By Gretchen Wing

“We tend to seek happiness,” announces a large painting in Becky Smith’s kitchen, adding below, “when happiness is actually a choice.” Smith’s life testifies to that declaration. In the aftermath of one horrible year — surviving a hurricane, losing a family member — she and husband Bob left unfulfilling lives in Tacoma and moved to Lopez. Here, through work and community, they chose happiness.

Becky Brown was raised mostly in western Washington, the daughter of a doctor. Graduating from high school in 1970, she spent summers working at Steven’s Memorial Hospital in Edmonds, even after starting nursing school at WSU. “I always knew I wanted to be a nurse,” Smith says, but after that hospital experience, classroom learning felt frustrating. Thanks to a family friend, Becky transferred to Merritt Hospital in Oakland, California, a rare hospital-run school where student nurses lived on-site. Her brother Steve lived nearby in San Francisco, another plus.

The family friend set her up with one Bob Smith, on “a blind date that worked.” It worked so well that the couple married ten months later, in 1974. After two years in San Francisco the Smiths moved to Tacoma, a town of family roots: Becky’s grandfather was the “Brown” of the famous Brown and Haley candy company. Bob went into the office-furnishing business with Becky’s other brother, and the Smiths started a family. Daughter Cara was followed by son Mikah, and all should have been well.

But it wasn’t. The early 1980s were tough in the northwest, and Bob was unhappy in his work. Still, as often happens, it took serious rattling to shake the Smiths out of their rut. In 1983, on vacation in Kauai, the family found themselves in Hurricane Iwa, being evacuated from a destroyed house. “That was a wake-up call,” Becky says. “What came out of it was, ‘What are we doing with our lives?'” Later that year, Bob’s father suddenly died at age 62. A sea captain turned lawyer, he had been longing for retirement, to follow his heart again. His loss was a powerful lesson for Becky and Bob: “No more doing what we don’t want to be doing.” They began to look for “a place to be happy where we are.”

Friends brought the Smiths to Decatur Island, from where they discovered Lopez. After selling their Tacoma house and buying property in Mud Bay, they re-constructed a used log home (costing $6,000). Bob got the caretaker’s job on Decatur, commuting happily in an old ski-boat named The Pink Cadillac. And Becky dived into her new community.

She began at the Senior Center. She and two year-old Mikah would drive “the ladies” (as Mikah called them) to lunch or shopping, and deliver meals to elders at home. “All these grandmothers adored him,” Becky says. And the Senior Center “was a fabulous way to get to know all the Lopez old-timers.”

During nursing school, Becky had become interested in end-of-life issues and the work of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. With the help of Annie Kammerer, Becky started an early hospice/home support volunteer network, later replaced by the current organization. Thanks to her Senior Center connections, Becky was one of the few whom the “old-timers” would trust to accept help.

In 1988, the Smiths bought an old, six-bedroom house in Richardson with the notion of opening an adult family home. Stymied by county opposition, Becky ended up caretaking anyway, nursing her grandparents through their final months. Familiar with the HIV/AIDS tragedy through her beloved brother Steve (who had lost dozens of friends in San Francisco), Becky became intimately involved when first Steve’s partner, then Steve himself, got sick. She nursed them both to the end.

That experience led to Becky’s involvement in HIV/AIDS education. First she wrote curriculum for the state. Then in the early 90s, amidst community controversy, Becky and Cathy Doherty began teaching AIDS education (which meant sex education) to all secondary grades on Lopez. They did this for twelve years. Throughout, Becky continued both hospice work and intermittent nursing.

Community involvement spread beyond caretaking, as answering phones for the San Juan Islands Visitors Board morphed into a Lopez Chamber of Commerce job. Until recently, Becky was president of the Chamber (aiding her claim to have “served on every board you can serve on,” including the school and the clinic). One of her proudest accomplishments: co-founding, with Daran Holscher, the Tour de Lopez in 2004.

During these busy decades, other committed Lopezians founded the Hamlet, and after Bob’s mother moved into one of the cottages, the Smiths “found out how great they are.” One year ago Becky became administrator/manager of Hamlet House. She admits that taking the job felt “bittersweet,” 30 years after the blockage of her own adult facility. But she loves the work. “Care giving skills are not something you lose,” Becky says. “I’ve been taking care of people my whole life.”