Saturday, October 31, 2026; from Jinny in San Diego, CA to Sally in Taneytown, MD
Dear Sal,
My recollections of how I found out that you’d died are slightly jumbled. I think our brother Bruce phoned me just before dinner time on Saturday, October 3, 2020 to let me know that your dead body had been found inside the Teeter Road farmhouse by a friend the preceding day. This friend, a Jim whom I never got to meet, had been scheduled to give you an acupuncture treatment on the morning of October 2. When you didn’t show up and didn’t respond to repeated texts to your cell phone, he became concerned. Once he had completed his other appointments for the day, he drove out to the farm and found you. You’d apparently been dead for at least several hours by then. I think your son Alex also phoned me later with the news. By then, I’d already heard. I hope I had the presence of mind to thank Alex for letting me know, regardless, and to share condolences. Losing your mother is hard, whatever your relationship and age. (In hindsight, it seems eminently fitting to me that both Mr. Trump and his wife Melania tested positive for covid on October 2, 2020. They announced their results on the social media platform then called “Twitter.” Over the next week or two, many others who’d attended an event with the Trumps just prior to their diagnoses also tested positive.)
As you had wished, your body was put into a simple wooden coffin. A few days after you died, you were buried on a slight rise at your beloved farm. I’m not sure who made the arrangements. I’m glad you also got your wish to be interred at White Rose Farm. When I had a chance to visit, well after the worst of covid in 2025, son Alex had had a small plaque placed at your grave, with your name plus your birth and death years.
Sometime early in 2020, you and I had set up a system to touch base by phone most Sunday evenings. Our calls became more important to both of us once the pandemic hit. You often expressed your frustrations at the way covid had upended or changed so many of your plans. For much of 2018 and 2019, you’d finally been able to make a comfortable living at the farm by adding an Airbnb rental in part of the “new” house on Ruggles Road. That income, along with revenue from renting out much of your acreage to a neighboring farmer and the miscellaneous income you got from special events, paid your minimal bills and the annual taxes with a little left over. You were paying down the mortgage you’d taken out to have the Teeter Road house re-sided and made more weatherproof.
The White Rose Farm Circle non-profit educational group you’d started, helping to spread knowledge of biodynamic farming practices, was coming along nicely. You’d groomed a few members of that circle to help you with the heavier farm chores as you got older. You were fairly regularly holding both free and for-fee workshops on good farming practices and various crafts. In early 2020, if I remember correctly, you were finally thinking about “slowing down” in your farming efforts. Then this pesky virus started its spread.
No Airbnb income. Fewer farm volunteers. Conflicting advice about safety protocols. Shortages of protective equipment. Widespread impacts on food distribution systems and grocery stores. Worsening food insecurity. Instead of slowing down, you switched gears and tried to find ways to ramp up your production and distribution of healthy food. We continued touching base by phone nearly every week through the spring, summer, and early fall. If one of us was going to be unavailable, we’d let the other sister know.
Just before the World Health Organization’s March 11, 2020 declaration of covid as a global pandemic, I’d traveled by train to Richmond to visit an older friend. On the train ride back to Raleigh, I noticed a first masked fellow passenger. In the weeks that followed, I was somewhat surprised at how much got shut down, and how quickly. Just before our library system closed up tight, this bookworm had a chance to check out one more set of books. During the next few weeks, schools closed. Grocery stores posted reductions in opening hours. When I went to our local garden shop to get spring planting supplies, all the checkout clerks were wearing gloves to avoid contact with either patrons or cash register keyboards. Cash was no longer welcome most places—touch-free credit cards were much preferred. Our North Carolina county went on official “lockdown” as of Friday, March 27.
Supplies of wood and of plexiglass dwindled as banks, groceries, hardware stores, and most other small businesses jury-rigged barriers and enclosures to try to separate their employees from contagion. For a while, neighbors and friends disinfected incoming mail and waited several days before touching it. Same with groceries. Restaurants struggled to adapt. Area heaters and semi-enclosed tents for commercial establishments proliferated as the weather got colder in much of the country.
One set of services that benefited from the pandemic were internet and video conferencing platforms. Both of the churches I used to attend fairly regularly in person now had “virtual church” on Sundays. Because their services were recorded, I could “double church” in a way that had been impossible before. (Fairly often, I would listen to both services—by the end of the week, I needed to hear as many encouraging words from a religious perspective as possible.) Holy Week, Easter, and Passover celebrations were nearly all either virtual or outdoors and socially distanced.
It’s hard for me to flesh out in retrospect what you might have been experiencing and feeling as the pandemic and year wore on. Some of our Sunday evening phone calls were fairly upbeat; others found one or both of us ready to crawl into a hole and stay there. The final Sunday I heard from you “in the flesh,” at the end of September, you phoned earlier in the day than was typical. Your voice sounded strained. You mentioned that you hadn’t been feeling well, but assured me that you were getting better. When I asked if I should make arrangements to come stay with you for a while, you gave me a resounding “no.” I can’t say that your death was entirely unexpected.
I doubt my being there would have made a difference, but I can never know for sure. During the weeks after your death, both your neighbor Mary and your local friend Gwen told me that you had looked ill the most recent times they had seen you. Each had urged you to get conventional medical treatment. I realized only later that getting a doctor’s appointment during the pandemic might have been more complicated than normal.
As time goes on, I continue to regret having missed your memorial service, though I am pretty sure you’d have understood. You and I had discussed the 2020 presidential campaign numerous times. We both were convinced that a second term for Donald Trump would be a disaster for the country. The man had little sense of governing as an ongoing relationship between elected officials and their constituents. Had he been able, he would have been an absolute dictator. Many of his role models were autocrats of varying degrees of authority—Jair Bolsinaro of Brazil, Victor Orban of Hungary, Kim Jong Un of North Korea, and the most important of them all, Vladimir Putin of Russia. Trump chafed at any restraints, took sole credit for any successes, and blamed others for any failures. He seemed to think that an infectious and potentially deadly virus could be bullied into submission as easily as some of the members of Congress he’d repeatedly lambasted.
As the 2020 presidential campaign unfolded, our respective seats for this theater of the absurd were in quite different audience sections. I lived in a relatively liberal, relatively well off suburb of Raleigh, North Carolina, where Biden signs were a dime a dozen. You lived in a struggling rural area with an equally large contingent of Trump signs. You were hesitant to discuss politics with your neighbors beyond a few trusted friends. You mostly kept your opinions to yourself. I knew you planned to vote, but that that would be the extent of your 2020 participation. As it turned out, you didn’t get to cast a ballot. When the rest of the family gathered for your memorial service on October 15, I was committed to begin work as an election official for a pivotal general election when poll workers were in great demand and short supply.
I’m glad that both brothers Bruce and Jim V. and their spouses had a chance to attend your service. Sister-in-law Wendy sent me a few pictures. It truly was a glorious autumn day. According to others who were there, about 60 of your family and friends had a chance to come to say good-by at the open-air ceremony. Most remembered your kindnesses and your gardening skill. As the news of your death spread to people I knew, I started to get condolence cards and emails. Maybe the most healing came from fellow Elkridge area resident Mary Brown, who knew the special relationship among siblings: “It isn’t easy losing a sister. You will feel the urge to call her, you will want to share a memory with her.” Mary included a poem, “Ascension,” that she’d found helpful after her sister had died years earlier:
And if I go, while you’re still here,
Know that I live on, vibrating to a different measure—
Behind a thin veil you cannot see through.
You will not see me, so you must have faith. …
And when you need me, just whisper my name in your heart,
…I will be there. (Colleen Hitchcock)
The previous letters composed here have provided me a chance to pretend that you were farm-bound, not traveling or visiting due to pandemic restrictions and the pandemic’s general aftermath, rather than your death. They’ve also given me a chance to gain some perspective on the different paths our lives took while we shared space on this earth, and the paths I’ve followed since you left.
I don’t presume to know what happens to our spirits once our bodies have given out, though I do know that our internalized conversations with loved ones don’t end when death separates us. Even though Dad and Mom have each been gone for over a generation, I still hear their voices occasionally when mulling over a difficult decision. I still want to alert them when having some awesome or awful experience that I think they might have enjoyed or struggled through. The same holds for you.
At the first anniversary of your death, I arranged a telephone counseling session with a good friend who’d transformed her unexpected early widowhood into a profession as a skilled grief counselor. Marion helped me tease out some of the blessings I’d received through our sixty-plus years of sisterhood. In the years since then, I’ve taken some quiet time, either on the anniversary of your death or on your November birthday, to remember who you were to me. Most years, the grief has lessened with the passage of time.
This year, I was surprised and upset that the loss of my “kid sister” again hit me hard. I suspect it had something to do with timing—this is the first year since you died that the anniversary of your death falls on the same day of the week, a Friday, that it did in 2020. We likely will never know for sure what caused your death. Covid certainly played a part, if probably indirectly. The added economic stress, the protracted isolation, the concern that son Alex and others close to you might become infected with the virus, weighed on you.
This year we’re not going through another viral pandemic, at least not that we know about. Our country has resigned from the World Health Organization and reduced its research into public health preparedness. It’s been a while since anyone I know has expressed urgent concern about covid or about the likelihood of another deadly pandemic. Most of us would prefer to pretend covid had never happened. I seem to be one of those who cannot maintain that pretense.
There are efforts at the United Nations to craft a better, more forward-looking pandemic approach, but they’re often mired in mutual distrust and disagreements among higher and lower income countries. According to what online research I could pull up, “On October 12, 2026, the UN General Assembly adopted a political declaration on pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response.” A vast majority of countries (153) supported this non-binding resolution. The United States, along with Israel and Argentina, opposed it. Work to come up with a better approach for pandemic response continues, mostly out of the spotlight.
At this writing, our globe is beset by a whole series of wars. The latest, a U.S. war with Iran, was instigated without Congressional approval by the same president who was in charge when you died. Our weather is becoming increasingly erratic and destructive. As a local friend and walking partner counseled when I pondered the “why” of this year’s grieving, I’d probably been caught in a “grief ambush,” a confluence of factors that triggered a stronger-than-expected response.
The relationship you and I had through life had its ups and downs. What relationship doesn’t? I remember being very jealous of the dimpled darling baby girl who entered our household not long before I turned five and got lots of the attention I’d become used to. I remember being less than thrilled at your request for more attention from me when I was a young teen with a brand new group of girlfriends on Lawyers Hill. It didn’t register with me until much later in life that your own set of elementary school girlfriends had been left behind when we moved from Main Street.
I remember the period after Mom’s death in 2002 as an especially difficult one. I’d been designated executrix of the estate, handling the paperwork (with the aid of an Elkridge lawyer) for divvying up her estate and also dissolving the family real estate corporation. It took several tense years to resolve the needs and wants of four cantankerous heirs while all of us were grieving. We made it through somehow, but the experience was a challenge I hope I will not have to repeat.
The high points are more nourishing to remember— as young girls, picking red raspberries together in Pop-Pop’s berry patch on Main Street (and eating nearly as many as we put into the quart or pint baskets we’d been told to fill to sell to neighbors); much later, coming back to the U.S. from an overseas assignment in Africa on a four week break, partly to participate in your wedding; even later, making the shorter trek from Richmond to Baltimore to be on hand as you gave birth to Alex; finally, having your support as I went through a first at-home week of recovery after breast cancer surgery.
I like to believe that your spirit lives on somewhere, learning and giving. If we live multiple times, you may be readying yourself for a further earthly life, or already experiencing one. I cannot know for certain.
You were a writer as well as a farmer. I’ve saved a few of your “little booklets.” I just read back through “The Farmer Sows the Seed,” published in 2014. You had it printed in large type on half sheets, with a bright yellow construction paper cover, tied with a pretty cloth bow—very “Sally.”
The text was brief, a few hundred words. You talked first about corn kernels, about a thousand-fold increase or more in a good year, from a single seed to double ears of corn. (One winter you had shelled out two ears from an especially fruitful corn plant and counted the seeds one by one.) You mentioned the “three sisters” of many native American gardens—the corn, beans, and squash that mutually support each other. You talked about a neighboring farmer who’d recently died after over fifty years of sowing, tending, and reaping crops. You ended: “May we follow his example and sow the seeds we have been given!” Amen!
At this year’s Samhain, as a pivotal midterm U.S. election approaches, I wish you well. I’ll always miss you. My memories of you will continue to shift as time goes on, as memories of covid further recede, as society shifts, too. As you noted on a promotional t-shirt I still have, White Rose Farm was/is a worthy attempt at “restoring wholeness.” Good work, sis. Please rest well.
Love, Jin
