Pre-Obituary: Grandma Bonnie Peters Moves On

KANSAS CITY, Missouri.--Bonnie Dale Lassiter Peters, 18 January 1935 -- 9 August 2020

The nurse, teacher, patient advocate, life coach, Health & Temperance Minister, Celiactivist, cook, restaurant supplier, frozen-food entrepreneur, church youth group leader, active grandparent, model of active seniority, and less-successful writer known as Grandma Bonnie Peters has taken her next step forward.

Upon reaching a plateau in recovery from a stroke, which was where she was the last time I visited her, she had some symptoms tested and learned that she had liver cancer.

She was 85 years old. She had been the home nurse for patients whose liver cancer had reached the almost unbearably disgusting stage at which they were sent home from hospitals. She rejected chemotherapy and planned, for this summer, The Last Road Trip, during which she planned to revisit scenes of her childhood in Kansas and Oklahoma in the company of relatives in Missouri.

Though willing to continue helping her friends at the retirement project, if able, on return from The Last Road Trip, she was making no commitments and was eating only a few bites of food at each meal before the Trip. On being notified of her plan to take the Trip, I said to relatives who doubted that she had the strength to survive it, "That's the point."

According to her younger daughter, who was driving, GBP rented two rooms for the two of them for a week, in a suburban hotel outside Kansas City. Her plan was to go to bed early Sunday night, wake up early Monday morning, and spend the day with relatives. She never woke up.

She wanted people to remember her as someone who could still walk, talk, make plans, and manage her own affairs, and so they will. Though she never recovered the fortitude to walk back up to the Cat Sanctuary, she will be remembered as the retirement project resident who practiced walking with great regularity and determination, and encouraged others trying to recover to practice walking around the track at the project, also.

She was the one who responded to the news that friends and relatives were postponing visits, for fear of infecting project residents with last winter's flu, by saying, "I'm here in my friend's flat, helping nurse her through the flu." She wanted to die "with her boots on" and almost literally did.

A lifelong advocate of simple memorial services, GBP was minimally insured to cover the cost of only the simplest. Following an open-coffin service in Missouri, which was attended by the disappointed relatives, she will be cremated there, and the ashes will be disposed of at a simple service on the Virginia/Tennessee border next week.

She was the daughter of Everett McCoy Lassiter and Ruby Jewel Garrett Lassiter ("Texas Ruby"). She was preceded in death by her sister, Mabel Lassiter Kerby; her husband, George Albert Peters; and two sons, David Floyd Peters (1969-1982) and John Kevin Peters (who lived fewer than 24 hours in 1984). She is survived by two daughters, four grandchildren, a large extended family, and many friends, students, and patients.