Kathleen Jolley Fox, 1945-2025

[Cross-posted to By Common Consent] 

By the time my youngest brother, Baden, and I arrived at the Spokane Valley Hospital in Washington state on Thursday, November 13, 2025, our mother, Kathleen Jolley Fox, was no longer truly communicating with others. Baden and I, residents of Nevada and Kansas respectively, had the furthest to travel out of our seven other siblings to get to our mother’s bedside. Afterward he and I spoke with each other, wishing that we’d called from the airport that morning, just for the chance to speak with Mom before she began her final decline. But at least we were able to be there with all our brothers and sisters when she passed away, and that was the most important thing.

Like all my siblings, I had time to hold my mother’s hand and listen to her breathing slowly weaken throughout the afternoon. She had still been conscious and speaking with my siblings that morning, following the family conversation on Zoom the previous Wednesday evening, when our mother decided, in agreement with the doctors tending to her, not to pursue another, rather risky surgery, and instead to forego any further curative care. There was no discussion or announcement following that call, but we all independently recognized our need to journey quickly to our old home state of Washington, to be part of the inevitable. But after the pain drugs she was given around mid-morning, she fell into a slow torpor, which continued for more than a day, well into Thursday. I don’t know if she was ever even aware of me while holding her hand, on and off, during those hours. I hope so, but do not know.

When one of her oldest grandchildren, McKenna, a daughter of my brother Stuart, arrived at our deathwatch later on Thursday afternoon, Mom surprisingly rallied enough to say her name. She also, that evening, as discussion was taking place about who would stay in her hospital room overnight, unexpectedly responded to a question, and said that she wanted her second daughter, Marjorie, to stay. And then, very early on Friday morning, as nurses moved our mother to prevent bed sores and check her dressings, she moaned and struggled and pushed back loudly. But other than that, there was no interaction with her children or grandchildren or anyone else around her, nothing that could give Baden and I any reason to hope for a final connection before her end.

Except, actually, for one other interaction, one that stays with me strongly, though it was completely silent. It involved another one of my brothers, Philip, who on Thursday afternoon attempted to give our mother some ice chips, seeing as she hadn’t eaten or drank anything since first thing in the morning. I was standing nearby her bed when this happened, and saw Mom’s reaction. Her eyes were suddenly sharp, shooting daggers at Philip; she tightened her closed mouth, shook her head, and her hand and fingers flailed in opposition, rebuking his efforts. I watched this, and thought: she’s dying, and knows she’s dying; she can feel herself passing away, and wants it, and absolutely does not want anyone, not even a beloved child, to interrupt or prolong the process. What I heard, silently, was very clear: leave me alone; I’m done; let me go.

 **** 

When I was in high school and competed in debate, our tournaments were almost always held on university campuses, and during our tournaments, I would always strive to find the time to visit the college’s bookstore. I loved those stores, and the environment of intellectual advancement and adventure that wandering down their stacks of books enabled me to conjure up. I would pretentiously pick up academic copies of classic texts, imagining the day when I would be taking classes in history and literature and philosophy far beyond that which my high school offered. So it wasn’t surprising that one day, I think in my sophomore year, I came home with a complete copy of Dante’s Divina Commedia (the classic John Ciardi translation). 

What was surprising is that I actually read it, all three volumes, unlike so many books that crowded my shelves and which I probably enjoyed at least as much for being able to run my fingers along them, reading their titles and feeling their pages, as for anything I could learn from their contents. I didn’t purchase them because I had any preternatural interest in late Medieval poetry; actually, I probably bought those volumes solely because of a comic book that made use of Inferno in describing the origin of a particularly diabolical super-villain. Nonetheless, I not only read all the way to the end of the first book, but worked my way through Purgatorio and Paradiso as well–and one part of the latter has never left me. 

In the final two volumes of the Commedia, Dante’s imaginary travelogue through the afterlife, his guide has been Beatrice, his muse. But towards the conclusion of his vision of heaven Beatrice ascends beyond him, and Dante is ushered into the Empyrean, wherein dwells God Himself. Dante’s eyes are enabled to behold a beatific vision: a realm of pure light and pure love, wherein all the angels and saints and saved are arrayed, outward and endlessly and all around, like petals of a glorious, cosmic, celestial rose. All is fulfilled; all is in a state of perfection. And of those within this state of celestial grace, Dante writes:

There is a light above, which makes / Visible the Creator unto every creature / Who only in beholding Him has peace (Paradiso, canto 30, lines 100-102) 

It’s difficult to figure out exactly why this invocation of divine peace has stayed with me for so long. Much of it, surely, is tied up in the many complicated ways I have, over the decades, tried to situate my own sense of God's creation and purposes within my own spiritual experiences, my membership in the Mormon church, my always-evolving understandings of scripture. But at least part of the reason it has stayed with me, I’m certain, is Mom. 

**** 

Ours was a very patriarchal family, though mostly in a default rather than an intentional manner. There were seven boys and two girls in the Fox family, and our father, James Russell “Jim” Fox, was charismatic and commanding, though not someone who strove to be comprehensively involved in the lives of his children. So long as our basic behavioral choices (church-attending, tithe-paying, only-other-members-dating, etc.) reflected his and Kathleen’s deep commitment to the LDS Church–and almost without exception, our choices did–perfect obedience and perfect harmony were not something Dad expended a great deal of consistent time or energy attempting to achieve. Predictably, especially when one adds the variables of being raised in the 1970s and 1980s on farms that had plenty of open pasture and thick woods and multiple mostly empty old buildings to wander around, hide, and plot revenge in, ours was a family of young men (and, occasionally, our sisters as well) who were regularly shouting at, fighting with, and sometimes bleeding on each other.

Mom did not deal well with all this chaos, though some years were better than others. She loved her children absolutely; she had nine, she said many times, and would have had more if her health had allowed, because she was always curious about, delighted by, and genuinely in love with whatever the next one would look like, and how she or he would turn out. But the constant craziness and near-constant contention of her children as we grew up was absolutely wearying to her, and her own inability to respond to it correctly, at least in her mind–to keep the house clean, to keep the children orderly, to keep herself presentable, and so forth–filled her with frustration. (She would reminisce with me occasionally in later years about how she would go into my bedroom while I was growing up, and just sit quietly on my bed, soaking up the calm environment created by her–then and still–somewhat obsessively neat-freak son.)

In retrospect, perhaps one of the ways she sought to balance out the weariness and frustration was with snark. It was so common for her to follow her husband’s lead, to stay silent when he spoke, that the times when she would issue a joke or reproach or a sarcastic correction would always come as a surprise, which only added to their sharpness. Kathleen absolutely had passions and interests and opinions that went far beyond the patriarchal, mid-20th-century conservative Mormon world that she committed herself too and firmly identified with; I hope that for most of her married life, those other aspects of her personality provided an alternative to her always feeling the full weight of every choice, every mistake, every argument, every conflict that her children were drawn into (or just came up with on their own). The fact that she was, by and large, during the busiest years of our growing up, to my memory mostly a happy and kind and laughing woman, gives me reason to believe that was so. Still, the weariness and the sadness that attended it was undeniable as well.

Once, during a family meeting wherein Dad was attempting to lead his rambunctious brood in developing a family motto, Mom, who had written “Love One Another” on a pad of paper where she was keeping track of suggestions, scratched it out as the family meeting descended into another one of its all-too-frequent bouts of chaos, and wrote “Hate One Another” in its place. (This was not an unique instance; throughout her life, Mom kept lists, writing down inspirational quotes, or conversely, recording of how sad life with the Foxes, with all the sometimes disappointing–to her, that is–choices they made, could be.) Add to this her long struggles with health issues, with being overweight, with what would almost certainly be diagnosed today as depression, and the fact that some of her children’s strongest memories of her are not necessarily her reliable expressions of love–which were never doubted–but rather those moments when her joy in her family was broken up by mistakes, apologies, weeping, or (more commonly as the years went by) retreats to quiet seclusion in her bedroom with her movies–is no surprise.

At one point our father became a passionate fan of Taylor Hartman’s thoroughly unscientific “Color Code” personality assessment; he and Kathleen took the test, and all the older children did as well. Dad was, unsurprisingly, a strong Red: assertive, inventive, a born leader. I asked Mom what the test revealed her to be. I was expecting that she’d be a Blue, the empathetic, maternal care-giver. I was surprised–though as the years went by I no longer was–by her answer: White. “Peace,” she said to me on the phone. “I just want peace; I just want quiet; I just want everyone to get along and leave each other alone.” That’s something I don’t think I could have seen in my mother when I first read the lines above from the Commedia as a teen-ager, but it haunts me now. 

 **** 

Whether my father was made by the cultural and doctrine of Mormonism, or just found it a perfect fit for the person he was, is an unanswerable question. What is undeniable is that the milieu Dad created for himself, imagined for himself, worked and prayed and served for in connection with himself, was Mormon to the core. He was LDS American busy-ness personified: always setting goals, making plans, accepting callings, starting projects, borrowing money, giving counsel, shifting funds, giving lessons, bringing lawsuits, preaching sermons, being sued, opening accounts, leading prayers, arranging vacations, making deals, and more; the idea of our father fully at rest is almost inconceivable. The words of Joseph Smith presented as a revelation in Doctrine & Covenants 130:2–“that same sociality which exists among us here will exist among us there,” presumably referring to the activity which will exist in the heavenly afterlife–has long since become a part of Mormon folklore, and it is a way of understanding eternal activity, engagement, and progress that fits our experience of Dad perfectly.

Personally, I find that promise of Smith’s an existential horror, and thankfully impossible to imagine actually being true. The “sociality” of human existence, the phenomenology of our daily-ness, is wholly defined by the banalities of our fallen, broken character, and our embodied limitations: unexpected delays, embarrassing remarks, mislaid plans, accidental lies, frustrated schedules, false presuppositions, misunderstood comments, unforced errors, harmful distractions, mistaken identities, rude fantasies, failed witticisms, and the thousand other mix-ups and indiscretions that give rise to the hidden confusion, quiet annoyance, unarticulated resentments, and general consternation that everyone experiences. Not everyone experiences them in the same way, of course: some they drive to distraction, or even despair, while others find ways to manage them, transcend them, or just keep themselves so busy they barely know they are there. But the way they wear us down is, I think, inextricable from being human.

To imagine a world where the Savior’s grace burns away all our enervating imperfections and quotidian foolishness would have to involve, I believe, imagining a world without business hierarchies, social obligations, scheduled meetings, family relations, civic arrangements, first impressions, and all the rest; whatever kind of “sociality” it would have, it certainly couldn’t be anything like what the work and weariness of the mortal world has prepared us for. Some of those who fully embrace the folkloric (and I think maddening) implications of D&C 130:2 come around, in my observation, to implicitly agreeing with the above sentence, and therefore choose to deny the burning promise of salvific transformation entirely. God’s power, to their mind, becomes merely the power of a smart mechanic, a talented artisan, a genial human resource operator: heaven is just a continuation of what we already have on earth, and the eternities are nothing but management, only management, all the way down (or rather, up). To the skilled who have spent their lives joyfully cracking their knuckles and matching their wits and waking up early and leaning in and trying again in the midst of the ever-busy, never-ending machine that is the universe God created, this might not appear problematically unChristian (though I think it actually very much is). But regardless, maybe, just maybe, if one can untangle oneself from Mormon folklore, one might be able to imagine the eternities instead as being a place without the temporality of interaction at all. Maybe it could be a place of being seen, and loved, fully and finally and eternally, with no further obligations entailed and no continuing actions required. Maybe it could be like a beautiful rose, an endless celestial circle of petals full of light. Maybe, just maybe, it could be a place of rest, of peace.

**** 

I’m sure all these memories have been intensified and shaped by Mom’s struggles during the years which followed our father’s entirely unexpected and profoundly distressing death on September 19, 2016. The distress was not because of Dad’s suffering; his death was instantaneous, a random stroke while golfing alone early one morning. (He would routinely wake up very early and head to the golf course to play 18 holes by himself, because partners would slow him down.) The assumption which everyone, including Mom herself, had long held was that Dad would long outlive his wife, and that he would be able to care for her and protect her privacy until her end. With the terrible loss of her husband of 51 years, Mom’s life was upended. In the years that followed, she sometimes enjoyed long stretches of stability and peace on her own at Foxhill, the family home on tall hill overlooking Otis Orchards, WA, which my father had built for the whole family nearly two decades before. But eventually, her ability to take care of herself greatly declined, and her dependence–costly in terms of time, and increasingly complicated in terms of the emotions involved–upon my brother Jesse and my older sister Samatha, the two siblings who still lived in the Spokane area, became unsustainable. Up until the very day we moved our mother into a full-time care facility, she wanted to stay at Foxhill. The changes she faced then were deeply painful, because they meant a change of space, a change of routine, a change in the patterns that she’d fallen into–and Mom, I came to understand only as an adult, had spent her whole life building, for those she loved as well as herself, patterns and expectations that could be relied upon. I can only imagine how difficult their disruption could be.

On my proselyting church mission, I ended up serving for nearly a full year in a South Korean city named Suwon. Mom and Dad came to pick me up at the end of my mission, and we toured around South Korea. On our last night of visiting Suwon, after a church meeting where I was able to introduce my parents to people I had long known and say some goodbyes, I was frustrated, feeling antsy and unsure and unfulfilled. So I sneaked out of our hotel room, and I spent one last night in Suwon, wandering the city. I came back to the hotel believing I’d had the experience I was looking for–and I discovered my parents awake. I can’t remember anything specific about that 3am encounter, except one line as we settled back to sleep: my mother begging me, “Please stay.” It took me years to begin to recognize how confused, frustrated, or terrified my mother must have felt that night, in a country where neither she nor her husband could speak the language, in a hotel room where their connection to the culture around them had left in the middle of the night without a word–and especially since, knowing my father, aware that there was nothing he could do, had probably promptly fallen back asleep after I sneaked out, while Mom waited all through the hours while I was gone.

Perhaps, in the end, our mother was tired of waiting–waiting for her body to finally shut down, waiting for her to be reunited with Jim. She would talk about wanting to die and be with her husband once more casually with her children and grandchildren; while sometimes her time at Guardian Angel Homes enabled her to make new connections and take up new practices, more usually she would fall into ever more sad and slow routines, staying alone in her room, watching movies, separating herself from church, finding even close associations with her children sometimes hurtful and depressing, as her expectations shrunk further and further. Eighty years, after all, is a very long time to live. Perhaps she’d lived enough.

When her health seemed to require yet another trip to the hospital, yet another surgery, yet another set of burdens (this one would have been a colostomy bag, a continued increase in the likelihood of further infections, and likely even more pain), we all could understand her decision. The very last words that I spoke to her that I know she heard, on a Tuesday evening phone call, the day before the end was made clear, were words of trust: “You know your body and spirit better than anyone, Mom–we’ll support whatever you do.” She replied “Thank you,” and kissed me through the phone connection. There she was, thanking me and showing loving appreciation, as though it was me who needed to give her permission to make the most personal decision imaginable–a decision to finally, at last, not focus on the future, not accommodate other people’s plans, not make arrangements and adjustments but to accept the end that would come, and look forward to it gratefully. I doubt she felt these preoccupations that haunt me now, but that doesn’t make them, as I weigh them in my heart, any less true.

**** 

Kathleen Jolley Fox died on Friday, November 14, at 1pm, less than two days after entering the hospital for the final time. By early in the afternoon her breathing had slowed even further, and he face was turning pale. The family decided it was time, and all seven of her sons–all of us Melchizedek priesthood holders as the Mormon faith understands such things–laid our hands upon her body to pray, with my oldest brother, Daniel, giving voice to our desire that she be released from this life. And her waiting ended. I hope, immediately thereafter, she found herself in God’s glorious presence, a petal enveloped in love and light and a timelessness free from any kind of wearying work and waiting. And, since we really can’t know what the afterlife is truly like, I hope there is, somehow, nonetheless some element of Mormon folklore present there as well, so that my father can, as he always did, find joy in making himself weary with organizing, serving, planning, doing. And finally I hope, in that eternity, that when he takes an occasional rest from his work, he can be like a bee landing on a flower petal–because Mom, at rest, would likely rather simply abide attentively in the presence of her eternal partner more than anything else.