Joan Biasini

Joan Helene Marie Biasini, our beloved mother, passed away at the age of 89 on November 14, 2025, surrounded by family, following a long and courageous battle with dementia. 

Joan wished to be remembered as a wife, mother, teacher, and caregiver and as someone who loved her Lord and her life.

Joan was born March 29, 1936 to Wilmar and Helen Scheld in Hartford, CT. Boating with her parents and younger sister Barbara along the Connecticut waterways and listening to her father play his banjo fostered her life-long love for the water and music. She attended Douglass College at Rutgers University, earning a BA in Music Education and Piano in 1958.

In the summer of 1959, Joan took a two-month Study Abroad Music Tour of Europe and met her future husband, Cole Biasini. Their first date was spent on a gondola on the canals of Venice. Their wedding, occurring a year later in Joan’s hometown of Wethersfield, CT, received a papal blessing from the Vatican. She was a faithful and loving wife for 52 years until Cole’s passing in 2012.

Joan taught general and vocal music at Livingston Junior High in Albany, NY until her first child, David, was born in 1961. Daughters Helisa and Joanna arrived next followed by son Michael. The family moved in 1970 to Bellingham, WA where Joan would spend the next 55 years. She became a state- and nationally certified piano teacher in 1975 and went on to share her talent and love of music with hundreds of children and adults for the next 33 years. She continued to receive correspondence during the holidays until her death, a true testament to the lasting impression she made upon her students.

Joan’s dedication to God was witnessed as she became a charter member of Christ the Servant Lutheran Church in 1975. As an active leader in the Church, she lent her musical talents in the roles of choir member, choir director, church organist, and Sunday school guitarist. Joan served on the church council and volunteered her time as liturgist, reader, assistant minister, usher, and greeter. In the last years of her life, Joan was often visited by Pastor Jana Schofield and Mary Schmidt, who brought the Church and its message to Joan, as she was unable to attend in person. 

Joan was creative and intelligent with a beautiful smile and an infectious laugh. She found joy in water coloring, swimming, traveling, making music with family, studying genealogy, gardening, bowling and in the many animals that became family. She was a life-long learner who held herself to high moral standards and set a daily example for her children of how an amazing human being should live. 

Joan was predeceased by her parents and her husband Cole. She leaves behind sister Barbara Courville, son David (wife Brenda), daughter Helisa Omey (husband Keith), daughter Joanna Cooper (partner Rex), son Michael (partner Matthew), granddaughter Brianna Wescott (husband Cam), grandson Parker Omey (fiancée Alicia), grandson Riley Cooper (partner Jen) and 4 great-grandchildren. 

We will be forever grateful to the dedicated team at Whatcom County Hospice for their guidance, nurses Robin Bailey and Kay Nigra for their outpouring of compassion, and to the army of caregivers who diligently tended to Joan’s daily needs with love and patience.