LITTLE ROCK — Hospital waiting rooms can be frightening and isolating for worried family members, but Nancy Elizabeth Rettig helped ease the fears of families and patients for 25 years as a volunteer at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.
Rettig spent two days a week, eight hours a day consoling families of surgeryand cancer patients, said Elizabeth Genz, director of volunteers for UAMS from 1993-2005. She described her friend as“sparkly” and “bubbly.”
“She was so well respected by everyone,” Genz said. “She was a neat gal.”
Rettig died Sunday at Parkway Village Health Center in Little Rock from complications of Parkinson’s disease.
She was 80.
Rettig was born Feb. 22, 1931, in the Manchester community just outside Arkadephia to Harry and Nannie Hunter.
She married Bill Rettig on Feb. 18, 1951, and later was a stay-at-home mother.
“She was always a good wife and mother,” said Suzanne McGuire, Nancy Rettig’s daughter. “That was her job, and she did it well.”
Rettig was just as dedicated to her work at the hospital as she was at home, McGuire said.
“She saw her volunteering as her job and she took it very seriously,” she said.
Rettig began volunteering long before her children were born and always exposed them to volunteering.
“I remember her folding bandages for cancer patients when I was little,” her son, Jeff Rettig, said.
Nancy Rettig volunteered at what’s now known as the Winthrop P. Rockefeller Cancer Institute. She worked in the recovery room where cancer patients go after surgery, Jeff Rettig said.
Genz said her friend became close with many of the doctors and nurses and was often a buffer for doctors who had to deliver bad news to families.
“Doctors ... don’t want to tell families bad news, they just want to save the patient,” Genz said.
Genz said Rettig’s independence, caring nature and ability to comfort families was an art form.
“She was a dream,” Genz said. “She treated everyone like family.”
Her son said the hardest part of her work was being around children who needed surgery.
“It really bothered her to see children who needed facial surgery due to chewing tobacco,” he said.
His mother’s inspiration for helping others came from her father, Jeff Rettig said.
“She’d always ask ‘What would my father do,’” he said. “[Harry Hunter] was the most giving, unselfish Christian man I’ve ever known.”
Nancy Rettig was given the Governor’s Volunteer Excellence Award in 1995, and was honored by UAMS in 2004.
About five years ago Rettig was diagnosed with Parkinson’s and continued to volunteer until the disease weakened her.
Rettig’s children said the diagnosis and the end of volunteering was tough for their mother, but she accepted it with dignity and always tried to do what she could.
Jeff Rettig said he admired his mother for helping other people.
“I had great respect for what she could do,” he said.
Arkansas, Pages 14 on 04/13/2011