Veronica was here, 1945-2025.

My mom departed this earthly plane on Sunday, May 4th at 5:33am — one week before Mother’s Day and nine days after I commenced hospice care for her on Friday, April 25th.

Several months after she retired somewhat abruptly in September 2023 — still seeming impossibly youthful as she approached 78 — I and my Brown family, with whom she resided in close proximity at our downtown Napa compound, began to suspect something was amiss.

Now if you knew Veronica, you know she was ornery as hell (I am likewise, clearly got it from her)… and one of her trademarks was doing things her way.

As in her epic life, so in her epic death.

I did not have confirmation that she had a terminal illness until she finally came out with it on April 24th, ten days before she passed. And I did not understand exactly what the trouble was until April 28th.

I had first contemplated making an intervention in February 2024; over the next seven months, Deneen and I made several attempts to pierce the veil as it were… but as she was becoming obviously unwell, my mom made a deliberate decision not to disclose what the matter was to any of us, including Deneen’s mom who was her close companion.

Without belaboring a deeply distressing situation, after speaking individually with a number of trusted elders, I was persuaded by their unanimous counsel: Whatever was going on with her health, privacy — and autonomy — were her prerogatives.

When I told her in her final days I wished she had let me help her be more comfortable sooner, she said she hadn’t wanted anyone fussing over her. Ugh. Here was the source of my own stubborn stoicism.

Her determination to keep her secret even from me — and moreover her request to be left alone (even by me) — landed me between a rock and a hard place, not conducive to contacting or being forthcoming with friends or family. For that I apologize.

As I thought through this traumatic (most of all for her) situation in real time, I came to suspect my mom had not had any western medical care in 40 years outside of flu shots and Covid vaccinations — despite having faithfully maintained her Blue Shield coverage along with supplemental prescription drug coverage. Another of her trademarks, as many of you reading this know, was her longtime keen interest in nutrition-based wellness and non-pharmaceutical remedies; she was a student of these and sundry spiritual and mystical subjects when I was a small child in the early 1970s.

What might be considered some of her unconventional ideas about wellness certainly resonate to a degree with my own values (no surprise — my mom imprinted a great many things on me; my longtime blind spot in this regard became a third eye as she was dying). That said, I dearly wish I could have collaborated with her to strike a balance between her desire to go it alone and securing some measure(s) of relief to ease her journey.

While I don’t have full clarity as to the timing, I believe it may have been in the latter half of 2022 that she detected a nodular melanoma, which she allowed to go untreated but for self-ministrations. On April 28, 2025 when she reluctantly revealed it, I saw that the problem literally stemmed from an atypical mole on her torso that I remember marveling at when I was small.

I don’t know if I ever will be able to reconcile her decision to let this thing go unchecked. I can’t help wondering whether she was influenced by her sister’s experience in 2018-2019 going through a battery of tests and treatments and hospitalizations for leukemia amidst an array of compounded underlying conditions. (Her sister died in April 2019 three days after Deneen’s dad died.) However, as most of you reading this know, my mom overall was in excellent shape. I have no doubt that had she opened up to me when the problem came to light, at a minimum during her last year and a half she could have had a much better quality of life with magnitudes less pain and suffering.

Be that as it may, she chose a most difficult route, and my heart breaks for the needless travail she opted into by concealing her condition for what I believe was nearly two and a half years — approximately one of which she spent going to work and customarily doing her thing(s) as if all was well.

My heart breaks, and simultaneously it floods with grace, gratitude, and forgiveness... in accord with the shared wisdom of Rumi and Leonard Cohen:

The wound is the place where the Light enters you.
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There’s a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.

I had about five days with my mom before the stepped-up morphine regimen knocked her out for the duration. During that precious window I was able to express some things to her, through both word and deed, that affirmed my deep and undamaged love for her — the tragic flaw of which was that it had been locked up for so long thanks to our shared incapacity to be vulnerable with one another. Now here she was… and there I was... and we were.

While she was still conscious I began massaging her — head, face, chest, arms, hands, legs, feet — and she purred like a cat, ever so softly: Thank you, thank you...

She nodded off for the last time around 7pm on Wednesday, April 30th. Over the next several days I continued massaging her from head to toe; held her in my arms; kissed her forehead a hundred times; whispered encouragements; received a cascade of epiphanies; and generally felt my heart exploding in slow motion.

Because she chose to die at home, throughout those nine days I now and then got about the business of going through her stuff (of which: a lot). Several times while she was awake she directed me to look here and there, see if I could find this and that. The Indonesian word, which became family lore when my grandmother was directing a parallel episode in her last days in May 1995, is bongkar: more or less the equivalent of rummaging.

Each time I would return to my mom’s bedside after a spell of searching, sifting, and sorting, she would ask Did you find any treasures? When I reported my most thrilling discoveries were old photos stored in a familiar basket, or various household/decorative objects she still had that I remember from my childhood — including a box of potpourri from when I must have been ten years old — her eyes widened with wonder. I was deeply moved to be reunited with numerous iconic/totemic items she had kept hold of from so long ago… and she was likewise to witness the meaning these unsung heirlooms held for me.

Seeing my mom through to her last breath was a journey of heartbreak and healing, dual sensations that have engulfed me since the morning of May 4th. Our connection, I came to understand in her last days, was very much of the cosmos — decidedly not mortal, rather larger than life. It occurs to me as I continue reflecting on her life, my life, and our shared time in this ephemeral realm of the living that my mom and I are twin flames.

On the night of April 30th, as I sat by her bedside with my left hand on her chest, watching her breathe, breathing myself, feeling the magnitude of what was underway here, I was possessed by what felt like a divine order: Write this down! Something like her life — and mine with her —flashed before my eyes. I hastened to pull out my phone and with my free right hand (index finger specifically) transcribed a 550-word homage to my relationship with this little lady who had brought me into the world and then gone about living her life as she saw fit… fully and freely, seeking and finding, yearning and longing, doing and trying, working hard, so hard, until her brave, bold heart let go so she could fly to the stars, where I know she now resides... in her element. My goodness.

As I make my way through the stuff of my mom’s life — chaotic balm that it is following her too soon departure — I am feeling a pull to construct a physical timeline (a la your favorite detective show) to recover the chronologies of her life, as well as to uncover some aspects of who she was and what made her tick that remain enigmatic from my current vantage.

For nearly 79 and a half years(!), my mom lived her life with tremendous curiosity, conviction, and courage — from Jakarta to Amsterdam to San Francisco to San Rafael to San Francisco to Los Altos to Mountain View to San Francisco to Los Angeles to San Francisco and most recently to Napa, along with an array of global treks including multiple touchdowns in Hawai‘i, where she contemplated moving us after we traveled there for the first time in 1981 (while I was in high school and living with her). That dreamy notion, which I recall as if it were yesterday, was quelled by a foreboding astrocartography chart that suggested a lack of productivity would follow. A lack of productivity was not for her. Next!

On a related note, I have work to do for the TIMELINE I’ve committed to here, which is part sorting and organizing, part processing, part documenting, part synthesizing, and entirely enriching (also: wrenching).

And last but not least, VK’s PHOTOS will be built out over time, to include more selections from her delightful selfie collection (sampler above spans 2012-2023, arranged chronologically).

My beautiful mama. She was quite the one. 💙 —sk