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General
MEDLEY COMMUNICATIONS
INSTALLATION PROFESSIONAL General
Drexel Height Fire District
Firefighter Part Time Employment
AVIVA Children's Services
Monitor: Parent-Child Visits

Jacqueline "Jackie" Faircloth-Bair's love was unconditional.

She placed no restrictions or limits on her compassion.

"It didn't matter what your background, what you looked like, if they had 20,000 tattoos and 20,000 piercings, it just did not matter" to the registered nurse, said her friend of 30 years, Claudia Reed. "It didn't matter if it was at work or on the street or in the neighborhood, she was there and she was the go-to gal."

Quick to laugh, the easygoing Faircloth-Bair was always willing to listen to her patients and accommodate their needs. She worked at Tucson Medical Center for 44 years, starting as a nurse's aide and working her way through school and up the ranks to earn a nursing degree and take positions in hospital administration.

"She was a special woman, not just because she was my mother, but because she had this knack with everybody," said one of her three sons, Jeffrey Faircloth.

When she retired two years ago, Faircloth-Bair began baby-sitting one of her granddaughters.

"Some grandparents may not be thrilled by that after raising kids, but … you couldn't pull her away" from the toddler, her son said.

Faircloth-Bair was a caregiver to the end, though no one could have predicted her life would come to a close so abruptly. She was killed in an auto accident Dec. 19 when an oncoming motorist crossed into her lane, hitting Faircloth-Bair's vehicle head-on. She was 64.

She enjoyed life, said her friends and family, even though it wasn't always easy.

When Faircloth-Bair was 9, her mother died, and she and her sister were placed in a Catholic orphanage in Pennsylvania. After she graduated high school at 17, she moved to Tucson to attend a nurse training program at St. Mary's Hospital. Faircloth-Bair worked as a nurse's assistant while putting herself through school — earning a college degree and becoming a registered nurse — while raising three sons with her first husband, Jessie Faircloth, a nuclear-medicine technician she met at St. Mary's Hospital.

The Faircloth family enjoyed spending time together on camping trips, and Jackie dedicated many hours to her sons and their teammates in Little League baseball and Pop Warner football as a team mother, scorekeeper and everyone's cheerleader. And she was a baseball fanatic, her son said.

"My mother was amazing," he said. "She went to school full time, she worked full time and she raised three sons. I don't know how she did it. She worked a lot of night shifts when we were young. You'd think she'd be exhausted and have a short temper from being so tired, but she had so much energy."

Even after her husband died in 1988 following a prolonged battle with cancer, friends and co-workers said Faircloth-Bair maintained a positive attitude.

She married Harold "Ted" Bair in 1995.

"She was never, 'Poor me.' She always had a good attitude," said Pam Sorock, a social worker at TMC, who met Faircloth-Bair 10 years ago when they shared an office in TMC's case management department. "I think she was entitled to feel like, 'Gee, I've had a couple of hard knocks here,' but she never complained.

"She worked so hard for so long, and had such a difficult life and then to have it all taken away from her so quickly, it's not fair," Sorock said.

Though she was an excellent case manager, her co-workers said, Faircloth-Bair's real joy came from bedside nursing, ministering to the day-to-day needs of patients.

"She went beyond and above the call of duty," Reed said. "She was always available and if a man needed shaving, she shaved him. She took care of their every need. If they didn't like their dinner, she'd say, 'What do you want?' If it was a cheeseburger, she'd go down to the cafeteria and get it from the grill and she'd pay for it. That's the kind of girl she was.

"She always had a smile on her face. No matter if a patient was disgruntled, she continually smiled," Reed said.

Carol Hall had known Faircloth-Bair since they began working together in 1978.

"She really loved bedside nursing. She gave excellent care," Hall said. "She always had time to listen.

"She had a heart of gold. She loved everybody unconditionally."