Faye Ollison, presente!

by David Bacon

Faye Ollison was 92 when she died last week.

It wasn’t an easy death because not having money puts you at the mercy of a healthcare system where money is everything. As her son Terance said over and over, “It’s all just about the money.”

Faye had health insurance, but it was United Healthcare, a plan she’d kept up from her time working at the UC Berkeley Rad Lab. When she couldn’t get out of bed at home, Terance took her to the hospital. The nurses were great, but from the beginning the hospital wanted the bed back. So first they put her on a list for hospice care. When her doctor pointed out that they hadn’t been feeding her, and she began to bounce back after eating a little, United Healthcare said she’d have to be moved to a skilled nursing facility. The hospital was too expensive. “But we know all about United Healthcare,” her hospital caseworker told us.

The nursing facility was full of patients. Terance had already had bad experiences with two other ones, from a crisis a year earlier. “They’re all understaffed,” he said bitterly, “because money is the only thing that counts to the people that own them.” To United Healthcare too.

Faye was holding on. She’d recognize us and try to talk a little. But eating was a problem. Her hands, calloused from a lifetime at the lab and then cleaning houses, were too frozen to hold a fork. A nurse’s aide would help her, or Terance would bring a protein shake she could drink with a straw. But then United said they were cutting off money for the nursing home, to force her into hospice care at home.

Terance and I cleaned a space for the bed in her cluttered apartment. The patient transport van unloaded Faye on a gurney, and brought her in. The hospice nurse was great, giving her the attention she didn’t get in the weeks before. But sleep had overtaken her. The next morning Terance called: “She’s gone.” He was crying into the phone. Another hospice nurse came out, changed her clothes and even got her agency to pay for the coffin.

Faye, who never had much love for funerals or memorials, told Terance she wanted to be buried without any ceremony, in a pine box. And so she will be.

Faye Ollison was born in the countryside, outside of Gonzalez, Texas, a small town that used to be part of Mexico. She grew up learning to cook Southern style, with a love of chile that never left her. When we wanted her to eat in the nursing home, we brought her sausage covered in chile flakes, usually her favorite.

Gonzalez was a slave county in a slave state, where 384 slaveholders owned 3,168 human beings in the year the Civil War started. That history was still alive when Faye was growing up. Her grandfather remembered his enslaved life. In the ‘30s and ‘40s she went to segregated schools, which weren’t desegregated until the mid-’60s. By then she’d long since left for California, a single mother with her son. Over the years while Faye worked at the lab and cleaning jobs, Terance found work in the Pile Drivers Union, from which he retired.

My mother and Faye were good friends from the time I was a teenager. When she was trying to get alcohol out of her life, my mom depended on that love and support Faye gave her. Faye knew everyone in my family and sent us all cards on every occasion, slipping into the envelope a cartoon from The Better Half, and always a 2-dollar bill.

It was hard the way Faye left this world. It should have been kinder and more gentle. Our country has so little respect for the old people who got us all here. Now we’re run by gangsters that Faye, always a radical and a real red in her heart, would call out by name. She knew who they all were, from first to last.

I’m sorry we didn’t change the world in time for you to leave it, Faye. But you would always say goodbye to us by calling out, “We just have to keep on going.”

Faye Ollison, presente!

These photographs were taken with Faye’s permission, and with the cooperation of her son Terance Reeves, who wants people to know about his mom and her last days. 

Award-winning photojournalist, author and immigrant rights activist David Bacon spent over 20 years as a labor organizer. He is the author of many books, including “Illegal People” (Beacon 2008) and writes for the Nation, American Prospect, Progressive, and San Francisco Chronicle, among other publications. He can be reached at [email protected]. 

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Source: https://sfbayview.com/2025/04/faye-ollison-presente/