Patricia "Pulamawai" Ganaban

The world lost an amazing soul this year. She was daughter, sister, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, aunt, friend, and colleague to more people than I realized. I don't want to talk about how she died. I'd rather talk about how she lived, and how her legacy is going to be eternal because of how she lived.

She was born in 1952, the eldest of 6 siblings in a Hawaii that wasn't even a state yet. She started working at 13, in the pineapple fields and cannery. While her family wasn't destitute, they had to pinch pennies so when a recruiter told her that joining the Air Force would pay for her college, she signed up. She was born at the tail end of the year though, so in order to be sent to basic training, she needed her parents' signatures. Her mother sobbed. At the time the military was for men and a place that people were sent to fight and possibly die. Somehow she convinced her mom and dad to sign off and she went to basic training. She was sent to Vietnam for a while, where she was part of the office pool but also went onto the field to identify and tag fallen soldiers. When she got back from deployment, her commanding officer had to put her in a small office away from other people because pregnant women were often medically discharged.

She left the Air Force and joined the Air National Guard where she learned how to work in radar stations and lay fiber optic cable (before the internet was a thing!). Her unit adopted an Elementary School as part of their civilian service program, a school she'd eventually go to work in as a teacher. Despite being just a few years from being able to retire from the Air National Guard with full benefits, she left to take care of her first grandchild. When she did, that school her unit had taken care of so long ago hired her despite her having no college degree. Yep. The one thing she joined the military for, she never got!

As a teacher there, she started working as an assistant to the special needs teachers and eventually became a Hawaiian Studies teacher that focused on teaching kids about plants. The granddaughter she was caring for became a student at that school, eventually so did her next grandchild. Most of the children at the school were military kids living in Hawaii for the first time. She taught them about both the Hawaiian culture, and how to respect nature. She respected those kid in turn by growing non-Hawaiian foods that the kids and their families might be more familiar with like pumpkins, corn, and collard greens. Then she'd have those kids harvest what they planted, and bring it to their parents who would often use those vegetables to hold a pot luck where they shared their own culture through their food.

The kids called her Mrs. G, but they knew her as Mama Aina. Mother Earth. She always had a love for plants and sinking her hands into fresh soil and she was able to blossom the same way she nurtured her plants and students to blossom. She was given an added opportunity to share that love of the earth when she assist her church in creating their own natural farm.

My niece is almost 30 now, and when she posted about my mom's passing on her social media, she had friends from her time in elementary school respond, remembering the impact my mom had on them and how she helped them grow.

It wasn't just kids at school that she nurtured with the light of her love and the water of her wisdom. Our very small house was always filled with kids. If not my sister and I, then our cousins (my sister and I are one of the oldest in our generation), and if not our cousins, our friends or the kids of our neighbors. One neighbor mentioned that she wouldn't be where she is now if not for my mom opening her doors to her kids and taking care of them. That friend now owns a very successful business she built up herself. Then as those kids grew up, my nieces and nephews wandered in.

And it wasn't just kids that learned lessons from her. As a Hawaiian studies teacher, she created one of the first natural gardens on a school campus. Other schools reached out to her to get her guidance and assistance in creating their own. She would share wisdom and offer guidance to everyone she met, and while she didn't talk much in groups, when she did her words were profound to those that hear them.

Her belief in helping others, and servitude for a greater good, was always a part of her. Always spiritual, she found herself volunteering for Toho no Hikari where she participated in activities that aligned with her passion for plants. With Toho no Hikari my mom taught children how to make flower arrangements and assisted in creating, planning, and executing the MOA Children's Art Exhibits that still happen at Honolulu Hale. She also served on the board and was involved in creating the church's first Nature Farm, a farm that's still being tended to today.

I might sound like I'm over-exaggerating her impact on others, but I'm not. A lot of the stuff I mentioned here was told to me these last few weeks by the people that came by to see her one last time and tell her 'thank you'.

To all of those people, I want to say 'thank you' also. You all gave my mom laughs and smiles during a time in her life when there wasn't much to laugh and smile about. She was tough, and never showed people she was struggling or sad. Medical complications like what she had to go through aren't easy.. or cheap. And while she would have never done something like this and would have just said 'I'll figure it out'. I can't say 'I'll figure it out' because the person I leaned so heavily on to figure things out is gone now.

When my dad passed in September of 2023, it was a wake-up call for my mom and I that she should get her things in order just in case. She would never be able to, though. She declined in health and energy. She'd say 'Let's do it tomorrow. I just gotta rest today'. Before we knew it, it was too late. The cancer kept her from being able to have the energy to meet with lawyers, the financial hole that having 2 ill parents dug was too deep to afford any, even if she did have the energy.

Now I need to figure out how to pay for the remaining debts (medical, renovation because new furniture and flooring needed to be put in after she had her liver transplant, then more when she was receiving chemo), the upcoming funeral, the celebration of life ceremony as we scatter her ashes, and legal fees as I figure out how to keep her house, the first and only house she ever purchased, the house so many of us grew up in, and the house where her garden still grows.

If you wouldn't mind, could you please leave a little message about how she may have touched your life.. or any kind of message. She always loved mo'olelo. Also... f*** cancer.