So, here I go, telling you all that I did not vote for Obama. I voted for Jill Stein. Phew. It wasn’t an easy decision for me, and if Washington had been at all in play, I would probably have decided differently. But now I’m going to defend it.

For me, it really came down to the drone attacks on countries we are not at war with; the ability for American citizens to be detained without trial; the assassination of American citizens without trial; Obama’s initial rejection of FISA and then support of it, codifying the ability of the government to wiretap American citizens with no oversight, as opposed to with a tiny bit of oversight, and many other assaults on our civil liberties. I believe that these things are a violation of the constitution, and if so many people weren’t anesthetized by reality tv and busy being afraid of not being able to pay their rent, there would be more uproar. But maybe not. It’s deserving of uproar, anyway, to me.

Okay, so you say that Romney wouldn’t be any better, and would probably be worse? Yes, I agree. That’s why I didn’t vote for him. That’s even why whether Washington was in play was a factor in my decision, even though I find Obama’s human rights violations repugnant, I was still willing to hold my nose and vote for him as the lesser of two evils.

But here’s the second part of my argument, and that is that there is a long game and a short game here. The short game is to get Obama elected as the most tolerable of possible presidents for 2012-16. The long game, in my mind, is to get enough people involved in our election process that it becomes actually representative. And that means that enough people have to vote to make it clear that currently our system is not representative of what the people want. That will never happen when smart, good people are saying “vote along the two party lines or don’t bother.” I don’t want people to not bother. I want people to bother.

I want people to stop saying the American people are apathetic. The vast majority of us are not apathetic. The system as it stands disempowers us, not allowing us to vote for what we really believe, and instead having to pick one of two parties, both of which are largely corporate-owned and are similar in many crucial ways. It feels futile to many people, and so they don’t play a rigged game. That’s a rational response. It isn’t the choice I make, but it is rational. But the thing is that together we are mighty. Imagine a world in which 90% of eligible voters did their duty, and third parties got 30% of the vote. It might break the electoral college. It might make the primary two parties have to actually listen to the Greens and the Socialists and the Libertarians (yeah, well, everything has its drawbacks). Or imagine the response if 90% of the eligible voters did their duty and it was completely ignored by the main two parties. We would then know that we’re living in an oligarchy, and wouldn’t that be valuable, too?

Here’s what else I want:
Vote. Everyone who is eligible, vote.
If you feel the need to prioritize the short game over the long game, do it. Someone needs to.
If you can’t stand to vote for the lesser of two evils, vote anyway, and vote for the third party candidate closest to your beliefs. Or Cookie Monster. Grover probably wouldn’t start any BS wars. Or your mom. Or MY mom (you can tell she’d be a good president because she’d never want to be one).
Don’t tell people that they don’t have the right or they shouldn’t vote if they’re going to “throw away” their vote. Throwing away the vote IS voting, too. It says, “I’m so disgusted by my choices that I am going out of my way to communicate, in the only way I’m allowed, that I’m disgusted by my choices.”

One final thing: I have obviously thought this out, quite a bit, complete with ramifications. So please, you don’t have to agree with me, but at least respect that reasonable people can come to well thought out conclusions that are different than yours.

When I started writing this, it was 5pm in Malawi. On a normal day, people would be heading home by foot or minibus or car, getting ready for dinner and the blackouts Escom (the electric company) recently scheduled for 4pm -10pm every day. But today is 20 July. It was Red Army day. It was a day of national protest. While the demonstration is over in the city centres, gunshots still reverberate through the townships and the grocery stores still burn.

The BBC only began to pay attention today, when the protests devolved into rioting with buildings being burned, and the firefighters in the capital of Lilongwe ran out of water to fight flames engulfing DPP (the political party of the President) buildings and vehicles. It’s easy, when it’s not an issue personal to you, to recognize that the BBC and other news outlets can’t cover everything. When it is a personal issue, as Malawi is to me, it can seem incomprehensible that no one seems to give a damn.

So, where are we now? The people of Malawi poured out into the streets in their red clothes and kerchiefs and hats, refusing to be silenced. Now multiple PTCs (a grocery store) and DPP storefronts have been burned, along with DPP trucks. One person is confirmed dead, but at least 6 are reported dead in Mzuzu, including police. Some of the protests have ended and people have gone home to make their nsima and eat dinner, but Mulanje is now in conflict, the police searching for protestors. In Lilongwe, the police started sweeping for looters. The townships in Blantyre are still alight, with burning tire roadblocks and for some reason youths are throwing rocks at cars passing by. When one of the Malawians interviewed on BBC’s Africa Have Your Say offered to go ask the youths why they were throwing rocks, the interviewer asked him to please not to do that and get assaulted on account of a radio show, so I guess we’ll never know why now.

But my question is what it takes for a story to be picked up in today’s world of increasingly segmented and sensationalist news? Why is it that the BBC and Al Jazeera waited so long to weigh in, and then got everything so wrong when they did? (Note to BBC’s Africa Have Your Say: Xenophobia about Asians could theoretically be exacerbated by the events of today, but Malawians have so many legitimate reasons to be angry and to be acting on it that blaming today on bigotry is honestly disgusting. Note to Al Jazeera: 400 in Lilongwe, really? You list no other numbers, or even though the big demonstration was in Blantyre, and thousands upon thousands of people came out there? Way to make it look like a discontented minority is just causing problems.)

It’s not like there’s been no media interest in Malawi. Bingu has obviously been imploding for months, and there have been periodic updates about him and Malawi. The only question has been how many Malawians he will take out with him. And yet every step of the way, it seems the media has treated it as a titillation (the headlines may not have said it, but the copy sometimes seemed to imply an attitude of “oh, isn’t he so *cute* kicking out the UK High Commissioner like that.”) or as an isolated incident, unrelated to any of the other ways Malawi was making the news. Regardless of the method, the effect is a disjointed and disrespectful misrepresentation of what is turning into a major event in the world. Sure, it may peter out and turn to nothing. But in the meantime, here are people who are fighting for their right to a democracy that isn’t in name only, some of them even invoking the beloved narrative of the Arab Spring, and they’re treated like they don’t exist.

Even when someone tweeted the BBC yesterday to ask why the demonstration wasn’t being covered in the news, the reply was that the protests weren’t newsworthy. It wasn’t until today, when the violence started, that they decided to dedicate an entire hour to Malawi and the protests.

So yes, I understand that the BBC can’t cover everything (and I think it’s sad that CNN and other US news organizations are so isolationist that no one thought they’d be interested at all). But they could have covered this. They had the information. They had incredibly smart people outlining what is happening in blogs and on twitter. Sure, not all of those excellent people to follow were talking about the protests before this morning, but most of them were.

I realize that I am angry. My friends have been trying to decide if they are going to stand in solidarity and risk themselves, or stay behind locked doors and be safe. That is an incredibly difficult decision to make, and it is one that is inherent in being a responsible member of a democracy. I honor whatever choices they came up with. That struggle should be acknowledged, especially by media that otherwise appears to, for all intents and purposes, have its head up its ass, for lack of a better way to say it. All of us who live in democracies have something to learn from Malawi today about the responsibility that comes with. I’m not trying to negate the looting and burning, which was wrong, but just like demonstrations that (used to) happen here in the US, the destructive type is not indicative of who went out chanting and cheering and participating in democracy.

The question now, for Malawi and for the media, is the same thing Blessings Ngwira asked: What will happen on 21 July?

*I realize there are photos on these two posts that are not of the cities, which is where most of the action on 20 July happened. I am not trying to contribute to the idea that all of Africa is the bush–it’s just that I take fricking awful pictures of cities, so I couldn’t find any to post. There is, however, one picture (at the thousands and thousands link) and one video (and the chanting and cheering link). I didn’t want to steal bandwidth by posting them directly.

**A friend of mine posted this about Uganda, which shows that the issue of the media gaze is not restricted to Malawi. I knew that, but it’s a good reminder.

What happened today has been coming for months. You can read this great and informative general timeline, which I will rehash a bit of and add a bit to, but here’s the upshot: dissent has been getting harder and harder to safely engage in, and the economic situation has been getting worse. The fact that there was going to be news today (from the yay! things on fire=page views perspective) was blatantly obvious to anyone who had the time and interest to connect the dots. The anti-farting legislation seemed like a huge joke in January and February of this year, but if you reframe it in the context of giving the government the ability to arrest any dissenter for specious reasons, suddenly it doesn’t seem that funny.  Laws like Section 46 of the Penal Code, which allows the Minister of Information to ban importation and publication of anything determined not to be in the public interest, then become logical extensions of the restrictions on freedom of speech.

Put that law in context of a country where in March a lecturer from Chancellor College, Blessings Chinsinga, was detained for questioning and then fired just for talking about the Arab Spring in his Political Science class (I’m pretty sure discussing things like the Arab Spring is the purpose of Political Science classes). This resulted in protests at Chanco where the police threw teargas and beat protestors. In the meantime, Bingu has been shutting down dissent and consolidating the power of the executive branch. Even his vice president, Joyce Banda, left the DPP and is trying to start her own party, only to have her security detail decreased. For the protests, she was threatened with arrest.

The economic situation in Malawi has become increasingly dire. Because the UK High Commissioner cable that stated the perfectly justified concerns about governance was leaked to Bingu, the UK High Commissioner was expelled from the country, which eventually, through continued posturing and stubbornness, led the UK to suspend aid to Malawi. 40% of Malawi’s budget comes from foreign aid.

Bingu has refused to revalue the kwacha at the internationally agreed on amount, thus depleting the foreign exchange (forex) which is what allows Malawi to buy things from abroad, such as medications and fuel. He further depleted the forex through his purchase of a private jet last year and the continued maintenance of the plane. Because of this, there are continuous fuel, medicine, and water shortages, affecting both travel and the functioning of things like grain mills and clinics. Everyone is affected in some form or another.

So, that’s the background, and it’s been heating up as Bingu seems to be more and more intractable. When the DPP started sending out thugs in their DPP vehicles with panga knives and when pro-DPP people started threatening the protestors, it seemed obvious that shit was going to go down. It seemed like everyone should have seen it coming.

At any rate, I say this because I just finished the book Still Alice. It’s an amazing book, and I literally cried through the last 100 pages (I know the definition of literally, and am using it, you know, literally.). I actually called my mom after the first 160 pages, because there were several times in those pages when I almost cried. On the T. That is not okay. So, I had to yell at her about not giving me sufficient warning. (She’s always been less of a crier than I am—except sometimes for Hallmark commercials, so at least I can blame that on her.) Because I almost cried. On the fricking T. I am a total sap, but I would like not to cross the crying in public because of a book line. That can stay firmly uncrossed, as far as I’m concerned.

From this description, you may think that you should not read this book. You would be wrong. It is an amazing story about Alzheimer’s from the point of view of the person living with Alzheimer’s, And it isn’t unremittingly depressing (I know, isn’t that damning it with faint praise?). It’s beautiful without being ornate, and it feels real without being contrived or stylistic. Alice seems like she could be someone I might run into on the street, or at work, or in my own family. It’s written well enough that only rarely was I aware of the writing (Don’t get me wrong, one of my favorite books ever was The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, which was about 80% about the writing; I have room for love of more than one style), mostly I was living in the story.

So, yeah, read Still Alice. Just not on public transportation.

Next I’m going to read The Girl Who Fell from the Sky by Heidi Durrow. Since the review on the back calls it “achingly honest,” I think I’ll be calling mom again to complain. And maybe at some point, I’ll get this crying at fictional events thing dealt with. I’m in no big hurry though.

My aunt told me that she has found, as part of the PTSD/grief research she does, that the Kübler-Ross model is just not how things happen. And as such she would like to weaken its hold on how we learn about grief.

Even if you don’t know it, you’ve heard of Kübler-Ross. She talked about the five stages of grief, and they became the fundamental teachings about death, dying, and grief. (That’s why her book is called On Death and Dying.) They show up on TV shows, movies, books . . . . Everybody knows you go through denial and anger and bargaining and depression and then acceptance.

I didn’t realize that some nursing schools teach Kübler-Ross straight up. At NYU, we learned that these stages are not in order, not everyone goes through any or all of them, there isn’t one way any of the stages manifest, and people don’t have to go through any of the stages to cope. Apparently that’s not how it’s always taught (and that certainly isn’t how it shows up in pop culture).

My aunt mentioned how when interviewed, nobody says they are in denial, and when asked if they’ve ever forgotten their loved one died, they would answer, “no.” The whole idea of denial that literal is sort of ridiculous. But there is a sort of denial that made me glad I was prepped by Kübler-Ross.

The day after the burial, my mom and I went to take flowers to the family graves. My uncle, great-aunt and uncle, great aunt, and great grandparents are also buried in the family plot. My mom and I were discussing, while driving over to the cemetery, whether we had enough flowers for individual bouquets. “Oh, there’s plenty flowers for four bouquets,” my mom said. “But we need five,” I said.
“No, we don’t.”
“Yes, we do.”
“No, we don’t: Matt, Pearl, Evelyn and Stan, Maude and Grandpa.”
And then I realized what happened, and said very quietly, “And Grandma, mama.”
And then my mama started to cry.

*                                                            *                                                                               *

For what would have been their 61st wedding anniversary a few weeks ago, my grandfather came over to visit Grandma’s grave. It had looked like he wasn’t going to come, and I forgot about the anniversary, so I made other plans.

I tried to figure out if I wanted to go with the family to the grave. I was also emotionally wiped out from being at the hospital with my other grandmother, and so I tried to talk it through with my mother. She is always wonderful about not making me feel obligated, but sometimes I wish she would a little just so I would know what to do. I talked about how tired I was and how I wanted to have a little fun, to not have to have this grief and fear weighing over me for just a couple days. And my mom said everybody would understand.

And as I said, “Anyway, I think her birthday is more important to me anyway, and I’d rather go then,” I suddenly realized what I never had before.
My grandmother was never going to have another birthday.
And then I started to cry.

*                                                            *                                                                               *
If you asked either me or my mom if we forgot about grandma dying, we would have looked at you with a special sort of scorn. I feel my grandmother’s loss in every space and forgotten area of my body.

However, there are certain things which, while I never forget them, I remember over and over and each time it’s as if it were entirely new information. Every time I remember that my grandmother is never going to have another birthday, I cry. Every time. Because every time it surprises me.

As for the rest of the stages, I don’t know. I don’t believe in the anger stage. Saying “It isn’t fair” isn’t anger, it’s the straight up truth. And I’m not sure about depression, either. The bone deep sadness that comes is earned, understandable, and right, if that’s what you need. Bargaining? Well, my family isn’t religious, so we had no deity bargaining partner, and although we did tell Grandma we’d help as much as we could if she could and wanted to fight, that seems to be more of a statement of support than some sort of contract negotiation.

And acceptance. Do we ever really get acceptance? Is there ever a point after which it never again surprises you that you can’t call your loved one up and tell them a story or ask advice? Is there ever a point at which it is completely acceptable that you’ll never feel their arms around you again? I doubt it. I’m happy, I’m living my life. But I’m still trying to make her proud, and I’m also still sad. I think, to some degree or another, these things will always be true.

That, I accept.

Let me be clear, this topic pisses me off. Not much does, really, but a similar arrogance about the cohesion of an osteoporotic spine, over the long run, killed my mom’s mom. And then the day we memorialized my mom’s mom, my dad’s mom started a month-long hospital stay, with a couple scary weeks in the ICU, because of a problematic procedure that was supposed to keep her in the hospital for a few hours, max.

On the other hand, I am fundamentally a medical professional. I recognize that good practitioners can make bad mistakes and as much as I hate it when it happens to me and mine, that some times you just have to correct the damage and move on. Also, it’s hard to be angry at the doctors when it’s obviously an institutional problem—This happened at two hospitals in two different states. My guess is that stats are aggregated over sex and age and osteoporosis diagnoses, and so these procedures look far less risky than they are. So why would I get mad at a doctor for screwing up, like we all do, based on information he thinks is correct?

But at University of California at Irvine Medical Center (and I’m calling them out on purpose, because they need to change their culture if they don’t want to be evil), nobody apologized. Two weeks later, nobody had apologized. Eventually there was one surreptitious, whispered apology from the resident, but that was it. There was never acknowledgment that there was a hospital-level problem, or that perhaps the policies needed to change to protect similar patients.

I don’t get this. Why wouldn’t they apologize? I know what you’re going to say—law suits and all that. But studies have now shown that being truthful, honest, and offering just compensation reduces lawsuits and expenditures. It also allows both doctors and patients to feel human.

Even more importantly, without disclosure, it’s very difficult to prevent recurrent mistakes. All the residents learn is to hide their mistakes, and all their supervisors learn is to deny them. How is it possible, then, to change anything? When a hospital like UCIMC does respond, it is often after many little errors have built up into something major, and their response may be to blame the doctor who made the mistake rather than recognizing their own systemic flaws that allowed the mistake to happen. So, after they rid the hospital of their “awful” doctor, it will all happen again with someone new. UCIMC has other problems with transparency, too, and all of it adds up to a hospital that isn’t nearly as good as it could or should be.

As a family member, rather than as a medical professional, all I wanted was an apology and the assurance that they would put in place measures to make sure it didn’t happen again. To anyone. When I didn’t get that, I did hope my aunt would sue them. After all I’ve told you, and all of which I honestly mean, my gut, heartfelt reaction was we should sue their frigging pants off just to get them to stop pretending nothing had happened.

There are a few things I’m going to talk about related to seeing my grandma in the hospital, but I’m going to start with advanced directives because, well, that was the last entry I wrote.

Grandma Barbara has a Do Not Resuscitate order (no CPR, no intubation, no nothing). This makes sense because she lives in an assisted living facility, and it’s quite likely she could have an event and not be found for hours, and she doesn’t want people to try to resuscitate her after hours of brain damage have already occurred. She also has a no antibiotics order on her DNR, which sort of makes sense, because assuming the picture Grandma had in her head of how she is going to die, antibiotics would only be used to prolong her life, not to make her better.

Well, then Grandma needed surgery. It’s common, at least at the UWMC (which is not where my grandmother is, and if it were, she would be getting much better care, I think), for doctors to suspend DNR during surgery.* But that suspension normally ends when the patient is 24 hours(ish) out of surgery. Well, my grandma wasn’t recovering all that well, so she and my aunt, who is her durable power of attorney for health, agreed to continue to suspend the DNR. Also, I’m not sure why, but it took the docs 2 full days to start treating her post-surgical pneumonia and urinary tract infections with antibiotics. I think, though, that the delay might have been because her DNR said no antibiotics, and there was a period of time when although the family thought the DNR was still suspended, the doctors might have thought it was reinstated.

So, there are two problems with this whole scenario. One is writing advanced directives that only account for the most likely way you’re going to die. Don’t assume you’re going to fall over from a massive heart attack. What if you get hit by a car? What if you get pneumonia, or sepsis from a massive infection that’s potentially deadly, but equally potentially treatable? The other problem is not having a living will in place as well.

In my opinion, the place for requests like “no antibiotics” is the living will. The DNR needs to be a black and white document so people immediately know whether to start CPR, intubation, and ventilation or not. The living will is the place for gray areas and if . . . thens. It’s there that you can say under which circumstances you do and do not want antibiotics, or any other care. Also, having a DNR does not negate the need for a living will: there are many circumstances under which you may be unable to make your own decisions, but you don’t need resuscitation. And, if you’re going into surgery, you should review all of your advanced directive and make sure they are relevant to the most likely things to go wrong during the surgery.

Also, remember that your living will and DNR are meant to take care of you. If you are even halfway with it, you can revoke either or both at any time. You can also insist they be followed. You just want to make sure they tell the medical staff to do what you think they tell the medical staff to do.

I don’t mean to blame confusing advanced directives for shoddy care, though. Any medical staff worth their salt would check that the decisions they make based on the advanced directives with the patient and/or family to make sure that’s what the desired outcome was. Advanced directives don’t allow the medical staff to abdicate responsibility.

*This is not doctorly arrogance. There are many ways a person can try really hard to die in surgery, and very few of them have anything to do with how ready their body is to fail outside of surgery.

The first part is figuring out what you want. If your heart stops, do you want someone to attempt CPR? To shock you, and give you drugs to get your heart going again? If you are in a coma, do you want to be on a ventilator? Do you want to receive tube feedings? Hydration? Is there any point at which you’d like the life support to be stopped? Is there no point at which the you’d like life support to stop?

The second part is filling out the paperwork and getting it notarized. This makes it all official. For Washington state, the standard paperwork, which can be modified, is here. You can register your documents so doctors can retrieve them online here.

The third part is to talk to your relatives. They need to know what you want, they need to be able to ask questions and to get comfortable with the idea. The codicil to this is, if you have any relatives for whom you may be responsible later, this is a good time to ask them what they want.

These three steps are all equally important. For obvious reasons, you need to know what you want. The second part is important because it gives medical staff a jumping off point. But more importantly, it gives your family something to fall back on. I talked to a patient once who had two family members die. Both of them needed to have life support stopped. Both of them had talked with their families about what they wanted. For both of them, having the life support pulled was the sort of thing they said they wanted. But only one of them had a living will. My patient said even though they knew it was the right and wanted thing to do, not having those desires in writing meant they felt tormented and guilty about making the decision to end life support. When they did have it in writing, it changed everything.

I know for my family, with my grandma, having everything in writing helped a lot. Without the living will, I think we would have had an incredibly difficult time following her wishes, even as it became more and more obvious that she was never coming back. The living will gave us comfort that we were doing what she wanted, however hard it was to withdraw life support. Putting it in writing respects and supports the people who will need to carry out your wishes.

Talking to your family is just as important because if your family doesn’t agree, chances are quite good that your wishes will not be honored. This is true even if you have it in writing. Hospitals have been sued for trying to follow a living will against a family’s wishes, and generally the hospitals have lost—so they usually defer to the families.

Talking to your family also gives them a chance to decide if these are the sorts of decisions for which they are comfortable taking responsibility. If they agree with your living will, but think they’ll chicken out following it, or if they disagree with your living will and refuse to honor it, it’s time for a durable power of attorney for health care, which allows someone else to make these decisions. Again, it also opens up the conversation with the people you care about, without having a subtext of, “You’re old and are going to die soon.”

Ok, so are you convinced yet? Remember, you could be hit by a bus tomorrow, and neither be fine nor die. So get hopping, and sort out your living will.

I’d like to say something about my grandma. I’d like to dispel the notion that Nancy was a superhero, with superhero powers to match. Judging by all the incredible and true things you will hear today, it would be easy to make that mistake.

Nancy had flaws. If you knew her well, I’m sure you can think of some. But the way Nancy always stepped up to do what needed to be done and to love who needed to be loved wasn’t the result of superpowers. These were choices she made and skills she cultivated. She also didn’t do any of it alone.

Nancy worked in community. Sometimes she failed. Sometimes she succeeded. Just like all of us, sometimes she thought later she should have gotten involved, or she should have done more. Just like all of us, sometimes she would overextend. Sometimes she made mistakes. Just like all of us. But she kept going.

To me, one of the lessons here, besides laughing hard and the beauty of a sharp wit, is that to be an amazing person like my grandmother does not take a superhero. It takes all of us, doing our best, not shutting our eyes, our hearts, or our minds, and working in community, together, to do what’s right. We owe that to ourselves, and to Nancy’s memory.

Oh, wait. I was wrong when I said my grandma didn’t have superpowers. She did have one, and that was being our grandmother. She will always be unsurpassable at that.

Thank you.

YAKIMA – Nancy Ann Tobin Putney Faller, 83, died July 17, 2010, at Yakima Valley Memorial Hospital. Nancy was born on September 22, 1926, in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, to Carrie Farmer and Tom Tobin, a Notre Dame graduate and Irish road construction contractor. Her father died when Nancy was seven. Two years later, her mother married Ellsworth Putney, whose daughter Virginia “GeeGee” Putney became the “sister of love” Nancy had longed for.

The Putneys settled in Seattle. When Nancy’s Japanese classmates at Broadway High School were sent to internment camps, she did not protest. This was a defining moment in Nancy’s life: she made a conscious decision that she would never again stand by and do nothing in the face of injustice, and neither would her children.

In college at WSC, Nancy joined the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority, where she made lifelong friendships with her Kappa sisters, with whom she reunited annually until recently. As a drama major, Nancy starred in Penny Wise and other plays and was known to stretch out on a piano, belting steamy torch songs on request. She never lost her love of theater or music, delighting in taking others to shows whenever she could. During the summers, she worked as the proverbial riveter.

After a determined pursuit, she married Bill “Butch” Faller on September 3, 1949. They headed out for a “year-long honeymoon” while Bill finished his Masters degree and Nancy worked as a librarian at the University of Illinois.

The couple moved to Seattle and had their first daughter, Virginia “Gini.” Their second daughter, Elizabeth “Liz” was born in Prosser. Matthew, Janet, and William “Will,” were all born while the family lived in Wapato.

In 1961, Bill became the football and baseball coach at YVJC and the Fallers moved to the house on Barge Street which remains the family base. While Nancy had always worked to keep the promise she had made in World War II, it was in Yakima that her community activism became a way of life for her.

Recognizing the noxious effect of segregation in Yakima, Nancy was active in the beginning years of Southeast Yakima Community Center. She most enjoyed working with children: she created a swimming program and headed the literacy program. Nancy brought her children to volunteer and made sure they had diverse groups of friends and diverse life experiences. She took them to Black Awareness classes and to meet her friends amongst immigrant workers, making sure that her kids cared enough about different people that they would never let anyone be taken away in the name of fear.

Using her trademark stubbornness, sense of humor, sharp wit, and willingness to tell it like it is, Nancy, Pat Haas, and their friends caused enough a ruckus that Mayor Bert Broad created the Mayor’s Committee on Human Rights, where they worked on equalizing opportunity in Yakima.

Nancy made her house a haven with open doors for all of her childrens’ friends, some of whom are still family today. She encouraged everyone to be the best person they could be.

The protection of human rights was important in Nancy’s life. She demonstrated against the Vietnam and both Iraq wars. She and Bill were active members of the Washington State Rainbow Coalition. Nancy wrote articles for progressive magazines, taking up the causes of Indian rights, the rights of rape survivors, universal health care, farm workers rights, gay rights, and the rights of those she felt needed love and compassion. Nancy worked on antinuclear issues with Jackrabbit News. She partnered with Dick Lord to produce and present local radio and television commentaries. Nancy belonged to the League of Women Voters, and with Bill belonged to the NAACP and the ACLU, where she would take on leadership roles when asked.

Nancy was not all about business. While she taught her children love and responsibility, she also had fun. Nancy taught her family to sing, to laugh and joke when faced with difficult times, and to swing dance in the kitchen. Sometimes she started food fights at the dinner table, not worrying about getting mashed potatoes on the walls.

After the children were out of the house, Nancy didn’t slow down. She kept all her political activities, and she gardened, read more, worked on her novel, joined a writing group, and went to writing workshops. She and Bill traveled to Mexico, most especially Santiago, Manzanillo, where they could enjoy swimming in the ocean and participating in Mexican village life, free of tourists. Even though Nancy never got her Spanish quite where she wanted it, she had no trouble communicating and making friends. At home, she loved to walk or bike down Barge, although she always had to stop and chat with someone.

Nancy is survived by her husband of 60 years, Bill Faller, her children Gini, Liz, Janet, and Will Faller; her daughter-in-law Diane Faller; her grandchildren, Jessica Holman, Robert Gonzalez, Will and Joseph Faller; two great-grandchildren, several nieces and nephews and their children, and many friends. She was preceded in death by her parents, Tom Tobin, Carrie Farmer Tobin Putney, and Ellsworth Putney; her son Matt Faller, and her sister Virginia Putney Neil.

Nancy will be buried in a small family service in Milltown, Washington. A memorial celebration of her life will be held at the Yakima Valley Museum on Saturday, August 14 at 3pm. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to Yakima Valley Human Rights Scholarship Fund or Yakima Food Bank in care of Keith & Keith Funeral Home, or to the charity of your choice.