly. And she led a prayer group. This is the single mother reporters overlooked.

Beth was also a longtime environmentalist. When her children were babies, she used cloth diapers, washed them herself, and hung them outside to dry. She made their food from vegetables she grew in her garden. She never used paper towels or napkins. And she recycled everything.

Trained as an artist, she couldn't make a living painting. But she painted murals in her children's pediatrician's office to make the place cheerier for sick kids. And after Sept. 11, 2001, she painted slates, which she decorated with stars and stripes and other patriotic symbols, then delivered the money she made from these to firehouses in New York City. When she heard that a friend of a friend, someone she didn't even know, had cancer and no health insurance? She used her art to help raise funds.

"She was a giver," her mother says. And her brother and sister nod. She was also a hard worker. She had two jobs, one at a salon where she used her art to create tiny, intricate nail designs, and the other at Tweeter Center, where she worked every summer. She loved her work and her garden and her art.

But her kids, her church, and her family were the most important things to her. She never missed even one of her girls' Irish step dances and competitions. Or basketball and volleyball games.

The family tells a story about a chair left at the side of the road. Beth rescued it and a while later she rescued a beaten-up chest of drawers. Both were junk and broken. But Beth transformed them into works of art, into things of beauty. She was like that with people, too. "The good that none of us could see, she could see," her brother says. "She had unconditional love."

Beth has been portrayed as someone who never stood up for herself or her kids, who was by virtue of her lifestyle complicit in her daughters' shootings and in her own death. But this was her lifestyle: Children. Church. Family.

Beth was love and light and joy, her mother says.  She believed that all people are salvageable. She believed that God dwells within all of us.

"Live your life as Christ did. This was Beth," her mother says.