One of the best things about moving to New York City was that our apartment had room enough for Mom to visit as much as she wanted. Mom loved New York, and I couldn’t wait for her to join us. But shortly after we moved in, she called with news that would change everything. Something in her throat had been bothering her for a while, and the doctors confirmed her fears: she had esophageal cancer.
Mom was scared but stoic when she delivered the news. I was in a state of disbelief. This was not how I’d imagined the future. I had just started at Planned Parenthood and, selfishly, pictured us together in the city, with Mom fighting alongside me for women’s rights. We had more adventures to take together. Plus, she was such a force in my children’s lives. Things were always bigger, brighter, and funnier when she was around. How could she have cancer? It just didn’t fit.
“We’ll figure this out,” she said.
We quickly discovered that hers was a really tough form of cancer, and she had to decide whether to fight or try to manage it for as long as she could.
My mother hated being sick. To her, it was a sign of personal failure. As much as she had battled her upbringing, there were some ways in which she was absolutely a product of her environment. In Texas the most hallowed attribute, far greater than intelligence or educational achievement, is toughness. In our football-obsessed culture straight out of Friday Night Lights, the greatest praise goes to someone who “plays hurt”—regardless of torn ligaments or broken fingers.
Mom subscribed to that school of thought. I cannot remember a time when any of us kids stayed home from school. It wasn’t because she was a working mother and had to have us out of the house; it was because, no matter what, you were going to suck it up and go, even if you didn’t feel good.
It was a lesson I internalized to a fault. My own kids never missed a day of school unless the teacher called and said I had to come get one of them. I couldn’t shake my mother’s conviction that any acknowledgment of being sick was a sign of weakness.
Of course that philosophy has its drawbacks. One Christmas I was dragging Lily from place to place, rushing to finish shopping for gifts, when she said, “Mom, I really feel sick.”
“We just have this one last stop at the music store. You’ll be fine,” I told her, only to have her throw up all over a gigantic bin of CDs. We haven’t been back to Waterloo Records since.
Mom’s view of sickness as a weakness surely came from her mother, who was strong as an ox and worked as hard as anyone I’ve ever known. Mom used to tell the story of the time she got a call at the governor’s office from one of Nona’s neighbors. “Ann, you are going to have to come get your mother. She’s up on the roof again, cleaning out the gutters. I don’t think that’s safe for an eighty-year-old-woman.” Mom just laughed—there was no way her mother was coming down from that roof until she was good and ready.
My mother walked through fire many times, and, as she liked to say, “the fire lost.” There was no doubt in my mind that she would beat cancer too. After the diagnosis she made the decision to move to Houston for experimental chemotherapy at M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, and in between trips for my new job, I visited her there. We spent the time watching Project Runway, which she found endlessly entertaining, and she laughed uncontrollably as we sat through Blazing Saddles one night.
She admitted during one of those visits that she had suspected she was sick before she went on a long-planned trip to India, but she’d decided not to tell anyone for fear the doctors wouldn’t let her go. When she got home from what would end up being her last adventure, she told me about visiting Varanasi, where Hindus cremate their dead on the banks of the Ganges River. “It was so important, Cecile,” she said. “I have never been anywhere so spiritual.” Clearly the experience had touched her deeply. I realize now that she was thinking about her own mortality.
Getting cancer was the first time Mom acknowledged that there was such a thing as human frailty, and she understood that taking care of herself had to be her full-time job. She approached it with campaign-like determination, and became interested in chi, the life force particularly important in Eastern systems of medical treatment.
When Mom was governor, her friend and partner in everything she did, Jane Hickie, made her a note pad with “Ann Richards: The Problem Lady” emblazoned at the top. That was what Mom used to call herself, since she had an answer for every problem. There were a lot of opinions in the world, but only one correct one: Mom’s. The hardest thing was, she was almost always right. When word spread that she was sick, she received desperate phone calls from people asking for advice, perhaps because subconsciously they realized it could be their last chance to get some Ann Richards wisdom. But after spending much of her life shaking hands with strangers, calling them “honey,” she had finally learned to save her energy for herself. When someone called upon her for her time, she’d say, “Cecile, I’m just not going to do everything everyone wants me to—it’s wasting my chi!” That was as close to self-care as she ever got.
• • •
After months of treatment Mom went home to Austin. In the exit interview, one of her doctors said, “Ann, you’ve been a perfect patient. We feel really good that through radiation we’ve gotten the cancer, and now you can start to recover.” The radiation had made it impossible for her to eat anything for weeks, and she was relying on a feeding tube, which we were taking home. “I need you to get healthy, so we can do the final surgery,” he said. Mom and I just looked at each other—it was impossible to imagine her recovering enough to have surgery.
As we were leaving, I saw Dr. Fan, Mom’s oncologist, who really made an impression on her. Dr. Fan was brilliant, yet Mom was always in her cheese, giving her advice about her life, her decisions, and everything she needed to do. Welcome to the family!
“Thank you, Doctor,” I told her. “You have been so good to Mom.”
“Well, she’s helped me too, given me a lot of advice. Just be sure to let her know I traded in the old car and got a new Prius, just like she told me to.”
My mother died just a few weeks later, in September 2006, at her home, in her own bed, with all of us at her side. She had made her own decisions, right to the end. She knew her own mind and was counting on us kids to respect that, and of course we did.
She’d already picked out a plot in the Texas State Cemetery, under an oak tree. Her gravestone, designed by her friend Robert Smith, is a piece of white marble that looks a whole lot like her Texas bouffant. It’s smooth and welcoming, and Mom always dreamed that people might visit it and leave stones or charms—which they do. (Even after she was gone, Mom had a surprise in store for us all. She had quietly arranged for Bud Shrake, her longtime companion, to be buried in the adjoining burial plot. When he died not long after, his equally unconventional gravestone was placed next to hers, reading, “So far, so bueno.”)
All of Mom’s friends came together to plan her funeral; it was like the old campaign operation sprang up all over again in her apartment. At a small ceremony with family and friends, Lily Tomlin and Anna Deavere Smith spoke, and Nanci Griffith, a favorite singer-songwriter from Austin, sang “Across the Great Divide.” Then came the memorial at the Erwin Center, with well-wishers and presenters including Jessye Norman, Hillary Clinton, and Ron Kirk—people who had been an important part of her life and who would carry the torch going forward.
Mom left us way too early in that she had so much more to give to this world. She set many of us on our path and left us a lot of life lessons. My daughter Lily summed it up best in her speech at Mom’s service: “Every time Mammy saw one of us grandkids, she would say, ‘How’s school?’ And then she would ask, ‘Are you the smartest one in the class?’
“And if we hedged in our reply, she would ask, ‘Well, why not?’
“This might seem a little too demanding, but it wasn’t. Because Mammy had learned the most important lesson of all, and she was teaching it to all of us. That lesson was simple: This is your life. It is the only one you get, so no excuses and no do-overs. If you make a mistake or fail at something, you learn from it, you get over it, and you move on. Your job is to be the very best person you can be, and to never settle for anything less.
“This message was not just given to her children and her grandchildren, but also in countless speeches and one-on-one conversations with thousands of people, many of them young women, across this country. She delivered this message as only she could—with wit, with intensity, but most importantly, by example. Mammy was the very best person she could be every single day.”
The December after Mom died, for the first time in a long time, our family decided to go back to Texas at Christmas. It just felt like the right thing to do. For the previous fifteen years Christmas had been spent on some madcap adventure with Mom, eschewing the presents and eggnog in favor of climbing a pyramid in Guatemala or taking a midnight train from Amsterdam to Paris. We were adrift without her. But after a couple of days in Austin, the thought of sitting around the Christmas tree and wrapping and unwrapping stuff was too much to bear. We spontaneously saddled up and drove out to Big Bend National Park, where Kirk and I had taken our first camping trip many years ago, to raft the Santa Elena Canyon. It wasn’t the best-planned trip, and several minor disasters occurred, not the least of which was locking our keys in the car that contained all our camping and rafting gear. Kirk broke a couple of fingers, and we slept in wool clothes that had been abandoned at the rafting put-in place. But we floated the canyon anyway, something Mom had done decades earlier. We still look at that as one of our more successful adventures—and Mom would have loved it.
To see Mom evolve and change, right up to her very last years, was a gift for me. Plenty of people get more conservative as they get older. She got more radical. During treatment she had a phalanx of doctors, all of whom were from other countries. She would say, “Can you believe these right-wing politicians who want to end immigration? Who in the hell do they think is going to keep them alive when they get old?”
The more years she spent in the fight for LGBTQ rights, civil rights, and so many other issues, the more outspoken she became. That was especially true of women’s rights. Mom saw history repeating itself and was downright furious at the idea that her granddaughters’ generation would have to refight the same battles she’d helped wage.
Once she left elected office, she was very much in demand as a speaker on the campaign trail, and candidates were constantly calling her and asking her to stump for them. After years of helping so many Democrats, she made it absolutely clear: unless you were 100 percent pro-choice, she wouldn’t lift a finger. But if you supported women, she would travel to the ends of the earth for you.
• • •
Near the end of her life, Mom knew she only had a certain amount of time left, and she was determined to spend it fighting as fiercely as she could to leave behind a better world for us all. Before she was going to make a speech, she loved to call and read me parts that she had worked on and was really proud of. She had recently fallen in love with the irreverent words of the Irish American labor activist Mother Jones, and the more outrageous the quote, the better. “Listen to this: ‘I’m not a humanitarian, I’m a hell-raiser!’ ” she read. “Don’t you love that? And how about, ‘Whatever your fight, don’t be ladylike!’ ” Meanwhile I’m thinking, How is that going to go over at the Waldorf-Astoria mental health luncheon? But she didn’t care. One of her mantras was “Ask for forgiveness, not permission.” She firmly believed in the idea that if you aren’t pissing off the powers that be, you aren’t doing your job.
Before she died, Mom decided that one way she could make a lasting difference was to start a girls’ school. She’d had friends who started girls’ schools in New York and California, and she thought, Why not Texas? That’s how, one year later, the Ann Richards School for Young Women Leaders came to be, a public school in Austin with one of the most diverse student bodies in the city. It has been a resounding success; there are now young women scattered all over the country who are graduates of the Ann Richards School. Many of them are the first person in their family to go to college. Every time I go back to visit, I feel it’s the place where Mom’s spirit truly lives.
Over the years I’ve gotten many calls from filmmakers and writers wanting to tell Mom’s story, but one stood out from the rest. The actor Holland Taylor told me she had met Mom years ago, with their mutual friend, the legendary columnist Liz Smith. Holland had become fascinated with Mom and now wanted to write a one-woman play about her life. For the next three years she researched and wrote, and in the process went from being a total stranger to becoming part of our family. Kirk, the kids, and I were in the audience at Lincoln Center to see the opening of Ann, and as one of the producers, Kate Hathaway, told me afterward, “It was like getting a couple of hours back with your mom.” Seven years after her death, Mom’s life story was taking Broadway by storm.
Even now, everywhere I go, I run into people who want to talk about Mom. Many recount how something she did or said changed their lives, how because of her, they decided to travel, run for office, or get involved in a cause they care about. Gruff-looking men will come up to me in airports to say, “I just loved your mother.”
But perhaps the most fitting tribute happened at the Texas capitol, where Mom lay in state for two days before her funeral. Anyone who wanted could come. Bill Clinton was to deliver the eulogy, and while we expected a crowd, we didn’t anticipate that thousands of people would travel from far and wide to say farewell, leaving behind handwritten notes, old campaign buttons, and, in more than one case, an AA chip from someone who had gotten sober because of her. It was a kind of pilgrimage for farmworkers and teachers, for mothers who brought their kids to pay their respects to this iconic woman governor. As I was standing there in the middle of the rotunda that day, a union truck driver from Tennessee walked up and introduced himself. He told me he had gotten his dispatcher to give him a twenty-four-hour leave to drive to Texas to be there. Activists from the disability rights community, who had barricaded themselves in her capitol office on her first night as governor to protest the conditions at the state schools, came to be part of it. They all wanted to share a story. But mainly they wanted me to know that they loved her. That is Mom’s legacy.
Today her portrait hangs in the rotunda in Austin. I love seeing the pictures folks take with Mom, who watches over us. For all she accomplished, and all the people she inspired, she left a lot for the rest of us to do. I know that if she were here, she would be at the barricades with us, standing up for women, for DREAMers, for anyone who needs someone on their side. She’d tell us, This is it—your only life—so whatever the question, the answer is yes. Don’t look back. Don’t hesitate.
Not a day goes by when I don’t miss Mom. Some days I miss her so much I can hardly stand it. It catches me off guard, like the time I came across a video clip from an old interview. “You may go somewhere else and you may make a lot of money,” she said, “but you will never receive the kind of gratification that you receive from looking someone in the eye who says, ‘Thank you for helping make my life better.’ ” She made all of our lives better—those of us who knew and loved her, and countless people she never met.
As activists and troublemakers, that may just be the finest compliment there is.