My mom, known to other folks as Cindy Dobson, died yesterday morning, April 15, managing to conflate both death and taxes in one bold move. She was 84. She spent a week in hospice after a serious stroke a week before. I was able to speak with her briefly when I arrived after the stroke and convey love from me and my family, and she understood despite being a little confused about what was happening. She didn’t speak or respond much after that evening, and she slept for nearly all of the next week, so her final moments were peaceful. She never wanted to linger in hospital care or be further disabled, and she had lived a long and interesting life with many joys. She had been very clear about her wishes, so the decisions we made on her behalf were sad but very obvious.

To me, of course, she was Mom, not Cindy. It will be impossible to convey in a note like this what she meant to me, but I’ll give you some details, at least. She was tremendously smart, earning an M.L.S. and a Ph.D. in sociology. She specialized in gerontology, which meant she was able to predict, understand theoretically, and complain with scholarly authority about everything that happened to her as she aged. She taught at several institutions, and she spent many years as a bibliographer at the Iowa State University Library, where she helped scholars and students by selecting books and journals for the library in the social sciences. That relatively rare profession meant that our house was constantly full of 3×5 library cards describing all kinds of books, which we as kids used as scratch paper, construction materials, boardgame components, and all kinds of other uses. She was phenomenal at research, and even in retirement she volunteered to help with some scholarly projects. A lifelong progressive and feminist, one of her proudest achievements was being part of a USIA grant that got her and some colleagues to Uzbekistan, where she taught classes and ran programs to help Uzbek women learn to launch businesses and establish themselves in what was then a very male-dominated traditional society.

She was also had a keen appreciation of the arts. There was no museum she would not enjoy visiting, some with a quick tour, others with seemingly endless, painting-by-painting ordeals. While I begrudged that some as a kid, I now absolutely share her passion for such places. She attended concerts, operas, and other performances all the time, and she served on the boards of music and arts organizations. Although she ensured that her communities would be well-supplied with classical chamber music, it was far more likely to be Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, or Joan Baez that she cooked to. She was a voracious reader of all kinds of books, but her particular passion was mystery novels, which she’d often consume at a rate of three or four a week, and about which she always had strong opinions. If your mystery included recipes, or heaven forbid talking animals, it was headed back to the library with a hearty helping of scorn.

She traveled far and wide, both when we were little but even more as a retiree. We lived for a year in Ireland in 1979-80 on a Fulbright exchange, and she and my father lived in Scotland for two stretches later in life, which she loved. She and my dad always saved up their middle-class salaries for travel, and we had many grand adventures. She and my dad also went on a ton of foreign trips as faculty hosts with the M.I.T. alumni association, with my dad giving lectures to the tours about the places they went. This served both to get her to far away lands, where she loved seeing buildings and learning the history, and to do so quite cheaply, which was also a lifelong passion. She even reached Antarctica, giving her six of the seven continents.

As a person, she was fiercely loyal to family, and she had a big, big heart, helping many charities, with a growing focus on Native American communities after moving to New Mexico in her retirement years. She also always helped out friends and coworkers who found themselves in difficulty, providing whatever would help, whether that was money, clothing, transport, or a home-cooked meal. Her love ran deep, but that didn’t stop her from telling you when you were screwing up, which she did readily and sometimes with some gusto. She loved, respected, and emulated her parents, who met and fell in love in their thirties during the height of World War II. My grandmother’s radical thrift and efficiency, learned from growing up in a tiny community on Waldron Island in Puget Sound and honed by living through the Great Depression, passed on undiluted to my mother, who wasted nothing and always wanted to find the best use or the best home for everything in her house. That occasionally resulted in decisions I questioned, usually when searching through the long-expired food in the back of her fridge, but it was absolutely who she was, and she placed as little burden on the world as she possibly could.

For me, I could not begin to catalog everything she taught me and gave me, but I definitely owe her my love of books and of learning. She loved being curious and learning new things, and I was taught from a young age to learn and study and question. She got us to the Ames Public Library at least every couple of weeks to bring back a big stack of books, mine full of sci-fi and fantasy, hers full of mysteries, which is a cherished memory of my childhood. She was skeptical of (though proficient with) computers up to the day she died, and she didn’t understand or really condone my love of video games, at least early on, but as computers and games became more a part of my life’s work and success, she celebrated that with me. It was the books I wrote she liked most of all my achievements, though, particularly my mystery novels. I so enjoyed sharing those with her and hearing her suggestions and joys, and I will miss her love and support so much as I continue to write.

I learned most of what I know, the good parts anyway, about parenting and making a marriage work from Mom and Dad. Their 62-year marriage was full of adventures and challenges and joys and frustrations, but the care with which they raised my brother and me, and their constant respect, conversation, copiloting, and commitment to each other were the very best model, and one I follow to this day and beyond. Mom spent her last sixteen years using a walker and in frequent pain after a serious spinal incident and failed surgery, but she took that on with grace and will, and with frustration and regret, of course, but with very few complaints. Her mind was undimmed with age, and she conducted complicated financial and legal business even in her last years, not to mention critiquing mysteries, TV shows, politicians, and society with sharp wit and a deep understanding.

The picture above is Mom on the occasion of earning her Ph.D. in 1979. It’s one of my favorite pictures of her. How she managed to complete an advanced degree with her two idiot children placing demands on her time and sanity, I don’t really know, but if anybody was going to do it, she could. I’ll love and miss her always.