John Raymond Uselding

John Uselding could tell jokes for 90 minutes straight. Donna Uselding knows because she once timed him.

They were in college at the University of Wisconsin, and for an hour and a half one night, John rolled from one joke to the next while the room howled. He had a knack for the setup, Donna says, leading his audience along without letting them see the punchline coming.

Decades later, after dementia began robbing him of the ability to remember those punchlines, John still remembered why he told the jokes in the first place.

“I want to make you smile,” he would tell people. “It’s my job to make you smile.”

And, his family says, he still did.

It was an unofficial job description for a man who made his career putting people to sleep. A longtime certified registered nurse anesthetist in Fort Worth and Texas Wesleyan University professor, John spent decades caring for patients and teaching generations of anesthesia students, usually — no, always — with a joke at the ready.

John died Aug. 3rd at the age of 83.

One of his favorite bits, “The Three Wisemen,” went like this.

The first king came and knelt. He presented his gift. The next one came in and presented his gift. The third one came in, fell and stumbled and yelled, “Jesus Christ!” And Mary looked at Joseph and said, “I really like that name. It’s much better than Fred.”

In addition to Donna, his wife of 61 years, John is survived by his three children, Andrew and his wife Melissa, Julia and her husband Mike, and Sarah, as well as grandchildren Chloe, Jessica, Abby and her husband Hunter and great grandson, Colter.

A gathering to celebrate John’s full life is 2:00 – 4:00 pm, Saturday, August 29th, 2026 at Thompson’s Harveson & Cole, 4350 River Oaks Blvd, Fort Worth, Texas 76114 in The Drawing Room. Dress attire is smart casual. The family is encouraging all to wear red in honor of John. (It’s a Wisconsin Badger thing.) In lieu of gifts or flowers the family is requesting donations be made to Alzheimer’s Association.

The family also wishes to thank the staff at Autumn Leaves who personally took care of John, as well as the staff and caregivers at Community Hospice.

In the beginning, God said he wanted a compassionate, clever learner and wise teacher, with a softball and Wisconsin Badgers obsession.

He came up with John Raymond Uselding, born Sept. 19, 1942, in Port Washington, Wisconsin, to Arthur and Julia Uselding. God said this boy will be quite the character. John grew up in Belgium, Wisconsin, which, naturally enough, was settled largely by Luxembourgers.

The family lived above Uselding Brothers, their general store and butcher shop. His father butchered the meat, his mother ran the store, and Donna’s dairy-farming family sometimes traded hay for cornflakes.

John and Donna met in first grade. Donna was not impressed.

“He was a jerk,” she says, their three children laughing.

“She thought he was a goody-two-shoes and teacher’s pet,” daughter Julia says. The family recently discovered evidence to the contrary: his childhood report card.

“His citizenship grades did not say he was a goody-two-shoes.”

John went off intending to become a priest. Seminary, college, Dominican novitiate. Then one day Donna stopped at Uselding Brothers general store and his father told her John was home.

“How long is he staying?” she asked

“For forever.”

And here is our romantic-comedy pivot. Whether it was his jokes or his game, she fell in love with this “jerk.” He did the same with her, too. They married Aug. 21, 1965.

After graduating from the University of Wisconsin nursing program in 1966, John joined the Army Nurse Corps, serving seven years and rising from second lieutenant to captain.

After the Army, John trained as a nurse anesthetist at Milwaukee County General Hospital. His first job was at Memorial Hospital in Sheboygan, Wisconsin.

The now full family of five landed in Texas in 1977 for John’s new job teaching nurse anesthesia at Harris Methodist Hospital. He later moved to Texas Wesleyan University, where he became a clinical instructor in the university’s graduate nurse anesthesia program.

“He just loved being with the students,” says Donna, who played host to students at the family home too many times to count.

John brought his sense of humor into the classroom, too. At Texas Wesleyan, he used computer-controlled patient simulators to test anesthesia students. Give the “patient” the wrong amount of anesthesia and John could make the mannequin open its eyes or moan. He even recruited one grandchild to record voices for the patients.

Apparently, even the mannequins had to participate in the bit.

Said one former colleague at Texas Wesleyan: “He was a great CRNA and an excellent teacher whose love for his profession and his students was obvious in every class he taught and every student he mentored.”

Teaching and learning were a way of life for him.

When he found out his granddaughter was dyslexic, John immersed himself in understanding dyslexia. That summer while he and Donna kept their granddaughter, John taught her to read.

“That's the kind of teacher that he was. If he found out that a student had issues, he did that kind of stuff,” Julia says.

It wasn’t limited to the classroom. John and Donna treated his students like family, even when they didn’t have much money themselves. If a student needed a meal, clothes for the kids, or simply someone to talk to, the Useldings stepped in.

“They had people over here for meals,” Julia says. “They could come to my dad and not just talk to him about anesthesia and putting somebody to sleep. They could come and talk to him and say, ‘My marriage sucks,’ or ‘I don’t know what to do with my kid.’”

John would listen. Donna would feed them.

“Those were the kind of people that they were,” Julia says.

And through all those years, the jokes never stopped.

“Sometimes he would look at me and go, ‘Well, you’re not laughing at my jokes,’” Donna says.

After 60 years, apparently even John Uselding occasionally needed new material.

Beneath the jokes, however, John had thought deeply about what his profession — and perhaps a successful life — required.

In a commencement speech to graduating Harris nurse anesthetists, John offered a definition of professional success that had little to do with money or status. A successful anesthetist, he said, should possess four qualities: care, respect, navigation and association — CRNA.

Care meant holding onto concern for patients even when burnout threatened to harden them. Respect included recognizing that a spouse or children might need their time more than they needed “a room-sized television and a top-of-the-line automobile.” Navigation meant continuing to learn with purpose. Association meant recognizing that no one succeeds alone.

John closed with what might have been the most essential guidance of them all.

“He who insists on playing his piano alone will never know the joy, the beauty, or the power of the symphony.

“We need each other.”