A Champion of Mothers: Kathy Buchanan

It is fitting that on the Day of the Dead, I’m in an airplane flying to Grand Rapids, Michigan to say goodbye to one of my heroes.

@Kathleen Buchanan should be yours too. This obituary is all you need to know. She passed away 11 days ago on October 22, and it’s taken me this long to rediscover how to share grief in public.

Death seems to have no problem keeping his dance card full. Names get added every day. Maybe there’s some small symmetry that Aunt Kathy died on a Sunday. She was devout in her Catholic faith.

I’d like to think it was faith that led her to a 60-year career in nursing. To bring life into this world takes special empathy, compassion, a willingness to serve others. And, if an obstetrics nurse, a special kind of humility and love for your fellow humans. I can’t even guess how many people she helped birth and the lives she fortified while caring for the mothers’ physical and mental health. Aunt Kathy co-founded the Maternal Wellness Program, and you can read her bio at https://maternalwellnessprogram.org/board (I hope you’ll consider donating at https://maternalwellnessprogram.org/donate ).

Her leadership and achievements in supporting families, especially mothers and babies, are profound, but I’d like to focus on two ways she was a champion just for me.

Back in 1975, Aunt Kathy helped bring my family into this world we call America as one of our resettlement sponsors. We had fled Vietnam nearly five months prior to the day. My parents, my Ba Ngoai (grandma), two sisters, one brother, and I.

In Vietnam, like in many places, we offer the honorifics of “Aunt” and “Uncle” to peers of our parents as a sign of respect. For some Aunties and Uncles, we don’t really mean it. (If you follow “Uncle Roger” on YouTube, you know what I’m talking about.)

But we revered Aunt Kathy, though not just her alone. We were in awe of Uncle Bill, Kathy’s husband, and our other sponsors, the aptly named Noble family, Aunt Joan and Uncle Andy. They led a cadre of Good Samaritans who all attended St. Robert of Newminster Parish in Ada, Michigan, collecting hundreds of 1975 dollars, beds, furniture, winter coats, boots, even a blue steel American station wagon that would fit all seven of us (seatbelts and my little sister came later).

The Aunties and Uncles met us at the airport in Grand Rapids on September 30, 1975. As a four-year-old, I still remember the Buchanans’ piercing eyes, their bellyful laugh, and their hugs. When they hugged you, they left their mark. I disappeared into their arms.?

They admitted years later they had no idea what they were getting into. Kathy was a young mother of two children under two, while working on the maternity floor at St. Mary’s Hospital in Grand Rapids. Uncle Bill’s insurance agency was finally making good money, policy by policy, after eight bootstrapped years. The Buchanans had just expanded their house on a hill full of pine, oak and maple trees next to a lake in Grand Rapids Township. Just in time for seven refugees needing to start a new life.

The four of them took us in. In one of our last conversations, Kathy reminded me that on the day we arrived at their house, everyone thought my older brother had drowned in their lake. Uncle Bill even put on a snorkel mask to duck under water, and later climbed into a canoe to look for the body. He figured the current would bring him up. Spoiler alert: my brother was alive. He had fallen asleep underneath a bed when we had played hide and seek before dinner.

Though that first dinner was cold, over the years we ate a lot of meals together. We had some adventures in the early days. Try eating corn-on-the-cob for the first time—where do you start? Seriously, you’re serving something called a “hot” dog—do you know what that means where I’m from?

After we straightened out the food customs, we kept living. We moved in and out of each other’s lives, popping up at the big events. First communions, weddings, and graduations. Aunt Kathy gave me a red canvas toiletry bag with a yellow zipper when I finished high school. My latest is charcoal gray. When I slipped it into my duffle this morning, I thought about her for the thousandth time. About how I verbally thanked her at my sister’s wedding later that fall in 1989 but had not sent a thank-you card.

The appearances slowed to a trickle when my entire family moved away: to Texas, to Massachusetts, California, Japan. Still, we popped in and out. Time was relative. It was like jumping in and out of the Quantum universe. At any second, you’re bursting out of thin air, only later shrinking away to an infinitesimal dot. Objectively, decades passed. The Buchanans helped more families start new lives in Michigan. Children grew up and got married, bringing more children into this world. Yet it seemed that no time had passed when we got together.?

My mother had lunch with Aunt Kathy six months before she died. My mother told me right before we boarded our flight today that her “sister” Kathy never let on that she was sick. I’d like to think her silent courage was born of her ever-present humility and compassion. Why burden others with your worries? Just pick up an old friend who was in town. Enjoy a meal. Continue the conversation from where you left it. Be in the moment. Even if your health is in shambles.

That wasn’t the first time that she didn’t make her health an issue. She risked her well-being—and so did her daughter Molly—back on November 16, 2020, when they walked into one of the Covid isolation rooms at St. Mary’s hospital. They got out of bed at 3 o’clock in the morning to say goodbye to my Ba Ngoai. During those apocalyptic days of the coronavirus, my grandma had been living in Grand Rapids while the rest of us were mostly in Texas. Nobody in my family could be there in person, so we kept our vigil over Zoom. An hour after Ba Ngoai died, Aunt Kathy and Molly walked into view of my computer screen. They covered themselves in blue gowns, gloves, masks, caps, and face shields so Ba Ngoai wouldn’t be alone. They grasped her 103-year-old hands and stroked her still-black hair. She was their Ba Ngoai, too. They collected her personal items, even her dentures. About ten of us watched on video, all of us crying, on mute.?

Afterward, I told them that I loved them both. We flew with masks on to Grand Rapids for Ba Ngoai’s viewing at the funeral home. There was at least one pandemic-be-damned Buchanan bear hug. And though I swore that things would be different, I jumped back out of Aunt Kathy’s life.

Via text I wished her another Happy Birthday. We passed other messages through my mother.

As the anniversary of Ba Ngoai’s death approached, I thought I’d have another chance to leap in from my Quantum universe to tell Aunt Kathy “thank you and I love you” once more. By now, we all know that sequel was not greenlit. Unresolved cliffhanger endings appear too often. The dance card always gets another name.

After my flight lands, I’m going back to that same funeral home and to the same church in Ada. I don’t know if bear hugs are waiting, though I really want one. I hope that everyone who ever loved Aunt Kathy will feel a little better when we say goodbye.

To Uncle Bill and to her children Molly, Beth, Bill, and Mike, I love you. To everyone in her family and to her thousands of friends and colleagues, may you feel the world’s embrace and smile, just a little, knowing Kathy Buchanan lived as a hero, of any universe.

Postscript: Again, please consider donating to Maternal Wellness Program at https://maternalwellnessprogram.org/donate .

#nurses #maternalwellness #KathleenBuchanan #mentalhealth #obstetrics