There’s a good reason for writing something about Amanda, our sister and oldest offspring in our clan, who was born in Mexicali many years ago. On May 4, 1945, for those who prefer exactness. And on Lerdo Avenue.
“Amanda manda,” said the priest as he baptized her.
It was an opportune rhyming one-liner but also a foretold certainty, meaning that she’d be in charge.
I was not present at that ceremony since I was not yet born, but our mom would often recall that comment years later.
The remark about being in charge was on-target, no doubt. Over the years, Amanda often displayed that gift of command. But it had to do more with doing what she wanted to do than with telling others what to do.
You will find out in a bit why I need to write about her. In the time being, allow me to mention a few anecdotes about a sister with a yen to do what is right. The first four are linked to the town where she was born and to the schools she attended.
At the end of the 1950s, a literacy campaign was launched throughout Mexico. In Mexicali, as well as in other towns, volunteers were sought to participate as tutors. The program called for teaching illiterate adults how to read and write. Amanda immediately volunteered and soon found a willing participant nearby, an elderly lady who still yearned to learn to read and write. In a few months, that fortunate older person was no longer illiterate.
Because of her success in educating others, Amanda was later asked to temporarily sub for a second-grade teacher in the primary school that she had previously attended. It was probably this event that eventually led her to studying to become a teacher.
During her last year of secondary school, Amanda was selected to recite the well-known poem titled La guaja for a school assembly. She was a hit. Everyone applauded loudly, including me. Some cried, too. Her delivery was impressive.
Once done with secondary schooling, she enrolled at the Escuela Normal Fronteriza, Mexicali’s teachers school. Unfortunately, she had to put that career plan on hold after we moved to the United States.
After becoming residents of the country to the north and in the spring of 1963, we both attended Imperial Valley College. The campus was miles away from our home in El Centro, but we got there somehow, mainly hitching rides to and from the college. I feel that it was easier for me to find a way to get to school, but Amanda did it too. She was determined to get a higher education degree, for sure.
Once we moved farther north, to Stockton, California, she didn’t have to hitch rides anymore, but it took her two city buses to get to San Joaquin Delta College. That’s Amanda for you. She did whatever she needed to do to get to the campus so she could turn her educational objectives into reality.
As she studied in that school, the bug to one day become a nurse invaded her mind and she soon set her sight on earning the registered nurse title. It wasn’t an easy goal to accomplish, I clearly remember, but she eventually obtained the degree, after years of working as an LVN, a licensed vocational nurse. By then, she had already worked in the three major Stockton hospitals: at St. Joseph, at Dameron, and at the county hospital.
As the years passed and the ways of providing healthcare changed, she became involved in basic home health care and eventually in hospice care. It was a specialty that she practiced for years, until the day she retired.
Before hanging up her nurse’s cap, Amanda, now a confirmed risk-taker, opted for going on several metaphorical less-traveled roads and doing what to others might be impractical. One of those undertakings led her and her husband to living in Rosarito, Baja California, near the water and the Pacific Ocean. She didn’t mind the time-consuming commutes to San Diego, where she worked, as long as she could live near the beach. Many of us visited them there. It was fun.
She did much real traveling, too, not just the figurative type. She did it on an airplane, on a car, but also on a motor home. A year or two before retiring, she bought a fifth wheel recreational vehicle and a heavy-duty truck to haul it so she and her husband could live in it and in the nearby San Joaquin Delta RV parks. It was done, basically, to get used to that kind of roughing it, since they were planning to soon travel throughout the United States in that motor home.
“We gonna do it after retirement,” she often told others.
And they did. The jaunt was launched without much fanfare but lots of fingers crossed. Some of us worried about them and about spending so much time on the road in the huge RV. But they did fine. They drove on the nation’s southern trails at first. On desert land, on interstate highways, and on lesser-known roads. They saw canyons, rivers, mountains, and eventually ended up in Florida. From there they drove north, to New Hampshire, where they stayed for a while with her daughter. Once that temporary stay came to an end, they returned to the west, moseying there, making many stops in between.
Amanda did all the driving since her husband of then no longer drove. It was an amazing accomplishment and a marathonic venture that only a person with her fortitude and determination could get done.
Recently, however, tragedy struck. On Saturday, April 1 of this year, while visiting relatives north of Los Angeles, Amanda and her husband were involved in a car crash. The driver of an oncoming SUV suffered a heart attack and lost consciousness. Seconds later, the now out-of-control vehicle crossed the center divider and collided head-on with Amanda’s small sedan. She and her husband ended up in a nearby hospital in critical condition. The driver of the SUV died at the scene of the accident.
Dale, Amanda’s husband, was beaten up pretty badly. He was bruised all over but had no internal injuries. But she wasn’t as fortunate. She suffered a broken leg, broken ribs, and had blood scattered inside her abdomen. After exploratory surgery, the doctors cut part of her intestine and patched up what they could discern that needed to be mended. For days, the prognosis didn’t look good but after about a week it seemed that she was going to make it. She was alert and able to talk by then. She was also breathing without the aid of a ventilator.
Since the prognosis had gone from not good to good, she was eventually transferred from intensive care to a regular hospital room. The following morning, however, Amanda’s body was unable to handle the transition and subsist without the help of medical contraptions attached to her body. A few hours after midnight she choked on her food and had a heart seizure. The nurses had to resort to CPR to resuscitate her. She was then taken back to intensive care where she was kept alive with the help of a ventilator. But her brain was gone, and she could no longer breathe on her own. A couple of days later, on April 12, after getting disconnected from the machine that kept her artificially alive, Amanda was dead.
It was a sad finale and the end of the line for Amanda, a beautiful human being, a beloved sister whose earthly journey had been driven by a zeal to live life to the fullest and to enjoy and relish the world around her. Her untimely passing is still difficult to accept. It’s really tough for some of us. But as we grieve our loss, we can all find solace in the legacy that she left behind: a fighting spirit, a “let’s do it” kind of attitude, and an unequivocal love of life.
AUTHOR: Pedro Chávez