When my brother and I were children, we stood in lines a mile long for government-issued peanut butter and cheese out at the National Cattle Congress. We stood individually, of course, because if we each went, then we’d each get our massive tub of grainy, gritty government peanut butter. This was how my mother navigated abject poverty as a single mom faced with disaster at every turn. She fought her way forward, always.

Mom was a fighter.

In the 1980s, she fought for this community as it faced economic disaster. She joined CCI (Concerned Citizens Initiative), serving to represent impoverished and disenfranchised people in the Cedar Valley at a time when downtown was a ghost town, farms were being foreclosed on, and those who could leave did. Mom didn’t leave. She ran for city council in 1981. She became an LPN. Mom always tried to help others. She was a nurse, an advocate, and a caregiver for her mother in the last years of her life. She cared very much about other people. She loved animals, often taking in strays and rescues to sometimes absurd degrees, but she had a loving nature and a determination not to see others suffer.

When she was a young woman, a teenager still I think, a family friend offered her a ride home from work. In the car, he attacked her. Mom fought him off and got away. My grandfather, a World War II vet who killed a German general at the Battle of the Bulge, paid this other man a visit that night. Mom told me this story not long after Mollie Tibbets went missing. She lamented the women who did not get away, and I felt I understood something about my mother. I understood her compassion, her fascination with mysteries, and her fierce determination never to quit.

My mother loved to solve puzzles. She lived for Columbo, Law and Order, Perry Mason, she watched them always. There were crime novels and murder mysteries all over the house when I was a kid and I should absolutely not have read, but I was a Scorpio like her, so I was hopeless. She watched Jeopardy religiously, and the last few years, we had a daily ritual of watching it together. On Jeopardy, as you all know, the answer must come in the form of a question.

That was growing up with my mom. Everything was a question. When are the lights going to be turned back on? How are we going to make it to the end of the month? Am I going to be able to go to college? Answers were never ready, and looking back, never useful. Answers foreclosed on doubt and possibility, and my mom never did that. She always held the door open, as she did to others, to animals, to things she would never get to do. There will be an answer for us, but I suspect it will be a question, and that will suit my mother just fine.

My mother fought very hard, through chronic pain, declining health, and misfortune. Several times in the last few years or so, there was a moment where I thought this one now was around the corner. Each time, she avoided the worst and recovered, more or less. I suppose I expected she would simply keep going. She never stopped fighting. When her body finally gave in, she wasn’t done yet. What was expected to be hours became days. It was excruciating, but entirely on brand. 

Everything I know about persistence and determination in this life, I learned from her. I am eternally grateful for everything my mother gave me. She gave me the world. I wish she were with me sometimes on these journeys she permitted, and she was, and she is, but you wish. I look forward to the next time I see her, when she’ll get to tell me what the question is.