Jane Claire Fischer (Reinertsen)

September 16, 1959 - September 17, 2021

Somewhere along the Mississippi River, 1988/1989

My mother Jane passed away unexpectedly on September 17th, 2021.  It was one day after her 62nd birthday.

My mom and I, August 1992

She had been diagnosed with colon cancer just two days previous, and did not know she was so sick.  The cancer caused blood clots to form in her legs, and unfortunately the surgery for this was too much for her body to handle.

Born in Geneva, Illinois, the family moved to Elmhurst, Illinois when she was very young and thus is her hometown.  My grandparents never relocated, so Elmhurst really became the home base for her, and myself as well even though I have only formally lived there for about a year at the age of seven.

While the world has been suffering from the pandemic, an overlapping timeline has seen both of my grandfathers pass away within ten days of each other in July 2020, and this loss is of course even harder.

After my grandmother passed away in February 2014, my grandfather lived on his own for a year or two, but between moderately declining health and having not lived on his own in over half a century, it was clear that he needed some help.  My mother stepped in, and lived with him for six years.  She provided him with the support he needed, making sure he went to all of his doctor’s appointments, saved him quite a few times, and just generally made the last few years of his life as comfortable as possible.  We are a very small family, so support is limited and I was in California most of the time but would return nearly every weekend to see family and help in the ways I could.

Once my grandfather passed, she continued to do the best work possible to ensure that his estate was treated properly.  Never did I think that I would be dealing with this myself anytime soon.  She had spent so much time focusing on my grandfather’s health and then estate that she hadn’t had the screenings which would have caught things much earlier on.  She did go to the dentist three weeks ago though, so the ball had started rolling!

I said something to one of my cousins the other day to the effect of “I’m not Rain Main, but do quite like routines.”  With my weekly travel between Chicago and San Francisco, I found comfort in routines, and those around me probably did too.  These routines of course changed a bit over the years, and especially during the pandemic, but one of the things which never really changed was that on Sundays we would meet around noon for coffee.  Most commonly, she’d send me an iMessage on Sunday morning to make sure I was coming (I always was, unless I forgot to tell her that I went to the airport and was thousands of miles away), and we’d meet at Brewpoint Coffee on Park Avenue in Elmhurst. She’d make the ten minute walk over, I’d drive over, we’d have coffee and sometimes walk around the park, sometimes go and run some errands afterwards (particularly when my grandfather was alive to get supplies for him), and then I’d take her home.

My office in San Francisco is still closed, so I don’t need to fly out west these days.  However, there were a few weekends in late August and early September with particularly bad humidity here in the Chicago area - so bad that you wouldn’t even want to walk a block outside.  With the weather so bad, I ended up flying out to San Francisco a couple weekends in a row to escape it, so I didn’t see my mom for a couple weeks and I got to see some friends.  We kept in touch though, and all seemed to be normal.

Even with a solid routine, schedules may be off by a few minutes. One of the silly things that we would do on Sundays would be that if the other person (usually me) was running late, the first one there would send a picture of their coffee to the other one as a “where are you?” notification.  At 12:15 PM on September 12th, I sent her this photo of my coffee, and she replied saying she was on the back porch.

Iced Americano, September 12

That was a little odd I thought, but the weather was nice, and the back porch at my grandparents house is the best part of the entire house.  It’s an elevated screened porch which my grandfather had an architect draw plans up for way back when, and then built himself.  The perfect place to spend the dog days of summer.  I noticed she’d developed a bit of a belly, and she didn’t want any coffee or anything.  She told me she’d been feeling a bit off for a couple of weeks, and thought it was food poisoning.  After Whole Foods started adding a $10 delivery surcharge, she switched to Amazon Fresh for her small grocery orders and thought that she had bad romaine lettuce or similar.  I asked if she wanted me to take her to the hospital, but she insisted that if she still felt bad in the morning that she’d take herself there.

There wasn’t really any question in my mind about my mom’s health before this, she was very active between yoga (which moved home during the pandemic) and cycling.  Even though they split 25 years ago, my dad would still often tell me he saw this blonde haired woman zipping down the Illinois Prairie Path while he was working on prairie restoration projects.  

In the middle of long ride to Batavia, Illinois, and one of the many post-ride Slurpees enjoyed.

She did take a Lyft to the hospital at noon on Monday, and sat in the emergency room waiting area for a couple of hours watching the People’s Court and Judge Mathis while sending me plenty of photos of the TV.  She was given a room, poked and prodded, and on Tuesday morning they drained 16 pounds of fluid from her belly.  She was so excited, she could see her toes!  At the same time, she insisted that I didn’t need to come to the hospital.  Eventually on Tuesday I convinced her to tell me something she needed that I could bring her (a comb), so I went to Target in the evening and told her I’d be there in the morning with it.  Still more tests and all that, and by the morning she was also asking for dry shampoo.  I didn’t know there was such a thing, but I swung by Target on the way to the hospital and brought all of it to her.

At that point, she was in a normal hospital room and was sitting in the chair, in good spirits and mostly just exhausted from the giant jug of liquid she had to drink before the colonoscopy that evening.  Her potassium levels had been low, and we were talking about how I learned from the film Honey We Shrunk Ourselves that bananas have lots of potassium.  They came to take her off to the colonoscopy around 3 PM, at which point I departed.  I heard from her around 10 PM that it had been no fun at all and the pain had gone to eleven, but they gave her some morphine and it was back around two and she was off to rest for the night.

Thursday was her 62nd birthday, and a hospital is no place to spend a day like that!  When I got to the hospital that morning, I told her that we’d have to have a true belated birthday celebration once she was out, but that I had brought her the one thing I recognized she really needed for her birthday: a ten foot USB to Lightning cable.  She’d only brought the three foot one with her to the hospital, and that is not long enough at all for a hospital room!  Her face lit up from this, and so did her iPhone which had gotten down to 14% battery (Low Power Mode lasts forever, doesn’t it?).  We chatted for quite a while, and I departed after a while to see some family.  Her doctors had ruled out a whole bunch of cancers, and we were told it was colon cancer but treatable with radiation and medicine.  Not something you want to do, but a sigh of relief.

A few hours later, I got a call that things were serious and it would be best if I came to the hospital.  I was there in a few minutes, thankfully not far away.  Her legs had gotten a bit cold, and it was clear that blood clots had developed in both of them as a result of the cancer.  The pain was so bad that they put her under, and I needed to sign consent forms for blood transfusion and the surgery to treat the blood clots.  This surgery started around 10:45 PM and the doctor said it could take up to five hours, so it was quite relieving when they finished around 12:45 AM and brought her to the critical care unit.  They had a bunch of vitals to run, but she seemed stable and she was being given the night to rest before the doctors came back in the morning to figure out the revised plan.  They said she’d probably be awake in the morning, but probably very groggy!  I went home at 1:30 AM for a few hours of sleep, and planned to return around 7:30 AM since the doctors would be there around 8 AM.

Exhausted but head spinning, I fell asleep around 2:45 AM but got a phone call from the hospital at 3:51 AM that she’d lost her pulse but they had brought it back and it had been stable for 20 minutes or so.  Very serious, but I was eight minutes away and they’d call with any updates.  The plan remained in place, I’d go around 7:30 AM.  I tried to sleep a bit more, but there was no chance of that happening, so I just went to take a shower and clear my mind a bit.

Previous to all of this, I knew I was going to be getting up early on September 17th, as it was time to order a new iPhone (I was ordering one for my mom too, of course!)

After being wide awake for three hours, I placed the iPhone order at 7:00 AM on Friday, and just a couple minutes later got a call from the hospital that I needed to come right now.  She had lost her pulse multiple times, and it was returning in diminishing amounts.  I rushed to the hospital, asking them to give me ten minutes.  I turned the corner into her room, with the nurses giving her CPR.  I had to give them permission to stop.  I collapsed on the floor, not ready for any of this.

I think I’ve spent more time on the phone in the last week than I have in the previous… ever.  Those phone calls were the hardest I’ve ever had to make.  I know it wasn’t easy to receive them either.

A memorial, likely via Zoom due to how spread out everyone she knew is, will be held in early October 2021.  An in-person get together will likely be hosted in the Chicago area a bit later.  This page will be updated with more details, or reach out to me for updates.

My only ask to others is to make sure to ensure that you take the precautions recommended by your doctor, and if there are ever problems which you aren’t 100% sure about, go straight to your doctor too.  Get a regular colonoscopy, even if you’re under 40 so you can at least get a baseline.  Get blood work done.  Get the COVID-19 vaccine (my mom had Pfizer!) if you have not already.  Take care of yourself, and make sure your loved ones do the same.

If you have any questions, or hopefully some fun stories to share about my mother, please reach out to me via email at [email protected].

Thank you for reading, and thank you to all of those who have been very helpful and supportive in this hard time.

Samuel Keeley

September 25, 2021

(page will be updated, please continue to check back)