Margaret “Peggy” (née Mantey) Mann, known to countless friends, colleagues, and hospital patients through her long and proud career as a nurse in Eugene, Oregon, died on May 18, 2024 in San Francisco, California where she had been living with family while she battled cancer and the complications it caused.  Though unfairly too brief, what time we had with Peggy was so special, and she is sorely missed.

 

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Peggy was born in 1945 in western Kansas, and grew up alongside her five siblings in a small house next to the Union Pacific tracks in Sharon Springs.  The mentioning of the railroad is necessary here, as Peggy’s father, Paul John Mantey, worked as a signal maintainer for the rail company, and one does not so much as enter the orbit of a Mantey without hearing an awful lot about life on the railroad.  Besides trains, many of Peggy’s lifelong interests were formed while stomping around in dry, dusty Sharon Springs with her four older brothers--John, Patrick, James, and Phillip--and her one younger sister, Ann.  Peggy's late brother James (Sandra, of Boca Raton, Florida) helped instill in her a deep love of the outdoors, though their version of “nature” in Kansas consisted largely of irrigation ditches and rattlesnake and chigger-infested fields of tall grass.  Her bother Patrick (Gail, of Los Gatos, California) not only introduced her to baseball, which she would follow all her life, but taught her the now largely lost art of keeping manual score of the game.

 

Indoors, Peggy followed her brother Phillip (Katherine, of Bay Village, Ohio) into the school band, taking up the French horn “because other instruments were taken”, something she learned to play happily and quite skillfully.  Peggy’s mother, the late former school teacher Alma Jean (née Quackebush), had her hands full with the brood of six, a load which Peggy tried to add to by regularly bringing home Sharon Spring’s finest—and occasionally mangiest—stray cats.

 

In high school, Peggy fell gravely ill and spent several weeks at a hospital in Denver suffering from what doctor’s would eventually discover was Crohn’s disease.  While lying there in bed, with little to do but read and chat with the medical staff attending her, Peggy did not bother to think much ahead toward college, so much she feared that she would never live that long.  But she did recover from the immediate illness, though the experience was never far from her mind, and when Peggy was later accepted to Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska, she had no doubt about what to study: nursing.

 

By the time Peggy earned her nursing degree, she had had enough of the extreme summers and winters of the Great Plains states, and Peggy looked longingly toward the coasts, eventually forgoing an opportunity to work in New Jersey for one in the San Francisco Bay Area.  As photos of her from the era attest, with her beaming wide smile and crisply starched uniform, Peggy was proud to start her career as a nurse at Oakland Children’s Hospital, and fell in love with the Californian lifestyle.  She made close and enduring friendships with the nurses in her cohort, and for the rest of her life regaled her sons with stories of cruising in her Chevy Malibu up Highway 1 to the Point Reyes National Seashore or over into the city of San Francisco for dim sum and other foods the native Kansan found wildly exotic.

 

It was also in Oakland that Peggy married a physician who was originally from Oregon, and not long after the pair moved to Eugene.  Peggy did not complain much about Oregon’s famously grey skies—being thankful for the Pacific Northwest’s mild climate, relative to western Kansas—and picked up hobbies that took advantage of her natural environment: namely, growing championship dahlias, and bird-watching.  Peggy’s lifelong love of birds and birding was something her sons would come to most firmly identify with their mother.  Those boys, Stephen and Robert, were born in Eugene in the late 1970s, not long before the aforementioned physician exited our story.

 

The 1980s was probably the decade that most defined Peggy Mann—and no, that definition didn’t come from the bright yellow polyester clothes she is wearing in every single photo from this period.  From the early 80s, Peggy really settled into her career as a charge nurse in the pediatric unit at Sacred Heart hospital.  In those halls—which smelled eternally to her youngest son like the precise mixture of French fries and disinfectant—she began so many friendships that endured till her death.  This special group of nurses, many of who would work with her most of their careers, were, in no exaggeration, Peggy’s second family.  She was proud of her nursing team and, as a boss or two would come to test in the twilight of her career, Peggy was unwavering in her loyalty to them.

 

Peggy spent several years working evenings shifts, and because her schedule was so demanding, her sons quickly grew to covet the time they were afforded with their mother.  Waking up early Saturday mornings, just knowing they would later spend the whole day with her (working till midnight meant she slept a bit late, while they have always risen with the sun), gave Stephen and Robert enough joy to make the tough weeks pass with ease.

 

Weekends themselves during this period, and especially the longer summer breaks, proved to be memory factories for the trio.  Peggy loved taking her sons to the Oregon coast to build forts out of driftwood and let the boys swim in the Pacific, regardless of the weather or temperature.  (Coastal trips invariably meant bringing along Magic, the family cat, a creature so singular and enigmatic that he warrants his own 2500-word obituary.  He had his own routine for how to spend his time outdoors and in the small motel where they often stayed in Yachats.)  Peggy packed the family wagon full of camping gear and trucked the boys off to southern Oregon to fight swarms of yellow-jackets along the Umpqua River, or to Sunset Beach near Coos Bay to see which boy could be least helpful setting up the world’s most cumbersome canvas tent.

 

Peggy would not let summer pass without setting forth in the car with the boys to visit her family in Colorado.  While Peggy’s mother was alive, her house served as home base while Peggy and the boys would venture out to daily to spend time with Peggy's siblings, Ann (Gary Bloemker, of Brush, Colorado) and the late John (Erma), who lived at the time in Boulder.  Though they usually saw each other only once a year during these trips, Peggy was particularly close with Ann.  The two (and only) sisters would joke they were each other’s “favorite sister,” though silliness aside, Peggy’s enduring affection for her siblings, nieces and nephews, and the extended family enforced for her sons the notion that family ties need never be limited or defined by geography.

 

As a mom to two spirited young boys, Peggy could be forgiven for evaluating family activities by how much of her sons’ energy they were likely to burn.  Firmly in this category were the years spent at the YMCA and the associated swim-meets, and also the dozens of soccer games, the dreadful early morning paper routes, the tennis lessons, the brief but active foray into ice hockey, and the years and years and years of going to every single Ems game… How did Peggy manage all this?  A day has not passed that her sons have not wondered exactly this.

 

She was not entirely alone, as Peggy took advantage of the close community she joined when enrolling the boys in parochial school, first at O’Hara and then Marist in Eugene.  The decision for Peggy, a single mother, to use her hard-earned and modest nurse’s salary for private school tuition was as monumental as it was natural for her.  Peggy had struggled to obtain her own parents’ blessing when she wanted to go to college, but she never grew preachy about the importance of education; she simply and quietly demonstrated it with her own actions and sacrifice for her sons.

 

After so long with her nose to the grindstone, Peggy’s world began to widen considerably as the boys got older, went to college, moved here and there, and entered the work force.  Though it was not her way to say so directly to them, even Peggy’s sons could infer how her pride in them grew as they settled into stable and professional lives.  When she finally started allowing herself more time off of work, Peggy slipped comfortably and eagerly into the role of traveler, using her sons as catalysts for opening up worlds new to her.  Stephen’s wedding in Maui brought Peggy for the first time to Hawaii, and it is fitting that those Pacific islands, which she fell in love with at the first sight of ever-blooming hibiscus and plumeria, were the last great destination she visited before getting sick.

 

With each big trip, Peggy grew a bit more curious, and a bit more adventurous in seeking out the wide world around her.  Robert’s time in Asia prompted her to not only visit Japan and Korea several times (the former of which became, second perhaps only to Hawaii, her favorite destination), but also far-flung places like Mongolia.  There, one July day in 2012, on the hot, wind-swept steppes adjacent the Gobi, stood Sharon Springs’ own Peggy Mann, remarking that Kansas sure had no monopoly on the world’s wide, beautiful vistas--or dust.

 

Friends of Peggy will remember this period in her life particularly well, as she fell into a steady dialogue with so many of them about all her travels.  She loved, for example, talking about when Stephen took her to New Orleans for the NCAA Final Four Championship, a trip which so perfectly brought together three of her favorite things: New Orleans-style fried shrimp, college basketball, and her eldest boy.  She also grew increasingly fond of trips to Europe, and waxed about the magic of the Greek sunshine, the easy-going flow of tapas meal in Spain, or, her European favorite, the evergreen and rolling dells and dales of the United Kingdom.

 

Fittingly for someone who introduced her boys to the game at a young age, golf often served as a reason (or excuse?) for much Mann family travel.  Sometimes these trips featured Peggy relaxing with a good book and a glass of pinot gris while Stephen and Robert chased the little white ball around for a several hours.  But more memorable were the visits to Scotland for the Ryder Cup and, especially, to Georgia when the boys gave Peggy a 70th birthday surprise of a trip to the Masters.

 

Of course, Peggy didn’t just spontaneously up and go on a trip.  No.  In a habit she would pass down in her genes, before any travel commenced, Peggy would plan the living shit out of it.  Flight itineraries were mulled over for months.   Several guidebooks for each destination had to be purchased, dog-eared, and annotated.  And yellow legal pad after yellow legal pad was filled with notes about castles, gardens and ideal bird-watching spots, hotels old colleagues had recommended, and restaurants that Guy Fieri happened to pop into once.  This was how Peggy taught her boys to travel.  Even the master herself was awed by the student once when, in preparation for a big trip to Scotland one year, Stephen pasted in a spreadsheet, along with all the usual travel particulars, an especially complex formula that ensured fair accounting for the various travelers’ different itineraries, group composition, and room sizes at a shared rental property.  God, she was proud of that spreadsheet.

 

But however lovely the trip, Peggy always looked forward to home, and home was always Eugene.  It was not just her friends in Eugene that she would miss during those weeks away—though they remained inseparable from her warm feelings of home—but it was her return to independence.  Peggy had lived for so long by herself that the solitude itself became a comfort to her.  This dynamic became particularly strained when she got sick and had to reckon with unwelcome circumstances that challenged independent life.  Especially when her cancer led to kidney failure, Peggy felt like she had been sentenced to life on dialysis, and grew mournful of the traveler’s life she had happily settled into.

 

Reluctantly at first, and mercifully for all who cared about her, Peggy began to turn to others for help.  Besides her dear friends, she increasingly accepted her family’s help as the years of battling sickness had weakened her physically, and her family was ready.  Peggy always loved to tell people how she had “won the daughter-in-law lottery” with Amber and Hyejin—something her sons certainly wouldn’t contest—and she leaned on these two strong women when she needed them most.  Particularly in her last years, and rather poignantly even in her final few weeks, she enjoyed precious moments with her two daughters-in-law, fittingly over a great bottle of wine, or two.

 

But despite all that she endured in her final years, the story of Peggy is not a solemn one, and that is why we end it here talking about the yang to her illness’s yin, the very embodiment of joy that entered her life precisely at the time her body was starting to turn on her.  Leo and Louis, Peggy’s two and only grandchildren, burst into her life in a profound way.  The two boys were born less than two years’ apart, just as her own sons were, and though their temperaments’ may be something of an inverse of her sons, it was no surprise Peggy saw much of Stephen and Robert in these new incarnates.

 

Peggy's grandsons spent a lot of time with her in Oregon as her health declined.  Leo was her consummate helper, whether acting as a makeshift medical aide, or just opening a bag of Starburst jellybeans (“Lunch!”) for her.  She had more trouble keeping up with Louis, quick as he was though to make her chuckle with his hijinks.  Even when she could no longer move around without considerable pain, Peggy found joy just sitting with her grandsons—though while she actually sat, one of them was usually “climbing the walls,” as she would say.  Particularly after she had abandoned living alone and moved in with them in San Francisco, Peggy would spend quiet afternoons recounting for Leo and Louis her favorite birds, trying to answer why she loved the color yellow, or sharing the mysteries of judging on FoodTV’s Chopped Junior.  She dazzled them with tales of her brother James’ skill at hunting rattlesnakes, and story after story of the many cats who entered her life—the time Tipper was shot by the neighbors with a BB gun (“the stupidest cat I ever had, but the sweetest”); when Stephen and Robert locked Varm in the closest and completely forgot about her; the accident that led poor Mittens to become known as “Hopper”…

 

One day, a couple months before Peggy's death, the boys’ dad overhead Leo and Louis discussing their “Mima”:

 

“Hey, let’s go down to Mima’s room!”

                        “Okay, we can play with her.”

“Yeah, Mima always wants to play with us.”

                        “And no matter what we do, she never gets upset with us!”

 

Peggy’s relationship with Leo and Louis was uncomplicated, but in its essence, was one that summarized what life is all about.  She simply lived for them, and they simply loved her.

 

They miss her now, and so do we all.