Janice Goldsmith Tomeny Szadaj Cisneros

The Service

Order of Service

• WelcomeTreyeshua
• Opening Prayer
• Scripture & ReflectionMatthew 7:16–20 · known by their fruit
• Words of Remembranceeach of her four children — Helen, Treyeshua, Eddie, and Pete
• The Committalher ashes laid to rest beside her husband Joseph Szadaj
• A Prayer & Blessing
• Closing

A Life Well Loved

Janice Goldsmith Tomeny Szadaj Cisneros was, by the testimony of everyone who knew her, loved by all who ever met her.

Jesus taught that His true followers are known by their fruit — “by their fruits ye shall know them.” By that measure, across the standard of any faith, Janice was a true saint. Her fruit is plain to anyone who has met her children or her grandchildren: lives shaped by love, by faith, and by a devotion to Christ that she planted and tended over a lifetime. That is the legacy she leaves, and it is a great one.

Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on June 22, 1932, to Ernest Goldsmith and Helen Harrison, Janice’s family home was in Glencoe, Illinois — a Chicago suburb where Robert Prevost, now Pope Leo, lived for a season nearby. She kept her faith at the very center of her days and was, as her family says with a smile, more Catholic than the Pope, attending daily Mass for decades. An interior decorator by profession, she had a gift for bringing warmth and beauty into every home — and every life — she touched.

She loved greatly, and was greatly loved in return. She married Thomas Joseph Tomeny Jr. in 1957, and together they raised four children. After his passing she married Joseph Szadaj in 1981, and later Gilbert Cisneros in 2001. In her later years she shared her life with Thomas Parker, who — by his own cheerful determination — fully intended to outlive her. Like the three good men before him, he did not manage it. Janice, it turned out, was not easily outlasted.

Today — on what would have been her 94th birthday — with her son conducting and each of her children speaking, her family lays her ashes to rest beside her husband Joseph Szadaj in San Luis, Colorado, reunited now with her beloved grandson TJ and all who went before. They give thanks for a life whose fruit will outlast us all. May she rest in peace.

A Prayer

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope.
For it is in giving that we receive,
and in dying that we are born to eternal life. attributed to St. Francis of Assisi