Benish received the Kent Lions Club Senior Citizen of the Year award <\/a>for 2009.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n“I thought I came here to pick up an award for someone else who was sick and could not make it,” Benish said after receiving the honor. “It makes me feel embarrassed. It’s just a matter of the years add up.”<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
She volunteered more than 10,000 hours with the Retired and Senior Volunteer Program, called RSVP.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\u201cJanet has done so much, yet she remains so humble,\u201d said Robin Knudson, program coordinator at RSVP, in an 2008 article. \u201cShe has a quiet, selfless nature yet she has made an irreplaceable impact in the community. She truly has a servant\u2019s heart.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Benish was born May 20, 1921, in Denver. She was the eldest of four children. She wrote a book of poetry, \u201cAngels\u2019 Advocate,” with her sister, Maggi Nolan, and had poems published in various publications throughout the years, according to her obituary posted on the Kent Reporter website.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
She was briefly married to Bill Benish, an artist, in the late 1940s. She worked as a bookkeeper in the early 1950s before converting to Catholicism and becoming a cloistered nun. In the late 1970s, she left the cloistered life, but maintained her vows. She worked for the House of Charity in Spokane before becoming a bookkeeper for Sacred Heart Hospital, which she retired from in 1989 at age 68.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Survivors include her sister, Maggi Nolan, one nephew, four nieces and their families and numerous friends.<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Sister Janet Benish, who won state and local awards for her volunteer work in Kent, has died.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":212,"featured_media":373,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-372","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/372"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/212"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=372"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/372\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/373"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=372"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=372"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=372"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=372"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}