This isn’t goodbye, this is just a temporary pause in us talking every day. I’m going to be really busy anyway.
My mom is the smartest, funniest, most generous person I know. She is a consummate big tipper at restaurants, and anytime I’ve relayed a story about a dog rescue or a charity she’d say, “I don’t know how that website works, here {handing me cash}, donate $200 for me.” In the spring, I told her that my colleague’s daughters were selling Girl Scout cookies and she said, “Order me a box of each.” I knew she had zero intention of eating the cookies. She has empathy coursing through her veins and was the first house in town to put up a Ukrainian flag. She loves hard and fierce and lets you know when you’re headed down the wrong path. She always answers her phone when you call even if she’s on the other line, or is too busy to talk, just to say she’ll call you back. She starts buying Christmas gifts months ahead of time, and they’re always the most thoughtful, she just really knows people so well.
In January of 2017, at the age of 68, my mom, infuriated that Trump had won the presidency, decided that even though she wasn’t the best walker, she was determined to walk in the Napa Women’s March. It was hard, but it was also important to her, so she walked the entire course. At the end of the march she collapsed and was taken by ambulance to the hospital. They ran tests and discovered that she had multiple myeloma, a form of blood cancer.
We were ready to hit the ground running with treatment. And it went well for a long time. The chemo and medication did take their toll on my mom’s body, but she didn’t lose much of her spark, and she retained a great deal of energy for a very long time. We were so scared when she contracted Covid in January of 2021, right before the vaccine was about to be released widely, but she beat it easily, remarking, “Covid was just the best sleep I’ve had in a long time.”
In April of this year, my mom tripped over a dog toy and broke her ankle. While in the hospital, they ran additional tests, and discovered that in addition to the multiple myeloma, she was also now suffering from lung and liver cancers. My poor darling mother, who never in her life drank alcohol nor smoked, was now looking at masses taking over her lungs and her liver. At one point I looked at her as she lay in the hospital, hooked up to machines and so completely out of it and asked, “When have you had enough?” Eventually she decided to stop treatment and head home where she could be surrounded by my dad, by her son and daughters and grandchildren, by her beloved dogs Charlie and Lottie, and by all of the rest of the critters on the Fairbanks farm.
The doctors expected her to live two more days. The hospice nurse predicted a month. She split the difference and lasted ten days. Eight of those days were filled with laughter and stories, all of us telling funny tales we remembered of her, and how much we loved her. I’m so grateful that my last moments with her she was lucid, she knew what was going on, she knew who I was, and she told me again and again how much I meant to her. She said to me as she grabbed my hand, “You and me, we had something special.” The last two days of her life she was merely holding on, and she wasn’t showing much signs of life. I didn’t see her those last couple of days, and I’m glad I didn’t. My last memory of her was me walking out of her bedroom as she said in her ever-fun way, “Catch ya later Rach.”
Two days later, on Friday, May 20th, at 3:30 in the afternoon, my mom held onto my dad’s hand and took what would be her last breath.
My heart hurts in so many ways but I’m grateful that I got to spend 48 years with this wonderful woman. She was my rock, my touch tone, my confidante. She is the most generous person I’ve ever known, with things and money and gifts, but especially with her time. She would sit for hours and talk, in person or over the phone. She loved the people in her life with a ferocity that is unmatched.
There were so many little things about her that I loved. She never ate lamb nor veal because “the babies never had a chance.” She was eco-friendly before it was cool and carried canvas bags to the grocery store in the 70’s. She was a cat person and a dog person and a bird person and a goat person and most recently a sheep and lamb person, and she cried when a bobcat got onto her property and killed one of her chickens. At the end of the Christmas season, she would feel genuine remorse for the Christmas trees that were left over at the tree lots, saying “They didn’t get to fulfill their life’s destiny.” My freshman year of college, I contracted mononucleosis, and without hesitation, my mom flew to San Diego to pick me up and take me home to rest. She read every single book I ever gave her right up until she developed cataracts which made reading difficult. She never missed any of my basketball or soccer games, she sewed all of our clothes, and she baked cookies every day for our school lunches. She was a great person and the best mom.
It’s hard to take any comfort right now, but I am so glad that the dying was not drawn out, that she is no longer in pain, that I believe her body works again as it did before it betrayed her. I know that in a lot of ways she is still with me, in the ways she has influenced me and my life, and the love she so readily shared.
I don’t know how I feel about an afterlife in my logical mind, Mom, but I know right now it makes me a little less sad to think you’re somewhere lovely, hopefully with Anya and Dooley, and the rest of the creatures we’ve lost over the years. I hope you’ve found a warm spot in the sun to read or knit or nap with a sleepy dog at your feet. I’ll keep an eye on the family for you, and I promise to try to live a life you’d be proud of.
You. Were. Magic.
