Category Archives: Obituaries

Many families find themselves unable or unwilling to pay the very high fees to publish obituaries of loved ones in Honolulu’s daily newspaper. They can be published here for free. Just email your text, along with any photos you would like to include to ian(at)iLind.net.

Rev. Bob Nakata 1941-2021

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I read the news of Bob Nakata’s death yesterday in Civil Beat (“Former Hawaii Lawmaker Bob Nakata Dies At 80“).

It wasn’t a surprise.

In January 2019, Larry Kamakawiwoole sent out an email blast with news Bob had suffered a massive stroke the previous November, was suffering from early stage dementia, and was in a Pearl City care home.

Bob’s a trail blazer. He lost his seat for reelection to the State Senate because he took a strong stand against the H3 Freeway coming to the Windward end. He’s been a fighter in and out of the legislature for many years on housing for the less fortunate in Hawai’i. No wonder the Kalama Valley eviction struggle was special to him. Bob told me about his aloha for the Kahalu’u area and Waiahole-Waikane where he was born and raised.

Sadly, Larry himself died less than nine months later.

I hope some budding social historian will do a PhD dissertation on Bob’s life, the struggles he was a part of, and the people he was a voice for.

Doing a quick check through my files, I found two photos of Bob taken nearly 30 years apart.

The top photo of Bob and his wife, Jo-Anna, was taken in about 1980 at a party at the home of Charlie and Pua Hopkins in Kaaawa, just across the street from where we later lived, (we didn’t buy the house and move out there until 1988).

Bob and Jo-Anna Nakata.

Fast forward to April 2009. I ran into Bob on the 3rd floor of the State Capitol as he took a break from his rounds through the hallways and offices of the legislature. He was dressed for lobbying. I honestly don’t remember which issue he was embroiled in during that legislative session, but he was always one of the good guys, a tireless worker for social justice.

In any case, I snapped a few photos. This is my favorite.

Another friend gone: Haunani-Kay Trask (1949-2021)

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Hawaii lost another powerful voice yesterday with the passing of Haunani-Kay Trask.

I met Haunani sometime around 1976 or 1977, not long after she returned to Hawaii. She was finishing a dissertation at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and had stopped in at the small downtown office of the Hawaiian Coalition of Native Claims, the predecessor of the Native Hawaiian Legal Corporation, where I had come by to see its director, Gail Kawaipuna Prejean. We all spent the next several years heavily involved in efforts to stop the Navy’s bombing of the Hawaiian island of Kahoolawe.

When I told my mother of meeting Haunani, she put our meeting in context.

We weren’t related, although sometimes it felt we must have been. My mom, Helen Yonge, and one of Haunani’s aunts, Nina Cooper, were in the same Class of 1931 as boarding students at Kamehameha School for Girls. A small item in the Honolulu Advertiser announcing the graduation of the Kamehameha Class of 1931 reported Cooper was valedictorian, while my mom was senior class president.

They then went through the University of Hawaii together, and were both on the first UH women’s swim team in 1933, when they won the 200 yard relay in the AAU Hawaiian Championship.

lft to right: B. Nicoll, Helen Yonge, G. Cooper, Libana Furtado, and J. Bains-Jordan. “In the AAU Swimming Meet, held this year at the Punahou swimming tank, the women’s relay swimming team…won the 200 yard relay Hawiian Championship race. They received their letters in sthe sport for this win.

Cooper later married Leo Lycurgus, son of “Uncle” George Lycurgus of Volcano House fame. Nina and Leo operated the Hilo Hotel for many years, and it was a regular stop for our family when we traveled to the Big Island back in my small kid days. When my mom died in 2013, I found correspondence she and Nina had exchanged over much of their long lives.

My mother’s Hawaiian ancestors lived in the Hana area, as did Haunani’s maternal family. When Meda and I were first married and returned to Hawaii to enter graduate school, my mother took us on a tour of Maui and Hawaii Island. On Maui, we visited Hana, and made a special visit to the home of another of Haunani’s aunts who, as I recall, lived in the family home with one of her brothers. My main recollection of that visit a half century ago was the sense of awe at the incredible collection of Hawaiiana on display in cabinets around the living room.

So while we weren’t related, we were surrounded by these family ties. Later, when we lived in Kaaawa, Haunani was living in Heeia. Many mornings, we would stop and pick her up, since she and Meda were both heading to the university.

That’s all to say that, at different times and different ways, our lives intersected. I have to admit we clashed at times over silly things. One I can remember vividly was where to have dinner to properly celebrate Meda’s birthday. She thought a “nice” restaurant would be the place, whereas I’m congenitally cheap and literally had trouble imagining spending that much for a single meal. It was, like other similar occasions, a disagreement among friends. That much is for sure.

The oldest trace of Haunani in my records was her article on statewide hearings regarding Kahoolawe, which appeared in Vol. 1, Number 1 of the Aloha Aina Newsletter dated June 1978 (you’ll find it beginning on page 3).

I also found this video excerpt from one of the First Friday public access cable programs she did with David Stannard and her sister, Mililani, this one on the occasion of the publication of her book of essays, “From a Native Daughter.” It can be viewd on the website of ‘Ulu’ulu, The Henry Giugni Moving Image Archive of Hawaii.

Throwback Thursday: Thinking about Ann Keppel

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Ann Keppel was a good friend and mentor who died at home of a heart attack in 2002. She was the director of the Women’s Studies Program at the University of Hawaii when Meda joined the Women’s Studies faculty.

I’m not sure why I got to thinking about Ann and her cats early this morning. That led me back to a set of remarkable reminiscences I had gathered from her friends and colleagues after her death.

I was startled at how much my attempt to capture our experience of Ann still resonates. I’m sharing it here for Throwback Thursday.

I’ll always remember our Friday nights on Ann’s deck overlooking Diamond Head and Waikiki, with wine and good food spread on the table, cats making furtive runs past to test our willingness to share, and Ann pumping us for stories, commentary and arguments until we were as dry as the last bottles of wine. Just inside the door, crisp new books recently arrived from Amazon would be stacked haphazardly amidst the general chaos, already read and now ready to be loaned at the slightest sign of interest.

I don’t know if I’ll cook, she would say in the morning, but by evening the kitchen would be filled with the glorious aroma of some Keppel production. She often seemed so impatient and resistant to prudential matters that I had trouble envisioning her taking the time to cook. But she did, with obvious skill and taste.

We shared a belief that the world can and should be a better place than it’s allowed to be, but Ann added an appreciation of both the broad tides and minute details of history. She had a mind for those details, a passion for them. You could always learn from her, and we did.

She was invariably the first person to call whenever one of my stories made it into print, and usually one of the only people to immediately ask about the juicy unpublished details.

We also shared a love of cats, and watching Ann’s feline interactions was always a joy. She could sweep any of her cats off their feet and clamp them firmly in the crook of her arm while administering wholesale affection. It was a most awkward position for the cats, but they never fussed or complained, having long since learned there was little room for resistance if Ann wanted to fold you into her life.

That was a lesson, I suppose, that we all learned over the years, cats and people alike.

Remembering my mom

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My mother was born Helen Mililani Yonge on May 15, 1914. She died on this day, January 29, in the year 2013. She was just a few months short of her 99th birthday.

I have a lot of pictures of her taken during that long life. I like this snapshot, taken on Kahala Beach somewhere around 1940-41. I’ll let it represent her for today.

She was born in Honolulu, grew up in Waipahu, boarded at Kamehameha School for Girls where she graduated in the Class of 1931, then attended the University of Hawaii at Manoa, earned a degree in Home Economics with a focus on nutrition, taught in the program for most of a decade, then got married and raised my sister and I at a small home my parents bought in Kahala. Near the end of her life, for a couple of years she could claim the title of “Oldest living graduate of Kamehameha.”

She taught me a fundamental lesson when I was probably six or seven years old and following her around the tiny kitchen asking nonstop questions about what she was cooking and how I could do it. Finally she stopped and told me the secret.

“If you can read, you can cook,” she said, introducing me not only to a couple of cookbooks that could be found in a drawer in the kitchen but also to her personal notebook, a small three-ring binder filled with her recipes, mostly typed and then edited with hand written notations based on subsequent experience. It’s a lesson that can be applied to other areas of life as well. If you can read, you can figure it out, you can do it on your own. Good advice!

She had been slowing down physically but remained mentally quite sharp until her final weeks. Around Christmas 2012, she was still keeping meticulous track of all household expenditures. In her papers, I found notes recording the amount spent for stamps to mail a couple of payments and a few holiday cards. Down to the penny spent, in her own hand. She ended up in hospice care in Palolo Valley after a fall in her bedroom. Within a week, she was gone.

On January 24, just four days before she died, I described an experience sitting at her bedside in the hospice house. I can still remember the moment. I suppose that makes it worth sharing.

I spent time at my mother’s bedside mid-day yesterday. One of our cousins had visited earlier and my mom was, as they say, unresponsive. She slept, and when her eyes opened, she didn’t connect. On the positive side, she’s comfortable, clean, and is periodically offered tiny bits of apple sauce and water, although she has mostly been refusing them. Yesterday I bought some poi, and my sister, Bonnie, took it up late in the day.

In hospice, the patient decides. Whether to eat, drink, to prolong life or not. Their choice. These are the few choices one can still make at this stage of life. It’s hard for us, those who can only wait and watch. But it is what it is.

After I had been there for a while, my mom opened her eyes, but they had that vague, cloudy, blank look. She barely responded, if at all, when I held her hand and told her I was there. She drifted in and out, closing her eyes, sleeping, then drifting back, eyes opening.

According to the hospice staff, she hadn’t spoken since arriving there early Monday morning. This was Wednesday.

So I was startled when she suddenly became agitated. Her eyes cleared as she looked across the room, then she unsteadily raised a hand, pointed.

She spoke, the words slowly bursting into the room. She struggled to get them out.

“Wait!”

“Don’t go!”

“Come back!”

Then she sort of relaxed back into the pillows, but her eyes were still bright and clear.

Her right arm was still raised, and this time she pointed to the foot of the bed.

Her voice was pretty clear, stronger than I could possibly have expected.

There was wonder, and loss, perhaps disappointment.

“He was right there,” she said, pointing to the foot of the bed. “Right there.”

She was speaking to herself, but I tried to gently ask who “he” was. It was enough to break up the moment.

She faded, eyes slowly closing, energy spent.

In the weeks before my father died, he referred several times to the people that were waiting for him. One day he asked me who was in the hall waiting to see him. Another time he said they were waiting in the next room.

“I really should go,” he told me, his tone of voice serious.

I don’t know what, or perhaps who, my mother saw. I don’t know if it was all part of a dream, or a glimpse somewhere into a world awaiting her arrival.

Believe not without evidences. But are these hallucinations or evidences? I suppose we’ll never know.