News From Barbaria: Steve Dear (Son Danny's Godfather), Has Written An Extraordinary Remembrance Of His Mom, Dr. Margaret Regan Dear, Who Passed Away Wednesday, July 19, 2023, At The Age Of 91. Requiescat In Pace

Mary Regan Dear, with her husband David

Steve Dear is with Margaret Dear.

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Our mother, Dr. Margaret Regan Dear, passed away in the early hours of Wednesday. She was 91.

Late Tuesday afternoon, I left my office in Eugene, and sat in my car in the parking lot. My brother Dave was beside her at a skilled nursing facility in Danbury, CT. I called him, and he held the phone to her ear. She had been asleep and not responding to him and his wife Karen prior to that moment. Her breathing might have been what doctors call "agonal.” After hearing my voice over the phone speaker, he said, Mom’s eyes opened, one fully, and she smiled and turned her head to find the source of the voice. Dave joined me in telling her of our love. Then, she fell back asleep. It was a four-minute phone call. I am not sure she smiled. But that moment was likely the last interaction she had with human beings. She passed away in the middle of the night. I had a ticket to fly to her that day, but moved it to Saturday after the medical director told us she was eating. I spent a wonderful week with her around her 91st birthday last month.

My mother was our first and longest teacher. Dave, John, Brian, and I were in the front row of her classroom. Class lasted for more than six decades.

As fate would have it, the four of us grew up with no sisters. Attending all-boys schools until college, we did not have a lot of female role models in our lives. Our father had no sisters. Our mother had no sisters. We benefited from two remarkable and loving grandmothers and had several aunts. My brothers and I had one daily role model of what a lady is, what women are capable of, and that was Mom. She was a stellar example. Our mother stood tall. Always.

Mom turned 18 in 1950. Let us remember that up to the 1970s women could not have a credit card, could not serve on a jury in most places, could not open a bank account, could not take maternity leave, and did not have rights in the workplace. Her dream was to be a doctor. Women did not become doctors, she was told.

While a teenage student at St. John’s University, a nun told her that she should follow her dream to become a doctor. “I could ask all these students to write a book review in French,” the nun told her, “And you’re the only one who could sit down right now and do it.”

But it was not to be. So, she practiced medicine and cared for people in other ways. Peggy Regan, RN, completed her studies at St. John’s and St. Vincent’s Hospital School of Nursing, paid for by herself. By her early 20s she was a head nurse at St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York supervising hundreds of nurses. She travelled alone across the city every day.

She had an inner I-beam that was unbendable to any force on Earth. She built her world and her life around that.

In the ‘60s and ‘70s during the Women’s Liberation Movement she lived the consistent example of a woman who stood out and stood up. When I was a child, from my limited perspective I always thought, in terms of the Women’s Liberation Movement — I thought about things like the Women’s Liberation Movement when I was eight — “Mom is liberated.” Liberated by intent, strong, wounded as we all are, resilient. I may not have understood the structures of oppression and injustice back then.

Mom and our loving father, Dave, raised, fed, entertained, admonished, transported to and fro, cared for in the middle of the night, and loved and uplifted four boys all while she earned a Ph.D. in sociology and then became a professor of nursing at Georgetown, then Johns Hopkins, and the National Institutes of Health and then George Mason. Her academic articles on a wide variety of topics related to nursing were published into this century. She was brilliant. And she expected each of us to be brilliant, to shine.

She loved the New York Times crosswords, as do I, but whereas I am lucky if I can struggle through a Sunday crossword and make it through to Thursday, she didn’t waste her time with the Monday through Wednesday. They were too easy. She preferred the Friday and Saturday editions, which I don’t even try.

She was our nurse and nurturer. She nursed our wounds, physical and emotional. But she expected us to do our best. I am the son of a nursing professor and registered nurse, the son-in-law of a registered nurse, and the husband of a doctor. These women have seen it all. Take it from me, it is hard to impress veteran health care providers with injuries and woes. I enjoyed reminding Mom that if one of us would say something like “Mom I broke my finger,” she would attend to the wound or take us to the doctor but the first thing out of her mouth might be, “Oh, why’d you go and do a thing like that for?”

She expected more from us and we are stronger for it. She was a proud Brooklyn girl, the daughter of bank floor workers, proud of her Irish heritage. Like her first-generation Irish parents, she could be… Brooklyn tough.

She taught us how to think for ourselves, to think critically about the world and our place in it. She and Dad taught us we each had responsibilities for our world and community. She taught us to apply our moral and ethical beliefs to our personal lives, and to our places in the community.

She taught us how to be generous. She was a co-founder and ardent proponent of the Nursing Foundation of Maryland, which gives scholarships to nursing students.

Before we would leave her presence, she would say “Come here and give me a kiss.”

She taught us how to have humility, the humility that comes with a devout faith and an ever-curious mind.

She taught us how to tell stories.

She taught us to be anti-racist. One hot summer day in the early 1960s, in a story she only told some of us five decades later, she was coming home from work in her nurse’s uniform and entered a pharmacy in downtown, segregated Elizabeth City, NC. She had just finished drinking a soda when a young Black man sat next to her at the counter. He was, it seemed to her, conducting a sit-in. She was faced with a conundrum: She had finished her soda and was ready to leave when he sat down. But if she got up and left the young man, he and others would think she did not want to sit next to him. She stayed seated next to him for 20 minutes.

She and my father taught us to be aware of our layers of privileges into which we were born.

She received hateful calls from the KKK in the middle of the night in Elizabeth City and threatening anonymous postcards over our father being a fair and decent community leader and newspaper publisher who wanted the best for everyone in his community no matter their skin color. People were upset that the Daily Advance covered local civil rights events and that wedding announcements were not just for white people anymore.

Mom railed against the Vietnam War and the corruption of Richard Nixon. She insisted that if the war continued and her sons faced the draft that she would take us to Canada herself before letting the US military get its hands on us. I loved that! She had our backs.

She taught us to laugh a lot. She showed us the country and the world.

She and Dad taught us about fidelity and love. In the mid-1950s she was the maid of honor at her best friend’s wedding. At the reception, the best man, whom she had not met before, noticed she looked sad. A bridesmaid had taken some of the yellow roses that Peggy had her eyes on. So, the best man went over to the mantelpiece and returned to present her with a huge arrangement of yellow roses. He offered to take her home. She accepted. Their first stop was at his parents’ house in Jersey City, N.J. They were married the next year and stayed married for 57 years of peace and love until Dad passed away in 2014.

She adored her three grandchildren and expressed great pride in them.

She taught us resiliency and service by example. All by herself, alone and physically isolated most days in their home, she cared for our father over the last seven years of his life as he declined with dementia. That’s how she spent her 70s. I don’t know how she did it. Then she lived alone for another five years before moving four years ago. That inner I-beam did not bend.

She taught us to live life with passion. She taught us to celebrate. “Get something nice” was her catchphrase at many of the hundreds of meals she and Dad took us to. In December I took her on her last big excursion before she got COVID weeks later and before the falls that followed. We went to the Tudors exhibit at the Met in Manhattan. By avocation she was a scholar and critic of the history of British royalty. It was a grand day.

She taught us with day-to-day advice. Since I left home for college at 17, Mom and I spoke frequently. For the past three decades, certainly over the past decade, we spoke probably four times a week, often daily. She was my friend and advisor.

Lastly, I am so grateful for having gotten to spend that week with her last month. She was tender and sweet and ended every conversation in the last few months with “I love you.” Those were her last words to me. So many people don’t get to hear that enough from their parents. I got to spend her last moments in sunlight with her. The last hour of my visit with her I witnessed the very last time she struggled and stood up on her own two feet. She taught me about courage and determination to the last.

May we all, in view of life’s uncertainties, live our best lives, and work to build the Beloved Community here and now.

Our teacher has retired. As an emerita professor, she will keep teaching me and my brothers. She will remain in our stricken hearts and growing consciences until our last days, standing tall, alongside and within each of us.

Oh, Mom, thank you!

As you ended thousands of telephone calls and visits, “Goodbye and God bless you!”

~ Steve

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Dr. Dear was preceded in death by her loving husband, David R. Dear, her parents John and Catherine Regan, and a brother, John Regan. She is survived by a brother, George Regan, of Columbia, Md., four sons, David Dear Jr. (Karen) of Danbury, Conn., Fr. John Dear of Calif., Brian Dear (Patricia), Stephen Dear (Janet) of Elmira, Ore., and three grandchildren, Patrick Dear (Christina) of Sunnyvale, Calif., Katherine Dear of Worcester, Mass., and Jennifer Dear of Milford, Pa.

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A visitation will be held at Joseph Gawler’s Sons Funeral Home, Washington, D.C., on Monday, July 24 from 5 to 7 p.m. A Mass in celebration of her life will be held at Our Lady of Mercy Catholic Parish, Potomac, Md. on Tuesday, July 25 at 11 a.m. Burial will take place at Gate of Heaven Cemetery, Silver Spring, Md. on Tuesday, July 25 at 1 p.m. In lieu of flowers, donations may be sent to Pax Christi USA or the Nursing Foundation of Maryland, https://www.nursingfoundationofmaryland.org.