Obituary for Winnie "John" "John Henry" Kauluwehionalani Rivera
Winnie “John” “John Henry” Kauluwehionalani Rivera passed away on May 16, 2021, a little after the break of dawn. She was at her favorite place in the world, her longtime home in Palolo Valley. As Winnie touched the end of her life, the Hawaiian music played on, and she was encircled all the while by her three children, Duane John Kalani Rivera; Shawn Clarence Rivera; Robin Lee Pohaikealoha Rivera; and her third-eldest grandchild, Keoni Hanalei Rivera. Winnie was 75 years old.
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Winnie was born on November 22, 1945 to Eva Alamaile Kahili Branco, née Ano, and Clarence “Winnie” Gomes Branco, at Queen’s Medical Center in Honolulu, Hawaii. While still in the womb, Winnie’s finger was positioned up near her eye, causing a delicate bruise to form around her eyelid, which can be seen in the first photographs of her as a newborn.
Winnie’s mother, Eva, was half Hawaiian, a quarter Chinese, and a mixture of Portuguese and English; while her father, Clarence, was half Hawaiian and half Portuguese. Winnie in turn was primarily of Native Hawaiian, Portuguese, and Chinese descent.
Winnie’s first name was originally a nickname her father went by in the 1940s and 50s, but she was known exclusively on her maternal side of the family as John and on her paternal side as John Henry. It was a nickname that, Winnie said, came out of a family pa’ina celebrating her birth in which her father (perhaps a little tipsy) and having previously expected the baby to be a boy, raised his glass and toasted: “To John Henry!”
And so from that moment on, the name attached itself, and for the rest of her life, Winnie, to her family, was John.
Winnie’s middle name, Kauluwehionalani, was given by her godfather, Manuel “Mano'' Silva, a relative from Winnie’s maternal family. In English, the name is translated to mean: “A beautiful gift from heaven.” In countless ways did this name hold prescience, as Winnie was an indispensable anchor for members in her family, always orienting things right and holding the world steady on an often topsy-turvy sea.
In the first years of her life, Winnie would come to know many of O’ahu’s neighborhoods. She grew up in Aina Haina, Aliamanu, Waimanalo, Kailua, and Waikane, as well as an oblique few years in Fresno, California. Between kindergarten and high school, Winnie attended seven or eight different schools, including an unenthusiastic switch from Kailua High to Kaimuki High, when she left behind very good friends two years deep into her high school education.
Winnie was also taken in for a short time as a young teen by her older step sister, Winona Kaniho, and her husband, Philip Kaniho. Winnie said that she, at the time, loved Winona and Philip as if they were her own parents and was heartbroken when she had to leave them.
But without a doubt, the location of Winnie’s early life that she held closest to her heart (although her Aunty Manu’s house along the Waikane Stream was a noteworthy second), was certainly her maternal grandparents, Victoria Kekukahilihiapoaliilani Ano, née Silva, and John Niliona Ano’s property, which was made up of three parcels they owned along the corner of Hardesty Street and 9th Avenue in Palolo Valley. Winnie visited her grandmother often, and as a child, lived in the converted basement of the main house (also known as the brown house), as well as in the add-on that was built behind the second house they owned next door (known as the white house). Winnie spoke often about her grandmother and the family property, of the boarders who were more like family, of the good times that involved old friends, old family, and numerous aunts and uncles, most of whom, by the time of her recounting, had been already gone for quite some time.
At the age of sixteen, Winnie left her father’s house in Keolu Hills for Palolo Valley to live with her mother and two younger sisters, Donna “Bubbles” Keali’ikukahili Tomlin, née Londeree, and Janet “Cissy” Lee Londeree. Winnie stayed for a while before moving on to live for brief periods here and there between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, before finally settling down in Palolo Valley, where she would put down her roots and remain for the rest of her life.
At the age of eighteen, Winnie shared an apartment for a few months with two of her girlfriends at the time, (one of whom was named Gloria), along the Ala Wai Canal, adjacent to where the Hawaii Convention Center now stands. Just behind the apartment, the young ladies would climb through a hole that had been cut into the chain link fence there, at times with some local boys, to drink and, from time to time, even swim. It was there upon the concrete wall that one of Winnie’s girlfriends introduced her to Jeptha John Eddy, a Portuguese young man who hailed from Papakolea.
Not too long following that introduction, Winnie and Jep were married, and their son, Duane, was on the way. Winnie said that she had liked Jep right off and that when you looked at him, he looked haole, “but when he open his mout, pure local.” The newlyweds lived for a little while on 17th Avenue in Kaimuki, as well as a few months with Winnie’s grandmother, Victoria, and then for a bit with her mother, Eva, before she and Jep moved into an apartment of their own in Palolo. Winnie said the two were “dirt poor” and that their apartment was sparsely furnished, containing just an old punee Jep had found at the dump (the large burn in the middle of it had been patched up by Jep); a television set; a bed given to them by Winnie’s grandmother, Victoria; and a circular bamboo chair. Winnie worked at Crown Drive Inn in Kaimuki at the time, while Jep worked as a trash collector. She’d work during the day while Jep worked overnight, and each took their turn to care for their young son. But the marriage lasted just a few years and the two eventually grew apart. In 1967, Winnie and Jep separated, and Winnie kept Duane with her to raise. By the time the divorce was finalized, Winnie and Jep had been separated for some time, but Winnie said that they did not bother to make it legal until Jep was ready to remarry.
Winnie would go on to remarry as well, in 1969, this time to George Rivera, Sr.
Before they met, George was Winnie’s neighbor across the way in Palolo. He was Puerto Rican and had come over to O’ahu from his plantation home on Kaua’i while serving as a young adult in the U.S. Army. He was twelve years her senior, and before they got together, George said that he had trimmed the branches from a tree in his yard so that he could have a better view whenever Winnie came home.
When they were married, George formally adopted Duane, and the newlyweds would go on to have two more children: Shawn and Robin Lee. With her second marriage also came two step children from her husband’s previous marriage: two sons, George Rivera, Jr. and Mathew Rivera.
Winnie often said that her marriage to George was rocky straight from the beginning, but after one heard her stories recounting this time in her life, one couldn’t help but feel that, for her, it was not completely without its points of light. Winnie would often muse about how, hanging her children’s clothes in the afternoons, she’d have a good feeling about things, that she had enjoyed caring for her family and keeping the children clean, keeping a tidy house, holding together a regimen for them, and having dinner either ready or about-ready by the time George walked in through the kitchen door every evening. She was a fair cook then, too, always fastidious in her methodology and possessing a natural instinct for flavors and assemblage. It allowed her to improvise a good tripe stew with no experience using the ingredient; to make due with some of the limitations the family had; and to simply liven things up at times with concoctions like Spam baked and dressed in the accoutrements of ham—“Ghetto Ham,” as it was known between her children, and one of the favorites of her daughter, Robin.
Another source of light Winnie had during this time, and throughout her whole life even, was her older sister, Yvonne “Fats” Kauakanihiaumoi Kim Choy. Yvonne predeceased Winnie by two months, and in that short time, described her sister as her best friend and her old “Pahtnah in crime.”
In the old days, it was Fats and John, John and Fats. Dancing to Frankie Lyman and Bill Haley at their grandmother’s house; throwing pa’ina up in Palolo Housing or down at Kuhio Park Terrace; playing penny games of Paiute (Winnie said she could never win at anything against her sister); even being spun right around in Winnie’s Pinto after a truck clipped the back end of the car in Kalihi. The two sisters would also take frequent cruises around the island back then. These trips would inevitably involve a stop somewhere along the way at one of the local joints they liked, sometimes in Kalihi, sometimes in Haleiwa, and many times with the kids—Duane, Shawn, Robin, and Stacy, Yvonne’s youngest—in tow.
Winnie generally did not like diving too deeply into the days when she was still drinking (though she did not drink at all for the last twenty years of her life), but she did enjoy laughing at some of the hyjinx she’d get into back in the day. Like the time Yvonne told Winnie that a man had hit her while they were playing pool, and Winnie said: “I wouldn’t take that s---!” With those words, the bar fell into a melee, and by the time the two sisters were on the other end of it, Winnie’s lip had been split wide open by a man wearing a large ring. “You can still see the scar,” Winnie would say, pointing to her lip, when she told the story.
But in 1978, Winnie’s husband, George, passed away suddenly, and she was left to care for her three children on her own (her stepsons, George, Jr. and Mathew, had by then moved away). George, Sr. left some money behind, which did help support the family for some years, but the thirty-five years spanning from the fifties to the eighties were difficult years filled to the brim with hard living, and not just for Winnie, but for her children as well. And after George died, in many ways, the struggles barrelled on, but Winnie did the very best she could with what she knew at the time, which is all one can expect from a person.
In the late eighties, the money left by George would run out and Winnie had no choice but to rejoin the workforce. By that time, it was just her and her son, Shawn, at home, and Winnie was filled with all the trepidation that comes when face-to-face with the unknown: “I was scared to death,” Winnie said, “But you gotta do what you gotta do.”
Despite her fears, Winnie would prove herself to be a good and exceptionally hard worker. As a matter of fact, her daily routine involved setting her alarm clock three hours before work started because she did not like to rush. So if work started at seven in the morning, Winnie would be up at four, always and without exception, despite all of the jobs she ever had being located just a few miles away at most. The only time she ever overslept and missed this three-hour reprieve was when there was a power outage in the middle of the night that caused the clock to reset (but she was still always on time for work itself, somehow managing to get up on her own, albeit a little later than usual). Winnie has never once been officially late—ever.
But Winnie’s morning routine would remain the same for decades; once established, the motions remained solid and rarely ever moved. From the moment she rose out of bed, she would sip on a small cup of coffee (always two-thirds of the way full) and watch the morning news. She was a news maven and often said that she could never imagine not knowing what was going on in this world. After that, she did her hair (the same way for decades), making sure each and every strand laid itself perfectly in place under a ton of hairspray. Occasionally, Winnie would even take a pair of scissors and cut the recalcitrant strands off altogether should they refuse to lie down. Then she would apply a touch of makeup using her Revlon eyebrow pencil and red lipstick. And when about an hour and a half remained, it would be time to depart so that, once at work, she would have time to read the local newspaper and do the daily crossword puzzle.
Because she read the paper daily and had a general curiosity about the world and current events, Winnie managed to accrue an impressive body of knowledge. She was an intelligent woman, not only regarding life and people, but regarding politics, regarding language (she could be a clever wordsmith at times), regarding various cultures of the world, and most particularly regarding trivia: she was pretty good at trivia and enjoyed watching television shows like Jeopardy! and The Cash Cab.
And so, over the span of the second half of her life, Winnie would become a formidable workhorse. Her employment history from the 1980s onward included Windjammer Cruises, where she worked as a dispatcher from the mid-eighties until 1998, when the company folded; then it was a short while at Inoa Tours and Roberts Hawaii each, before settling down at 7-Eleven, where she remained for over five years: “I started there working minimum wage and I left there working minimum wage,” she’d say. Following 7-Eleven, Winnie was hired at Walmart Ke’eaumoku, where she was employed for over fifteen years.
Working as a cashier at Walmart Ke’eaumoku was not easy for her—especially considering her age. It was hard work done for an underwhelming pay. Every few weeks, Winnie would come home from work with tears in her eyes because of some horrible incident that had unraveled. But in this life, one must make a living, and through the physically exhausting work (Ke’eaumoku was always very busy), and through every single trying episode, make a living Winnie did, and she did it very well, right into her seventies, and right up until she fell ill and could work no longer.
But what elevates Winnie to the level of remarkable is not just the daunting difficulties she managed to muddle through in the first part of her life, but also the fact that, in the final stretch of it, in the early 2000s, while working full-time at 7-Eleven, Winnie took in two of her young grandchildren to raise on her own.
At the time, Winnie’s shifts were erratic and inconsistent. She’d sometimes work overnight one day, the afternoon another, and in the early morning after that. There were periods when weeks at a time would go by without a single day off, and it was not that uncommon for her to call her grandsons to say she wouldn’t be coming home that night, that she had to pull a double shift because a colleague didn’t turn up for work.
But through all of it, Winnie would keep a good house; have dinner prepared daily; the laundry would always be washed, hung, and folded; the kitchen sink cleaned; and were she working afternoons, she would cook dinner in the morning for her grandsons to heat up later on, and also made sure to have all the household odds and ends completed before they got home from school, by which time she would already be at work.
This was a time when Winnie would sometimes tell her grandsons that she’d been awake for more than twenty-four hours, or thirty hours, and once or twice, thirty-six hours. I don’t know how she did it seeing as, at the time, she was close to sixty years old. And with her age and her helter-skelter schedule in mind, never did she break any of her routines. Winnie was truly a creature of habit in that way. It didn’t matter if she had gotten just two-to-three hours of sleep that night, the alarm would still be inexorably set three hours early. And on top of that, and despite her constant fatigue, the only time Winnie ever got into bed to sleep during the daytime was if she worked the grave shift later that evening. She never, ever slept during the day just because she was exhausted or to catch up on much needed rest because: “I’m gonna be up all night if I do.” Instead she would settle for nodding off every now and again on the couch in front of the television.
Winnie had an uncanny ability to push herself to extreme limits, and all the while never letting a single plate tumble off its rod: never was dinner unprepared (or pre-prepared) for her grandsons—and never was dinner late when she was home to cook. Never were the clothes left unwashed, unhanged, and unfolded; never did she let the house get too out of the control, always putting the time aside to move the furniture so that she could sweep and mop underneath, being sure to periodically reign untidiness in, and to reign it in well; and never was she unpredictably moody or morose either, somehow forever holding the same, if at times peppery, temperament through it all. The grueling work schedule and homelife did not change her. She managed to be the same person at all times, never letting anything get to her for too long (a truth that would hold even during her battle with health later on).
And although a lot of Winnie’s life at the time revolved around her work, she made sure to never be out of reach to her grandsons, ensuring she was always available by telephone at least. She showed up to all of their band concerts; she flew them on a vacation to the Big Island to visit her son, Shawn; she took her precious respite—her day off—and handed it to them when she took them around the island because she felt that they might be bored; she bought one grandson a piano; she helped pay for the other’s college education and contributed when he went abroad to study in London.
And with all that she did (and never forgetting the age at which she managed to do it), Winnie would still express how, of her whole life taken into a single view, that it was her later years, these years, and all the ones leading straight up to her passing, that were by far her favorite. She often said how she liked her life in older age, as she was independent (no one told her what to do), she was making a living, she was put together, she had stopped people-pleasing, and, just like when her own children were little, she took a genuine pleasure in caring for her grandsons. She was the first to admit that she had made many mistakes raising her own children, at the time being herself young; being naive; being a product of the times and the dysfunctions that tended to come with growing up in 1940s Hawai’i; being a drinker; being painfully insecure; and not knowing how to process the emotional vortices that simply came part-and-parcel with rough living. All of these elements conspired against her children, conspired against herself, and Winnie often said that she lived with guilt every single day of her life for that.
But to compare the two versions of Winnie, the one with her three children, and then the one, years later, with two of her grandchildren, may not be as conducive to making sense of the past as one might initially believe. You would find more truth and perhaps even a glimmer of healthy understanding by knowing that there is not much to be gained when pinning a person at the beginning of life’s spectrum against themselves when they are toward the end of it, if only to scrutinize the differences and wonder, Why? Because it is just one of those things in life that we, as human beings, become different people at different stages of our lives, and as we get on with age, as we accumulate the wisdom that comes with life’s many hard lessons, and as we learn from mistakes made, by the time we are in our sixties, in many ways we are no longer the person we once were in our twenties and thirties. Oftentimes we are, by then, and by the mere aggregate of self-corrections, somebody else entirely. And as similar situations present themselves over the course of a life, always, how one handles it the first time will inevitably differ from how they handle it the last time. Because by the last time, one has learned; one has come to understand better.
So raising her two grandchildren, Winnie had all of her experience wielded in hand and in heart, and once said to her daughter that the reason her style is different with her grandchildren is not because there was something wrong with her own children, but rather that it was her attempt to make up for all of the mistakes that she had made in the past by doing things another way this time around.
And make no mistake, Winnie loved all of her grandchildren, and her great-grandchildren, too, very much. And she spoke about all of them, and often, sharing with anyone who would listen how many she had and where they all lived and what their names were. But to really appreciate Winnie, proximity was vital, particularly due to her busy work life. Winnie was not a writer; she was not one to send cards; it wasn’t in her for any of that. But if you were near, you knew, not so much through words, as Winnie, coming from a different generation, tended to show her love in quiet action rather than through words; but if you were around her, you knew that she loved you because she would always be there for you when it counted. Even when she was at her wits end with you and you asked her to do something she absolutely did not want to do—once you got through listening to “her mouth,” as she would phrase it, always, always, Winnie pulled through for you in the end. Were all of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren on O’ahu, they too would have felt this, without a shadow of a doubt.
When I think about Winnie and when I contemplate her life and what she wanted most from it, I believe that the answer would have been normalcy. That was what Winnie wanted most from life. This feeling reached back to the 1960s when she would sit at the kitchen table with her husband, George, and tell him how all she wanted was to be able to live a normal life without the fighting, the violence, the drinking, and the ever-present waves of chaos that would wash over her, her husband, and her children, one after the other.
And it was only in her later life that the whirlwind’s dust would begin to settle, and normalcy make its way in. It might be how she made all that she did look easy. Because after years of hard living, after years of turmoil, dysfunction, and unhappiness, what she was doing with her grandsons, with her daughter, what she was doing with her work and in the home, was not too bad and not too difficult after all, because compared with all that had come before.
Despite—or perhaps because of—Winnie’s rough life, she possessed an admirable character and a keen conviction for what she believed to be right and wrong; even when things were not black and white and even when the right thing stood hidden far behind an opaque glass, still, somehow, Winnie would know the answer. She had a proclivity for disentangling all of the ambiguities that life tended to give. She knew exactly when to put down the torch of the rationale and to go forward instead using the light of the heart. She taught me that it is a fallacy to believe that the rational thing is always the right thing; that many times, it is instead the loving thing that should triumph. That much Winnie knew; that bit of wisdom she passed on. That alone, forgetting anything and everything else that was good about her, already made Winnie a good person—an emotionally gifted, and truly good person.
On the other hand, Winnie’s difficult life also made her very complex. Just when you thought you had shed light on her, you were quickly snapped back into the darkness by some unexpected revelation, some confusing remark, or some jarring perspective that forever kept you at work, trying to put a finger on who Winnie really was, how she really thought. The fact of the matter is this: Winnie kept a thousand shields positioned phalanx all around her heart. It was what she used for protection over a winding history that was littered all along the way with the pieces of an injured heart. And it’s because of the fact that she kept you on your toes—that she was in certain respects unpredictable (as one could never say with any consistent measure of accuracy that she thought this way, or she thought that way); and for that, Winnie was a tremendously interesting person too, since there would forever be something left to uncover, some theory that one held about her that would need revising.
It was only on the rare occasion that Winnie revealed one of the deeper pieces of herself, though; much of the time, she would keep certain swathes of what lay beneath hidden away. But that is not to say that she was necessarily secretive (at least from my perspective). A lot of the time it was simply that she did not speak about a particular aspect of her life unless she was asked about it, and then she would need to be in a divulgatory mood when she was asked, or else it would be somewhat of an exasperating struggle to get anything from her.
But I think that it was in part due to the things that Winnie didn’t talk about much that would sometimes lead her to be misunderstood, even by those within her own family. With Winnie, a lot of things lacked context and lacked perspective, particularly when it came to why she was the way she was. One usually only got the final product absent of any of the history that would have allowed one to understand why she did the things she did, or why she thought the way she thought. But as the years rolled over and as I grew to understand her more and more, I’d see, by luck and by chance, her side of things. I learned over years and years that everything Winnie did, every rigidity she seemed to have, that each one was germinated from the seed of a good reason. That her idiosyncrasies were almost always reasonable; that they pretty much were the echoes of both the life that she had lived and the experiences that had come clasped together with that particular kind of life. As I grew older, and as life unraveled itself before me in steady measure, I’d come across one thing or another that would cause me to realize: that’s why she does this, or that’s why she’s like that. In those moments, a baffling mystery was finally put under a light and understood. Suddenly an aspect of Winnie made sense. But one needed to stitch the pieces of the puzzle together themselves, to do the work of identifying seemingly disparate parts of the picture and know, somehow, that the two go together—and to do all of this mostly alone since Winnie tended to bend philosophical when it came to the whys of her life.
Through the process, though, I learned that Winnie was incredibly wise. And that it was life that made her that way; that it was an accumulated wisdom that was gathered largely through personal experience. I learned that, in the end, Winnie would usually turn out to be right. Sometimes many years would go by before I’d understand how she’d really been right all along. I learned that Winnie was also always purposive in action and in behavior, that nothing was ever done frivolously or arbitrarily. Rather, every perspective, every supposed rigid corner, or perplexing attitude, was instead a deliberate, rational, and understandable alteration that she had made to herself in response to some bothersome stimulus that had come to her at an earlier time in her life. And many of these alterations, once developed, would stick with her all the way up until she finished up the entire candle of her life.
One of Winnie’s more extraordinary qualities that deserves mentioning, at least in my view, was something very simple, and yet endlessly profound. It was how every time she said she would do something, she did it. Without a single exception, always, if Winnie said she would do it, it got done. She did not like to disappoint; she did not like a sunken promise. She would sometimes tell her grandchildren that she knew the pain of disappointment, and on one singular occasion did she reveal herself regarding this, when brought to the surface one of the deeper pieces of herself and said how, to her, every single promise that someone made to her mattered; that even when it was something as little as “picking the clothes,” to her, in her heart, when in the end it was not done (and this she said as she tapped her chest with her palm): “It’s like they failed me.”
And so Winnie vowed to never let herself make a promise and leave it unfulfilled; to never make a commitment and not see it through; to never say she’d do something, and not do it. She was the most dependable person who ever lived, because she never once made a promise she didn’t keep. When she said she would be there at such-and-such time, she was there. When she said she would do you a favor, the favor was done and it was done promptly. When she said she would take her children or her grandchildren on some excursion, like to the beach, no matter what, she took them; they went (even if it meant sleeping in the car while her grandchildren swam because she was so exhausted from work—something Winnie actually did once).
It’s one of those things you don’t appreciate about someone until you look back at it all piled up together in one heap. To look back and see: Wow. Winnie was there every single time she said she would be; she did everything she ever said she would do for others; she was always, always there when she said she’d be, and even when she didn’t say—still, she was there. This is just one of the many things the family will miss about her, as to find in life someone with that kind of reliability, that kind of dependability, and to have such a deep fidelity to these principles like she had, (she held a perfect record after all), I am convinced I will ever see anything like it again for the rest of my life.
By the time Winnie reached the end of her life, everyone who had come to know her, loved her. She was deeply intelligent (although she did not know it); she was beautiful (although she did not believe it); and she had a preternatural strength that allowed her to overcome all the hardships that would fall before her on life’s path. She would surmount them all with an inspired fortitude, a little bit of irreverence, and a quiet stoicism, particularly in her later life. But perhaps above all of these things, and what I think of the most when I think of Winnie, it was her wide reservoir of understanding and compassion that prevented her from ever casting a harsh net of judgment against anyone (except Donald Trump). Winnie lived a whole lot of life in one lifetime, and she at one time or another occupied every unpleasant angle that there is to occupy, so she knew very well, through her own collected wisdom, that a lot of the time life was messy, it was complicated, that it had a tendency to warp people in different ways. So Winnie seldom made lasting judgments, and never made a grievance bigger than what it was; that in fact, she believed most grievances were manini anyway and better left, with some time and to the best of one’s ability, to the past.
I think that Winnie’s ultimate legacy for this world will be how, despite all the things that life threw at her and threw at her family, somehow still she managed to possess, and then pass on to all three of her children, the wisdom to know that people are complicated because life itself is complicated, and to make room in one’s heart for that complexity; she passed on the power to feel people and be pulled, quite naturally and with an ease, into the shoes of another; to forgive and to just plainly let things go. She passed on her compassion for those who hover at the lower rungs of it all, as well as the wherewithal to know that to put rigid judgments down upon someone else is wrong. And to never, never become mired in condescension, in high makamaka-ness.
And furthermore, Winnie, with the twisting course of her life, has also become a sheer example of how one can pick up the pieces and turn it all around at whatever age, at whatever time. That it is never too late; that it is never too early; that it isn’t always easy, nor will it always seem worth it. In life, there are always bumps in the road no matter what; there will always be ups and there will always be terrible downs, but it is possible for one to learn how to cope with everything that comes. You’d be surprised to learn just the kinds of things you can get through on your own. One need only pursue with no thought to the future, and no thought to the past. To move forward only with the moment. That alone is enough.
At the end of ends, it is this: Winnie passed on to each of her three children, Duane, Shawn, and Robin, a piece of her good heart. In the same way that life is complicated, so too are people, but underneath every intricate veil that life has spread over them, incorporated into them, all of Winnie’s children, I think, carry a part of Winnie’s good heart wrapped warmly inside their own. And so within her children, in a manner of speaking, Winnie continues on. And so too in her grandchildren.
And so for Winnie, this elegy filled all the way over with love. It’s impossible to truly capture the life of a quiet hero such as her in pages so few as this, in words so inadequately chosen as this. But for a good mother, an excellent grandmother, a mighty person, a genuinely good person, and our true hero. A woeful and painful aloha ‘oe to you (we’ll visit you in our minds and in our hearts every day for the rest of our lives). Until we meet again. We love you more than any arrangement of words could ever dream of conveying. And we hope we are making you proud.
(I know in your eyes that, no matter what, we always are).
—
“i carry your heart with me (i carry it in my heart)
i am never without it (anywhere i go you go, my dear;
and whatever is done by me is your doing, my darling)
i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)”
-E. E. Cummings
—
Services:
A celebration of Winnie’s life will be held at the end of May in 2022. More information will become available in the coming months. If you would like to attend, please contact one of Winnie’s children. All family and friends are welcome, as well as anyone who would simply like to be there to lend a hand in sending Winnie off one more time.
Some Random Facts About Winnie:
Winnie’s favorite color was blue; she stood 5 feet 9 inches tall; she enjoyed going to Ala Moana in the 1980s with her son, Shawn, to people watch; her favorite store at the time was J.C. Penney; her favorite movie of all time was the Japanese film, Departures; she was known for her very colorful language; she loved all kinds of music, from country (specifically bluegrass) to soft rock to even a rap song here and there, but her favorite song, at least in later life, I believe, was “Gee Whiz” by Carla Thomas; Winnie saw a number of plays in her life, but her favorite was The Lion King, which she saw four or five times with her grandsons; if she wore earrings, it would be a single pearl on each ear lobe; and if she were to go really formal, she would wear mu’umu’u; she once said that the love of her life was a boy she dated for several months as a young adult whose name was Miner; she could drive a stick shift (badly, in my opinion); she tended to speak her mind and was never afraid to do so, no matter how indelicate or awkward; she loved fish sauce, specifically Patisse; she used to catch green crabs in Waikane with her Aunty Vicky; her first boyfriend was a boy named Henry Pahia; she used to pick limu in Kahala with her Aunty Vicky and Aunty Manu; she also helped care for her Aunty Vicky when she got sick up until she died back in the 1970s; Winnie danced hula as a child; Winnie bore a scar on her right leg, where a large kitchen knife penetrated her calf, going in on one side, and coming out the other; for the last 30 years, Winnie wore her Hawaiian bracelet every day and only rarely ever took it off. It was purchased by her boyfriend at the time, Joseph Soares, and bears his name in Hawaiian: Iokepa. She chose to have it inscribed that way and told him when he protested against the idea that it did not matter to her if they one day broke up–she wanted it anyway.
Predeceased By:
Sister, Yvonne “Fats” Kauakanihiaumoi Kim Choy, December 15, 1941 - March 6, 2021
Survived By:
Sisters:
Janet “Cissy” Lee Londeree
Donna “Bubbles” Keali’ikukahili Tomlin
Children:
Duane John Kalani Rivera
Shawn Clarence Rivera
Robin Lee Pohaikealoha Rivera
Grandchildren:
Joseph Daniel Brocklehurst
Elizabeth “Kawehi” Kaweweheokalani Kamanawa-Kuklenko
Keoni Hanalei Rivera
Duane “Tommy” Thomas Kalani Rivera
Kainoa Ka’ai’aikai Kamanawa
Ikaika Analu Rivera
Kuliakehaulanikaloahoumilua “Kulia” Mukini Kamanawa
Kaliko Damien Rivera
Keahi Agnes Rivera
Great Grandchildren:
Eula Ann Alaka’iana I Kealoha ‘O Ku’u Pu’uwai Lanning III
Elijah Daniel Brocklehurst
Alexander Keli’ikuli Kala Kuklenko-Kamanawa
Poseidon John Kalani Haaheo Hipa Taketa-Kamanawa
Elijah Kahiapo Kamanawa
Kaulanaonamaunakiekie Kamanawa
Levi Kaiolohia Kamanawa
Nikolas Kewalao Kuklenko-Kamanawa
Ailini Mele Tangikina Faleofa
Serenity Healani Kamanawa
Haleaka O’Keliikuli Kamanawa-Faleofa
Lesieli Kilinganoa Faleofa
--
Winnie was born on November 22, 1945 to Eva Alamaile Kahili Branco, née Ano, and Clarence “Winnie” Gomes Branco, at Queen’s Medical Center in Honolulu, Hawaii. While still in the womb, Winnie’s finger was positioned up near her eye, causing a delicate bruise to form around her eyelid, which can be seen in the first photographs of her as a newborn.
Winnie’s mother, Eva, was half Hawaiian, a quarter Chinese, and a mixture of Portuguese and English; while her father, Clarence, was half Hawaiian and half Portuguese. Winnie in turn was primarily of Native Hawaiian, Portuguese, and Chinese descent.
Winnie’s first name was originally a nickname her father went by in the 1940s and 50s, but she was known exclusively on her maternal side of the family as John and on her paternal side as John Henry. It was a nickname that, Winnie said, came out of a family pa’ina celebrating her birth in which her father (perhaps a little tipsy) and having previously expected the baby to be a boy, raised his glass and toasted: “To John Henry!”
And so from that moment on, the name attached itself, and for the rest of her life, Winnie, to her family, was John.
Winnie’s middle name, Kauluwehionalani, was given by her godfather, Manuel “Mano'' Silva, a relative from Winnie’s maternal family. In English, the name is translated to mean: “A beautiful gift from heaven.” In countless ways did this name hold prescience, as Winnie was an indispensable anchor for members in her family, always orienting things right and holding the world steady on an often topsy-turvy sea.
In the first years of her life, Winnie would come to know many of O’ahu’s neighborhoods. She grew up in Aina Haina, Aliamanu, Waimanalo, Kailua, and Waikane, as well as an oblique few years in Fresno, California. Between kindergarten and high school, Winnie attended seven or eight different schools, including an unenthusiastic switch from Kailua High to Kaimuki High, when she left behind very good friends two years deep into her high school education.
Winnie was also taken in for a short time as a young teen by her older step sister, Winona Kaniho, and her husband, Philip Kaniho. Winnie said that she, at the time, loved Winona and Philip as if they were her own parents and was heartbroken when she had to leave them.
But without a doubt, the location of Winnie’s early life that she held closest to her heart (although her Aunty Manu’s house along the Waikane Stream was a noteworthy second), was certainly her maternal grandparents, Victoria Kekukahilihiapoaliilani Ano, née Silva, and John Niliona Ano’s property, which was made up of three parcels they owned along the corner of Hardesty Street and 9th Avenue in Palolo Valley. Winnie visited her grandmother often, and as a child, lived in the converted basement of the main house (also known as the brown house), as well as in the add-on that was built behind the second house they owned next door (known as the white house). Winnie spoke often about her grandmother and the family property, of the boarders who were more like family, of the good times that involved old friends, old family, and numerous aunts and uncles, most of whom, by the time of her recounting, had been already gone for quite some time.
At the age of sixteen, Winnie left her father’s house in Keolu Hills for Palolo Valley to live with her mother and two younger sisters, Donna “Bubbles” Keali’ikukahili Tomlin, née Londeree, and Janet “Cissy” Lee Londeree. Winnie stayed for a while before moving on to live for brief periods here and there between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, before finally settling down in Palolo Valley, where she would put down her roots and remain for the rest of her life.
At the age of eighteen, Winnie shared an apartment for a few months with two of her girlfriends at the time, (one of whom was named Gloria), along the Ala Wai Canal, adjacent to where the Hawaii Convention Center now stands. Just behind the apartment, the young ladies would climb through a hole that had been cut into the chain link fence there, at times with some local boys, to drink and, from time to time, even swim. It was there upon the concrete wall that one of Winnie’s girlfriends introduced her to Jeptha John Eddy, a Portuguese young man who hailed from Papakolea.
Not too long following that introduction, Winnie and Jep were married, and their son, Duane, was on the way. Winnie said that she had liked Jep right off and that when you looked at him, he looked haole, “but when he open his mout, pure local.” The newlyweds lived for a little while on 17th Avenue in Kaimuki, as well as a few months with Winnie’s grandmother, Victoria, and then for a bit with her mother, Eva, before she and Jep moved into an apartment of their own in Palolo. Winnie said the two were “dirt poor” and that their apartment was sparsely furnished, containing just an old punee Jep had found at the dump (the large burn in the middle of it had been patched up by Jep); a television set; a bed given to them by Winnie’s grandmother, Victoria; and a circular bamboo chair. Winnie worked at Crown Drive Inn in Kaimuki at the time, while Jep worked as a trash collector. She’d work during the day while Jep worked overnight, and each took their turn to care for their young son. But the marriage lasted just a few years and the two eventually grew apart. In 1967, Winnie and Jep separated, and Winnie kept Duane with her to raise. By the time the divorce was finalized, Winnie and Jep had been separated for some time, but Winnie said that they did not bother to make it legal until Jep was ready to remarry.
Winnie would go on to remarry as well, in 1969, this time to George Rivera, Sr.
Before they met, George was Winnie’s neighbor across the way in Palolo. He was Puerto Rican and had come over to O’ahu from his plantation home on Kaua’i while serving as a young adult in the U.S. Army. He was twelve years her senior, and before they got together, George said that he had trimmed the branches from a tree in his yard so that he could have a better view whenever Winnie came home.
When they were married, George formally adopted Duane, and the newlyweds would go on to have two more children: Shawn and Robin Lee. With her second marriage also came two step children from her husband’s previous marriage: two sons, George Rivera, Jr. and Mathew Rivera.
Winnie often said that her marriage to George was rocky straight from the beginning, but after one heard her stories recounting this time in her life, one couldn’t help but feel that, for her, it was not completely without its points of light. Winnie would often muse about how, hanging her children’s clothes in the afternoons, she’d have a good feeling about things, that she had enjoyed caring for her family and keeping the children clean, keeping a tidy house, holding together a regimen for them, and having dinner either ready or about-ready by the time George walked in through the kitchen door every evening. She was a fair cook then, too, always fastidious in her methodology and possessing a natural instinct for flavors and assemblage. It allowed her to improvise a good tripe stew with no experience using the ingredient; to make due with some of the limitations the family had; and to simply liven things up at times with concoctions like Spam baked and dressed in the accoutrements of ham—“Ghetto Ham,” as it was known between her children, and one of the favorites of her daughter, Robin.
Another source of light Winnie had during this time, and throughout her whole life even, was her older sister, Yvonne “Fats” Kauakanihiaumoi Kim Choy. Yvonne predeceased Winnie by two months, and in that short time, described her sister as her best friend and her old “Pahtnah in crime.”
In the old days, it was Fats and John, John and Fats. Dancing to Frankie Lyman and Bill Haley at their grandmother’s house; throwing pa’ina up in Palolo Housing or down at Kuhio Park Terrace; playing penny games of Paiute (Winnie said she could never win at anything against her sister); even being spun right around in Winnie’s Pinto after a truck clipped the back end of the car in Kalihi. The two sisters would also take frequent cruises around the island back then. These trips would inevitably involve a stop somewhere along the way at one of the local joints they liked, sometimes in Kalihi, sometimes in Haleiwa, and many times with the kids—Duane, Shawn, Robin, and Stacy, Yvonne’s youngest—in tow.
Winnie generally did not like diving too deeply into the days when she was still drinking (though she did not drink at all for the last twenty years of her life), but she did enjoy laughing at some of the hyjinx she’d get into back in the day. Like the time Yvonne told Winnie that a man had hit her while they were playing pool, and Winnie said: “I wouldn’t take that s---!” With those words, the bar fell into a melee, and by the time the two sisters were on the other end of it, Winnie’s lip had been split wide open by a man wearing a large ring. “You can still see the scar,” Winnie would say, pointing to her lip, when she told the story.
But in 1978, Winnie’s husband, George, passed away suddenly, and she was left to care for her three children on her own (her stepsons, George, Jr. and Mathew, had by then moved away). George, Sr. left some money behind, which did help support the family for some years, but the thirty-five years spanning from the fifties to the eighties were difficult years filled to the brim with hard living, and not just for Winnie, but for her children as well. And after George died, in many ways, the struggles barrelled on, but Winnie did the very best she could with what she knew at the time, which is all one can expect from a person.
In the late eighties, the money left by George would run out and Winnie had no choice but to rejoin the workforce. By that time, it was just her and her son, Shawn, at home, and Winnie was filled with all the trepidation that comes when face-to-face with the unknown: “I was scared to death,” Winnie said, “But you gotta do what you gotta do.”
Despite her fears, Winnie would prove herself to be a good and exceptionally hard worker. As a matter of fact, her daily routine involved setting her alarm clock three hours before work started because she did not like to rush. So if work started at seven in the morning, Winnie would be up at four, always and without exception, despite all of the jobs she ever had being located just a few miles away at most. The only time she ever overslept and missed this three-hour reprieve was when there was a power outage in the middle of the night that caused the clock to reset (but she was still always on time for work itself, somehow managing to get up on her own, albeit a little later than usual). Winnie has never once been officially late—ever.
But Winnie’s morning routine would remain the same for decades; once established, the motions remained solid and rarely ever moved. From the moment she rose out of bed, she would sip on a small cup of coffee (always two-thirds of the way full) and watch the morning news. She was a news maven and often said that she could never imagine not knowing what was going on in this world. After that, she did her hair (the same way for decades), making sure each and every strand laid itself perfectly in place under a ton of hairspray. Occasionally, Winnie would even take a pair of scissors and cut the recalcitrant strands off altogether should they refuse to lie down. Then she would apply a touch of makeup using her Revlon eyebrow pencil and red lipstick. And when about an hour and a half remained, it would be time to depart so that, once at work, she would have time to read the local newspaper and do the daily crossword puzzle.
Because she read the paper daily and had a general curiosity about the world and current events, Winnie managed to accrue an impressive body of knowledge. She was an intelligent woman, not only regarding life and people, but regarding politics, regarding language (she could be a clever wordsmith at times), regarding various cultures of the world, and most particularly regarding trivia: she was pretty good at trivia and enjoyed watching television shows like Jeopardy! and The Cash Cab.
And so, over the span of the second half of her life, Winnie would become a formidable workhorse. Her employment history from the 1980s onward included Windjammer Cruises, where she worked as a dispatcher from the mid-eighties until 1998, when the company folded; then it was a short while at Inoa Tours and Roberts Hawaii each, before settling down at 7-Eleven, where she remained for over five years: “I started there working minimum wage and I left there working minimum wage,” she’d say. Following 7-Eleven, Winnie was hired at Walmart Ke’eaumoku, where she was employed for over fifteen years.
Working as a cashier at Walmart Ke’eaumoku was not easy for her—especially considering her age. It was hard work done for an underwhelming pay. Every few weeks, Winnie would come home from work with tears in her eyes because of some horrible incident that had unraveled. But in this life, one must make a living, and through the physically exhausting work (Ke’eaumoku was always very busy), and through every single trying episode, make a living Winnie did, and she did it very well, right into her seventies, and right up until she fell ill and could work no longer.
But what elevates Winnie to the level of remarkable is not just the daunting difficulties she managed to muddle through in the first part of her life, but also the fact that, in the final stretch of it, in the early 2000s, while working full-time at 7-Eleven, Winnie took in two of her young grandchildren to raise on her own.
At the time, Winnie’s shifts were erratic and inconsistent. She’d sometimes work overnight one day, the afternoon another, and in the early morning after that. There were periods when weeks at a time would go by without a single day off, and it was not that uncommon for her to call her grandsons to say she wouldn’t be coming home that night, that she had to pull a double shift because a colleague didn’t turn up for work.
But through all of it, Winnie would keep a good house; have dinner prepared daily; the laundry would always be washed, hung, and folded; the kitchen sink cleaned; and were she working afternoons, she would cook dinner in the morning for her grandsons to heat up later on, and also made sure to have all the household odds and ends completed before they got home from school, by which time she would already be at work.
This was a time when Winnie would sometimes tell her grandsons that she’d been awake for more than twenty-four hours, or thirty hours, and once or twice, thirty-six hours. I don’t know how she did it seeing as, at the time, she was close to sixty years old. And with her age and her helter-skelter schedule in mind, never did she break any of her routines. Winnie was truly a creature of habit in that way. It didn’t matter if she had gotten just two-to-three hours of sleep that night, the alarm would still be inexorably set three hours early. And on top of that, and despite her constant fatigue, the only time Winnie ever got into bed to sleep during the daytime was if she worked the grave shift later that evening. She never, ever slept during the day just because she was exhausted or to catch up on much needed rest because: “I’m gonna be up all night if I do.” Instead she would settle for nodding off every now and again on the couch in front of the television.
Winnie had an uncanny ability to push herself to extreme limits, and all the while never letting a single plate tumble off its rod: never was dinner unprepared (or pre-prepared) for her grandsons—and never was dinner late when she was home to cook. Never were the clothes left unwashed, unhanged, and unfolded; never did she let the house get too out of the control, always putting the time aside to move the furniture so that she could sweep and mop underneath, being sure to periodically reign untidiness in, and to reign it in well; and never was she unpredictably moody or morose either, somehow forever holding the same, if at times peppery, temperament through it all. The grueling work schedule and homelife did not change her. She managed to be the same person at all times, never letting anything get to her for too long (a truth that would hold even during her battle with health later on).
And although a lot of Winnie’s life at the time revolved around her work, she made sure to never be out of reach to her grandsons, ensuring she was always available by telephone at least. She showed up to all of their band concerts; she flew them on a vacation to the Big Island to visit her son, Shawn; she took her precious respite—her day off—and handed it to them when she took them around the island because she felt that they might be bored; she bought one grandson a piano; she helped pay for the other’s college education and contributed when he went abroad to study in London.
And with all that she did (and never forgetting the age at which she managed to do it), Winnie would still express how, of her whole life taken into a single view, that it was her later years, these years, and all the ones leading straight up to her passing, that were by far her favorite. She often said how she liked her life in older age, as she was independent (no one told her what to do), she was making a living, she was put together, she had stopped people-pleasing, and, just like when her own children were little, she took a genuine pleasure in caring for her grandsons. She was the first to admit that she had made many mistakes raising her own children, at the time being herself young; being naive; being a product of the times and the dysfunctions that tended to come with growing up in 1940s Hawai’i; being a drinker; being painfully insecure; and not knowing how to process the emotional vortices that simply came part-and-parcel with rough living. All of these elements conspired against her children, conspired against herself, and Winnie often said that she lived with guilt every single day of her life for that.
But to compare the two versions of Winnie, the one with her three children, and then the one, years later, with two of her grandchildren, may not be as conducive to making sense of the past as one might initially believe. You would find more truth and perhaps even a glimmer of healthy understanding by knowing that there is not much to be gained when pinning a person at the beginning of life’s spectrum against themselves when they are toward the end of it, if only to scrutinize the differences and wonder, Why? Because it is just one of those things in life that we, as human beings, become different people at different stages of our lives, and as we get on with age, as we accumulate the wisdom that comes with life’s many hard lessons, and as we learn from mistakes made, by the time we are in our sixties, in many ways we are no longer the person we once were in our twenties and thirties. Oftentimes we are, by then, and by the mere aggregate of self-corrections, somebody else entirely. And as similar situations present themselves over the course of a life, always, how one handles it the first time will inevitably differ from how they handle it the last time. Because by the last time, one has learned; one has come to understand better.
So raising her two grandchildren, Winnie had all of her experience wielded in hand and in heart, and once said to her daughter that the reason her style is different with her grandchildren is not because there was something wrong with her own children, but rather that it was her attempt to make up for all of the mistakes that she had made in the past by doing things another way this time around.
And make no mistake, Winnie loved all of her grandchildren, and her great-grandchildren, too, very much. And she spoke about all of them, and often, sharing with anyone who would listen how many she had and where they all lived and what their names were. But to really appreciate Winnie, proximity was vital, particularly due to her busy work life. Winnie was not a writer; she was not one to send cards; it wasn’t in her for any of that. But if you were near, you knew, not so much through words, as Winnie, coming from a different generation, tended to show her love in quiet action rather than through words; but if you were around her, you knew that she loved you because she would always be there for you when it counted. Even when she was at her wits end with you and you asked her to do something she absolutely did not want to do—once you got through listening to “her mouth,” as she would phrase it, always, always, Winnie pulled through for you in the end. Were all of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren on O’ahu, they too would have felt this, without a shadow of a doubt.
When I think about Winnie and when I contemplate her life and what she wanted most from it, I believe that the answer would have been normalcy. That was what Winnie wanted most from life. This feeling reached back to the 1960s when she would sit at the kitchen table with her husband, George, and tell him how all she wanted was to be able to live a normal life without the fighting, the violence, the drinking, and the ever-present waves of chaos that would wash over her, her husband, and her children, one after the other.
And it was only in her later life that the whirlwind’s dust would begin to settle, and normalcy make its way in. It might be how she made all that she did look easy. Because after years of hard living, after years of turmoil, dysfunction, and unhappiness, what she was doing with her grandsons, with her daughter, what she was doing with her work and in the home, was not too bad and not too difficult after all, because compared with all that had come before.
Despite—or perhaps because of—Winnie’s rough life, she possessed an admirable character and a keen conviction for what she believed to be right and wrong; even when things were not black and white and even when the right thing stood hidden far behind an opaque glass, still, somehow, Winnie would know the answer. She had a proclivity for disentangling all of the ambiguities that life tended to give. She knew exactly when to put down the torch of the rationale and to go forward instead using the light of the heart. She taught me that it is a fallacy to believe that the rational thing is always the right thing; that many times, it is instead the loving thing that should triumph. That much Winnie knew; that bit of wisdom she passed on. That alone, forgetting anything and everything else that was good about her, already made Winnie a good person—an emotionally gifted, and truly good person.
On the other hand, Winnie’s difficult life also made her very complex. Just when you thought you had shed light on her, you were quickly snapped back into the darkness by some unexpected revelation, some confusing remark, or some jarring perspective that forever kept you at work, trying to put a finger on who Winnie really was, how she really thought. The fact of the matter is this: Winnie kept a thousand shields positioned phalanx all around her heart. It was what she used for protection over a winding history that was littered all along the way with the pieces of an injured heart. And it’s because of the fact that she kept you on your toes—that she was in certain respects unpredictable (as one could never say with any consistent measure of accuracy that she thought this way, or she thought that way); and for that, Winnie was a tremendously interesting person too, since there would forever be something left to uncover, some theory that one held about her that would need revising.
It was only on the rare occasion that Winnie revealed one of the deeper pieces of herself, though; much of the time, she would keep certain swathes of what lay beneath hidden away. But that is not to say that she was necessarily secretive (at least from my perspective). A lot of the time it was simply that she did not speak about a particular aspect of her life unless she was asked about it, and then she would need to be in a divulgatory mood when she was asked, or else it would be somewhat of an exasperating struggle to get anything from her.
But I think that it was in part due to the things that Winnie didn’t talk about much that would sometimes lead her to be misunderstood, even by those within her own family. With Winnie, a lot of things lacked context and lacked perspective, particularly when it came to why she was the way she was. One usually only got the final product absent of any of the history that would have allowed one to understand why she did the things she did, or why she thought the way she thought. But as the years rolled over and as I grew to understand her more and more, I’d see, by luck and by chance, her side of things. I learned over years and years that everything Winnie did, every rigidity she seemed to have, that each one was germinated from the seed of a good reason. That her idiosyncrasies were almost always reasonable; that they pretty much were the echoes of both the life that she had lived and the experiences that had come clasped together with that particular kind of life. As I grew older, and as life unraveled itself before me in steady measure, I’d come across one thing or another that would cause me to realize: that’s why she does this, or that’s why she’s like that. In those moments, a baffling mystery was finally put under a light and understood. Suddenly an aspect of Winnie made sense. But one needed to stitch the pieces of the puzzle together themselves, to do the work of identifying seemingly disparate parts of the picture and know, somehow, that the two go together—and to do all of this mostly alone since Winnie tended to bend philosophical when it came to the whys of her life.
Through the process, though, I learned that Winnie was incredibly wise. And that it was life that made her that way; that it was an accumulated wisdom that was gathered largely through personal experience. I learned that, in the end, Winnie would usually turn out to be right. Sometimes many years would go by before I’d understand how she’d really been right all along. I learned that Winnie was also always purposive in action and in behavior, that nothing was ever done frivolously or arbitrarily. Rather, every perspective, every supposed rigid corner, or perplexing attitude, was instead a deliberate, rational, and understandable alteration that she had made to herself in response to some bothersome stimulus that had come to her at an earlier time in her life. And many of these alterations, once developed, would stick with her all the way up until she finished up the entire candle of her life.
One of Winnie’s more extraordinary qualities that deserves mentioning, at least in my view, was something very simple, and yet endlessly profound. It was how every time she said she would do something, she did it. Without a single exception, always, if Winnie said she would do it, it got done. She did not like to disappoint; she did not like a sunken promise. She would sometimes tell her grandchildren that she knew the pain of disappointment, and on one singular occasion did she reveal herself regarding this, when brought to the surface one of the deeper pieces of herself and said how, to her, every single promise that someone made to her mattered; that even when it was something as little as “picking the clothes,” to her, in her heart, when in the end it was not done (and this she said as she tapped her chest with her palm): “It’s like they failed me.”
And so Winnie vowed to never let herself make a promise and leave it unfulfilled; to never make a commitment and not see it through; to never say she’d do something, and not do it. She was the most dependable person who ever lived, because she never once made a promise she didn’t keep. When she said she would be there at such-and-such time, she was there. When she said she would do you a favor, the favor was done and it was done promptly. When she said she would take her children or her grandchildren on some excursion, like to the beach, no matter what, she took them; they went (even if it meant sleeping in the car while her grandchildren swam because she was so exhausted from work—something Winnie actually did once).
It’s one of those things you don’t appreciate about someone until you look back at it all piled up together in one heap. To look back and see: Wow. Winnie was there every single time she said she would be; she did everything she ever said she would do for others; she was always, always there when she said she’d be, and even when she didn’t say—still, she was there. This is just one of the many things the family will miss about her, as to find in life someone with that kind of reliability, that kind of dependability, and to have such a deep fidelity to these principles like she had, (she held a perfect record after all), I am convinced I will ever see anything like it again for the rest of my life.
By the time Winnie reached the end of her life, everyone who had come to know her, loved her. She was deeply intelligent (although she did not know it); she was beautiful (although she did not believe it); and she had a preternatural strength that allowed her to overcome all the hardships that would fall before her on life’s path. She would surmount them all with an inspired fortitude, a little bit of irreverence, and a quiet stoicism, particularly in her later life. But perhaps above all of these things, and what I think of the most when I think of Winnie, it was her wide reservoir of understanding and compassion that prevented her from ever casting a harsh net of judgment against anyone (except Donald Trump). Winnie lived a whole lot of life in one lifetime, and she at one time or another occupied every unpleasant angle that there is to occupy, so she knew very well, through her own collected wisdom, that a lot of the time life was messy, it was complicated, that it had a tendency to warp people in different ways. So Winnie seldom made lasting judgments, and never made a grievance bigger than what it was; that in fact, she believed most grievances were manini anyway and better left, with some time and to the best of one’s ability, to the past.
I think that Winnie’s ultimate legacy for this world will be how, despite all the things that life threw at her and threw at her family, somehow still she managed to possess, and then pass on to all three of her children, the wisdom to know that people are complicated because life itself is complicated, and to make room in one’s heart for that complexity; she passed on the power to feel people and be pulled, quite naturally and with an ease, into the shoes of another; to forgive and to just plainly let things go. She passed on her compassion for those who hover at the lower rungs of it all, as well as the wherewithal to know that to put rigid judgments down upon someone else is wrong. And to never, never become mired in condescension, in high makamaka-ness.
And furthermore, Winnie, with the twisting course of her life, has also become a sheer example of how one can pick up the pieces and turn it all around at whatever age, at whatever time. That it is never too late; that it is never too early; that it isn’t always easy, nor will it always seem worth it. In life, there are always bumps in the road no matter what; there will always be ups and there will always be terrible downs, but it is possible for one to learn how to cope with everything that comes. You’d be surprised to learn just the kinds of things you can get through on your own. One need only pursue with no thought to the future, and no thought to the past. To move forward only with the moment. That alone is enough.
At the end of ends, it is this: Winnie passed on to each of her three children, Duane, Shawn, and Robin, a piece of her good heart. In the same way that life is complicated, so too are people, but underneath every intricate veil that life has spread over them, incorporated into them, all of Winnie’s children, I think, carry a part of Winnie’s good heart wrapped warmly inside their own. And so within her children, in a manner of speaking, Winnie continues on. And so too in her grandchildren.
And so for Winnie, this elegy filled all the way over with love. It’s impossible to truly capture the life of a quiet hero such as her in pages so few as this, in words so inadequately chosen as this. But for a good mother, an excellent grandmother, a mighty person, a genuinely good person, and our true hero. A woeful and painful aloha ‘oe to you (we’ll visit you in our minds and in our hearts every day for the rest of our lives). Until we meet again. We love you more than any arrangement of words could ever dream of conveying. And we hope we are making you proud.
(I know in your eyes that, no matter what, we always are).
—
“i carry your heart with me (i carry it in my heart)
i am never without it (anywhere i go you go, my dear;
and whatever is done by me is your doing, my darling)
i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)”
-E. E. Cummings
—
Services:
A celebration of Winnie’s life will be held at the end of May in 2022. More information will become available in the coming months. If you would like to attend, please contact one of Winnie’s children. All family and friends are welcome, as well as anyone who would simply like to be there to lend a hand in sending Winnie off one more time.
Some Random Facts About Winnie:
Winnie’s favorite color was blue; she stood 5 feet 9 inches tall; she enjoyed going to Ala Moana in the 1980s with her son, Shawn, to people watch; her favorite store at the time was J.C. Penney; her favorite movie of all time was the Japanese film, Departures; she was known for her very colorful language; she loved all kinds of music, from country (specifically bluegrass) to soft rock to even a rap song here and there, but her favorite song, at least in later life, I believe, was “Gee Whiz” by Carla Thomas; Winnie saw a number of plays in her life, but her favorite was The Lion King, which she saw four or five times with her grandsons; if she wore earrings, it would be a single pearl on each ear lobe; and if she were to go really formal, she would wear mu’umu’u; she once said that the love of her life was a boy she dated for several months as a young adult whose name was Miner; she could drive a stick shift (badly, in my opinion); she tended to speak her mind and was never afraid to do so, no matter how indelicate or awkward; she loved fish sauce, specifically Patisse; she used to catch green crabs in Waikane with her Aunty Vicky; her first boyfriend was a boy named Henry Pahia; she used to pick limu in Kahala with her Aunty Vicky and Aunty Manu; she also helped care for her Aunty Vicky when she got sick up until she died back in the 1970s; Winnie danced hula as a child; Winnie bore a scar on her right leg, where a large kitchen knife penetrated her calf, going in on one side, and coming out the other; for the last 30 years, Winnie wore her Hawaiian bracelet every day and only rarely ever took it off. It was purchased by her boyfriend at the time, Joseph Soares, and bears his name in Hawaiian: Iokepa. She chose to have it inscribed that way and told him when he protested against the idea that it did not matter to her if they one day broke up–she wanted it anyway.
Predeceased By:
Sister, Yvonne “Fats” Kauakanihiaumoi Kim Choy, December 15, 1941 - March 6, 2021
Survived By:
Sisters:
Janet “Cissy” Lee Londeree
Donna “Bubbles” Keali’ikukahili Tomlin
Children:
Duane John Kalani Rivera
Shawn Clarence Rivera
Robin Lee Pohaikealoha Rivera
Grandchildren:
Joseph Daniel Brocklehurst
Elizabeth “Kawehi” Kaweweheokalani Kamanawa-Kuklenko
Keoni Hanalei Rivera
Duane “Tommy” Thomas Kalani Rivera
Kainoa Ka’ai’aikai Kamanawa
Ikaika Analu Rivera
Kuliakehaulanikaloahoumilua “Kulia” Mukini Kamanawa
Kaliko Damien Rivera
Keahi Agnes Rivera
Great Grandchildren:
Eula Ann Alaka’iana I Kealoha ‘O Ku’u Pu’uwai Lanning III
Elijah Daniel Brocklehurst
Alexander Keli’ikuli Kala Kuklenko-Kamanawa
Poseidon John Kalani Haaheo Hipa Taketa-Kamanawa
Elijah Kahiapo Kamanawa
Kaulanaonamaunakiekie Kamanawa
Levi Kaiolohia Kamanawa
Nikolas Kewalao Kuklenko-Kamanawa
Ailini Mele Tangikina Faleofa
Serenity Healani Kamanawa
Haleaka O’Keliikuli Kamanawa-Faleofa
Lesieli Kilinganoa Faleofa