Learning to Surrender: Remembering Jennifer (Danner ’98) DellaCrosse, 1975 – 2025

Wife,
Mother of seven,
Nurse,
Veteran,
Tireless friend,
Champion of the Catholic Faith 

 

“That’s how I met her,” recalls Ryan DellaCrosse of the day he first met his future bride, Jennifer (Danner ’98). “I met her in a fight.”

Having just discerned out of the seminary, Ryan encountered Jen at a Catholic young-adult event in Jacksonville, Florida, where the two tangled over a round of “Mafia,” the social-deduction party game. “Thomas Aquinas College sure trains its women how to argue,” he says, “because we got into it, fighting about a game.” Next thing he knew, the two were attending daily Mass and increasingly spending time together.

“This relationship is either going to be really good,” he remembers, “or horrible.”

Seventeen years and seven children later, Ryan now falls squarely on the “really good” side of the divide. “It was amazing. Everything was always amazing.”

Amazing, but not without hardship. This past April, Ryan and the children bid fare­well to Jen when her courageous, 21-month fight against brain cancer came to an end.

A loving wife, a devoted mother, a tireless friend, and a 20-year veteran of the U.S. Army, Jen lived an extraordinary life, defined by service and adventure. A larger-than-life ambassador for the Catholic faith, she set an example of faithful surrender that has inspired new devotion to a century-old novena — and left a mark on everyone she met.

Showing Up

“She just had this energy about her, this playfulness in her life and sparkle in her eyes,” notes Amy Dragoo. “She was always looking to banter, always looking to tease, always looking for an inside joke.”

Amy and her husband, Brian (’01) — now a member of the Thomas Aquinas College teaching faculty — first arrived on the California campus in 1997, when Brian, having already earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in engineering at the University of Arizona, enrolled as a 24-year-old freshman. Older than all of Brian’s classmates, and the only married couple among them, the newlyweds initially felt out of place. Jen, a senior and the College’s student activities director, set out to change that.

“That first night, there was a dance, and the Virginia Reel started playing,” Amy reminisces. “Now, I had never danced the Virginia Reel before, but all of a sudden, I hear this yell from the middle of the Commons. It’s Jen, and she shouts, ‘Amydragoo!’ — Jen always ran people’s first and last names together, like they were one word — ‘Amydragoo! It’s the Virginia Reel! Get over here!’”

Called out and crimson-faced, with the full student body now staring at her, Amy answered Jen’s challenge, flinging herself headlong between the twin lines of laughing, clapping dancers. “I didn’t know what I was doing, just moving with the music, when I spun around, and saw Jen, with this huge, playful smile on her face.” The ice was broken, and the Dragoos were outsiders no longer. “Later on, she said to me, ‘Amydragoo, that’s when I knew we would be friends, when I saw you take it. I thought, we’re going to be good friends.’”

When the Dragoos, who struggled with infertility throughout Brian’s four years at the College, were blessed with the first of their six daughters — little Lucie, for whom their new TAC friends had prayed all that time — they asked “Jendanner” to serve as godmoth­er. And 22 years later, “Aunt Jen,” then caring for seven children of her own, would travel 800 miles to affix Lucie’s second-lieutenant’s pin at her Air Force ROTC Commissioning Ceremony.

“Jen showed up at pivotal moments,” says Carrie Alexander (’98), whom the Danners honorarily adopted into the family six months after the classmates met on the first day of their freshman year. Jen and Carrie lived together for years after they graduated from the College; they were bridesmaids in each other’s weddings and godmothers to each other’s firstborn. Throughout the years, they always prioritized being there when one gave birth to a baby, had to undergo surgery, or celebrated some family milestone.

“It didn’t matter if she was carting six kids. It didn’t matter,” says Carrie. “Jen showed up. She prioritized the important things. She couldn’t keep a cell phone. She couldn’t keep keys. The girl had no commitment to the material world. The only thing she cared about was her faith and the souls God put in her life.”

“Gas on a Fire”

Born on Christmas Day, 1975, Jen was the oldest of Loree and Dennis Danner’s six children, raised in Jefferson, Oregon. She was, as her husband puts it, “the most favorite of everybody, just an exceeder in everything she did.” As a child, she excelled in school, in making friends, and as a member of the high school softball team. “They put her in outfield, because she could throw harder than any human being I’d ever met in my life,” Loree recounts. “She could catch that ball, and throw it all the way to home, before the runner would ever get there.”

“Jen was amazing before she came to TAC, but, when she left, there was a sophistication that she had. There was a deeper understanding of her faith.”

Success came readily, as did praise, without, it seems, going to her head. “She never cared about awards, even though she got a ton of them,” Loree remarks. The faculty at Jefferson High School had an annual tradition of naming one senior as Student of the Year and, in 1994, there was little doubt who would take the prize. “No one had ever been voted by every single teacher,” says the DellaCross­es’ 15-year-old daughter, Ava, “but that year, they all voted for my mom, which is the first and only time that has ever happened.”

With a perfect report card and the SATs and résumé to match, Jen had her pick of universities. A friend of the family introduced her to Thomas Aquinas College, which — then not even 25 years old and still lacking permanent buildings — attracted her through its rich spiritual life and rigorous curriculum. “She went down to visit TAC and saw this whole school in trailers,” Ryan laughs. “And she was like, ‘This is the school for me!’”

Jen immediately took to the College’s spiritual and intellectual life, attending daily Mass and diving into classroom conversations with gusto. “She was eager to get involved and enlivened every discussion,” says Dr. Paul O’Reilly, who taught her Freshman Math­ematics course and now serves as the College’s president. But the rough and tumble of Socratic seminars brought about a humbling realization. “She loved it, but I remember her telling me, ‘Mom, all of a sudden, I’m not the best,’” says Loree. “In high school, she was always the best student, but now she wasn’t Number 1.” She had to dig deeper, and work harder, to keep up.

For the Christian, every struggle is an opportunity to turn to God, and that’s how Jen took the challenge posed by the College’s integrated curriculum, especially Dr. O’Reilly’s class on Euclidean geometry. “She had a habit of repeating conversations she would have with Jesus,” says Amy Dragoo, re-enacting one of Jen’s mono­logues: “I said, ‘Oh Lord, help me. I don’t know this proposition.’ And Jesus would just say to me, ‘Jendanner, you have to sit down! You got to trust Me. It will come!’”

This act of surrender marked the beginning of a pattern that would define the rest of her days. At an alumni event some 30 years later, Jen told Dr. O’Reilly how the College, in its own small way, helped prepare her for the closing chapter of her earthly life. “She said that the things she read at the College — Scripture, St. Thomas’s discourse about the problem of evil, St. Augustine, and others — helped her deepen her appreciation for God’s plan for her life. She also cited the example of so many people when she was a student, attending daily Mass on campus, the chaplains. Those are the things, she said, that gave her the foundation that allowed her to suffer well.”

She was learning truths of the Faith she had already grasped with her heart. “Jen knew the emotional side of her faith. She knew that part from her childhood,” Carrie explains. “The intellectual aspect of Catholicism is what Jen learned at TAC, and I think it changed her. I think it matured her faith. Jen was amazing before she came to TAC, but, when she left, there was a sophistication that she had. There was a deeper understanding of her faith. She left TAC a better person.”

As Ryan observes, “It was something that took her from good to great. It was like putting gas on a fire.”

Major Mom

How would she channel that fire? To what end should she direct such passion, such energy? At first, she wasn’t sure.

“I think Jen had a hard time figuring out what God wanted her to do after graduating,” says Amy. She tried her hand at teaching and various other jobs but struggled to find her place, until she divined her avocation. “She decided she wanted to be a nurse, and the easiest way to do that without a lot of debt was going into the Army.” She enlisted on September 12, 2001 — the day after 9/11.

Nursing, however, would have to wait. The Army detected in Jen an aptitude for intelligence work. She was sent to the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center in Monterey, Cali­fornia, for training in Mandarin Chinese, then assigned to an El Paso-based unit combatting international drug smuggling. “I could never understand what she was doing there,” Jen’s mother, Loree, says. “She was a lover, not a fighter.” Her adoptive sister saw the matter differently. “The mil­itary is less about fighting than about protecting and supporting,” Carrie reflects. “And, to a certain extent, her military life was also a bit of missionary work, be­cause she brought faith into every single thing she did. Jen made people remember their faith. She made people find their faith, even in the military.”

The work was grueling and rewarding in its own way, but less than she had hoped for. When it was time to re-enlist, she returned to her original dream of nursing. “So, she signed up to earn a master’s in nursing at Jacksonville University in Florida,” says Ryan. That’s how the two would come to meet over that infamous game of “Mafia.” The couple wed on November 3, 2007, at Jacksonville’s Our Lady, Star of the Sea Church.

They were soon blessed with children: first Joseph, next Ava, then Vincent, Leo, Maria, Raphael, and Rose. As a mother, Jen “took free will seriously,” says Carrie. “She would guide her chil­dren, give them what they would need to be successful, and then stand back and pray that they made the right choices. She had faith that they might make mistakes, but they could fix them. That’s what she was like as a mom.”

For Jen, parenting was another act of surrender. “Because she was so fearless, there was a sense she could do anything and fix anything,” says Amy. “But once she started having kids, and there was so much outside of her control, that was a step toward surren­der and getting to know God in a deeper way.”

All the while, she continued her medical career with the U.S. Army, attaining the rank of major. She nursed veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in the neurological unit at the Walter C. Reed Medical Center in Washington, D.C., before moving to Houston and, eventually, back to Jacksonville. Longing to incorporate the Church’s teachings on marriage and family into her work, she be­came a certified Natural Family Planning instructor on the side. “It was kind of weird,” Ryan quips, “because at that point, we had four kids, and clearly there was no planning going on in our house!”

In her third act as a medical practitioner, she got into hospice care shortly after retiring from the Army in 2021. “Having worked at Walter Reed, she saw people at the end of life, and she wanted people to have that moment where they are at their most vulner­able, or they are lonely, to just feel loved and seen,” says Carrie. “The woman could not stop giving. She couldn’t stop,” Ryan adds. “Whenever she had a moment, she started thinking about other people, how she could help them, even with seven kids.”

Alas, her time as a hospice nurse would prove short-lived, albeit helpful for what would follow when, two years later, Jen was diag­nosed with glioblastoma, a highly aggressive form of brain cancer.

It was Fourth of July Weekend, 2023. The DellaCrosses had just returned from an expedition in the Colorado wildernesses with some other families and a priest. When Jen awoke with headaches and, the next day, unable to walk, Ryan brought her to the emergen­cy room, then headed home to care for the children. “Yeah, there’s a tumor,” she would later report back to him. “It’s really big.”

The Surrender Novena

“I hoped for miracles,” Ryan shares. “We prayed. We wanted God to glorify Himself with this, but it never happened.”

The DellaCrosses pursued every treatment available but knew a cure was unlikely. Only a quarter of glioblastoma patients live more than a year past their diagnosis, and only 5 percent survive for more than five. “Jen was not afraid of death. I mean, come on, the woman’s been pregnant how many times?” Carrie asks. Nor was she daunted by the prospect of pain and suffering, which she saw as an opportunity to pray and sacrifice for others. “She was used to being limited in what she could eat and drink and physically do. She was also used to being uncomfortable. She offered it up every single day. She looked at it and thought, ‘Who is going to benefit from what I am suffering and what I am going to lose?’”

For Jen, the hardest part was knowing she would have to leave her family. “The only times she seemed scared to me in our conversa­tions, it was because she just didn’t know what was going to happen to Ryan and the kids,” says Amy. “She knew God was calling her to something, and she knew it was going to be OK for her, but she couldn’t see how it was going to be OK for Ryan and the kids.”

In her time of helplessness, she turned to prayer.

“She knew God was calling her to something, and she knew it was going to be OK for her, but she couldn’t see how it was going to be OK for Ryan and the kids.”

As it happened, months before her diagnosis, on an ordinary yet overwhelming day, Jen scrolled through the Laudate app on her phone, looking for a prayer suitable to the moment. It was then that she discovered the Surrender Novena, created by Servant of God Dolindo Ruotolo, an Italian priest and contemporary of Padre Pio. The devotion emphasizes complete reliance on God and submission to His will. Each day’s brief utterance ends with this tenfold refrain: “O Jesus, I surrender myself to You, take care of everything.”

That prayer, which readied Jen to receive her diagnosis, would give her the peace to say goodbye to the family she cherished. And Jen, incapable of receiving graces without passing them along, was deter­mined to share them. She created a website, The Surrender Novena Project, encouraging this devotion and soliciting visitors’ prayer intentions.

“We’re conditioned to believe you have to do everything yourself. Your goal is independence. Sometimes God jolts you out of that illu­sion, so you can finally let Him take over,” Jen wrote on the website. “My jolt was cancer. Cancer forced me to go from being the nurse to being the patient, from the caregiver to the one who needed care. It was awkward. I didn’t know what to do. So, I sat in my bed and prayed. In that surrender, I found peace.”

Yet surrender is no one-time decision. It’s a habit, strengthened through diligence and repetition. “Every time, every day,” Jen ad­vised, “just put it back at the foot of the Cross and say, ‘Jesus, I know you’ve got this.’”

“She Taught us how to Die”

As her body began to fail her, and as she endured the pain of var­ious treatments, Jen lived the last 21 months of her life to the fullest. She cared for her children, traveled with her family, and continued to show up for weddings, parties, baptisms, and other special events.

“That’s all she wanted. She wanted people to come back to the Church and to live their faith. That’s what she did, start to finish.”

President O’Reilly approached her at the College’s 2024 Alumni Dinner. “She had all the visual signs of having had brain surgery, but she was still that smiling, friendly person,” he says. “My intention was to go over to her and try to say something comforting, but she kind of took control of the conversation. She wanted to know how I was doing, and how I was handling all the travel my job requires, and was I spending a lot of time away from home? She was offering me consolation.”

That Alumni Dinner came at the beginning of a road trip — a “bucket-list item,” says Carrie — that she and Jen took up the Pacific Coast. “Almost every place we stopped, people would come up to her and say, ‘I’d like to pray with you,’” Carrie recalls. “And every time, she would stop everything that she was doing and, with com­plete joy on her face, would say, ‘I would love to do that.’ She would randomly be stopped by strangers. You could feel her faith.”

Ten days before Jen died, her mother came to be with the family in Jacksonville. “When she couldn’t talk any more — I think she knew what was going on, but she couldn’t communicate — I went up to her room and I got really close,” says Loree. “I said, ‘Jen, I’m praying,’ and she said, all of a sudden, ‘Pray … too.’ Right up to the very end, that girl was praying, too.”

Jen’s last days, Ryan explains, were “a sign of her life,” equal parts worship and celebration, with dancing in the backyard and prayer in their bedroom, which had been decked out “like a chapel,” in an array of icons and relics. In her final moments, she lay there, surrounded by the husband and children she never wanted to leave, but whom she freely entrusted to the God she served. The room, her obituary reports, “could barely contain all the grace, love, laughter, memories. It was peaceful and beautiful — and so very Jen.”

For all the pain and heart-wrenching tragedy, Jen’s was a happy death, graced and unifying. “I think she taught us all how to die,” says Ryan. Or, as Carrie counters, “I think she taught us how to live.”

In just a few short months, there have been encouraging signs of Jen’s intercession: a fragrant aroma of flowers at her deathbed, a de­cayed backyard rosebush that suddenly bloomed back to life the day after her passing, and, most notably, word of family members, friends, and others returning to the Faith. “That’s all she wanted,” Carrie says. “She wanted people to come back to the Church and to live their faith. That’s what she did, start to finish.”

For her family and for many friends, who, like Jen, have had to learn to surrender, such signs are a hopeful consolation — a reminder that “every time, every day,” we must “put it back at the foot of the Cross and say, ‘Jesus, I know you’ve got this.’”