Tunbridge
Brabham, who died of lung cancer on Oct. 16, 2017, also gave food, time and kindness freely to her friends and family.
When a friend needed help caring for her children after school, Brabham stepped in. When her father developed dementia, Brabham quit her job, moved him from Florida to Vermont and relied on money from her retirement account while she cared for him.
Even while she was undergoing chemotherapy for her own cancer, Brabham continued to cook for other people, including her younger sister, Johanna.
Brabham prepared “a container of this and a container of that,” and Johanna, in a recent phone interview, recalled saying, “you’re the one who doesn’t feel good.”
But, Johanna Brabham, who now lives in Burlington, said she knows “It was just (her sister’s) way of showing love.”
All this giving came at a sacrifice, however.
It was “to her own downfall really,” said Tracy Vesper, Tunbridge Central’s administrative assistant. “She didn’t have much herself.”
To make ends meet, Brabham, who was known at the school as “Miss Abby,” took on extra jobs, working in the after-school program, cleaning houses, delivering ice and catering, although she didn’t always take payment for the work.
But, Johanna said, kindness is its own form of currency, particularly in her sister’s adopted home of the White River Valley. Brabham spent much of her adult life living in Tunbridge, though she lived in Bethel the year before her death.
“It doesn’t matter how much money you have down there, it just matters that you’re a nice person,” said Johanna, who originally moved to South Royalton from Massachusetts with her sister in the early 1980s.
Abby Brabham, the middle of three daughters of Harold and Margaret Brabham, grew up in Framingham and Dover, Mass. Harold worked as a dean at several Massachusetts colleges and Margaret served as a eucharistic minister and clown.
From the start, Brabham loved animals, flowers and being outside. Six years younger than her older sister, Amy Moore, and 11 months older than Johanna, she was the family peacemaker, Johanna said.
After graduating from high school in Massachusetts, Abby and Johanna moved to Vermont. They worked together at South Royalton House, Abby as a cook and Johanna as a server. While there they befriended both law students and longtime area residents, Johanna recalled.
After encouragement from Jonathon Chase, who was the dean of Vermont Law School at the time, the sisters attended Johnson State College. Abby studied psychology.
“I want to do something to help somebody,” Johanna remembered Abby saying at the time.
Johanna, who studied hotel management and now manages custodial services at the University of Vermont, went on to graduate, but Abby didn’t and returned to South Royalton.
“Abby just loved the small community,” Johanna said.
Brabham enjoyed jeeping, hanging out by various bodies of water, gardening and watching hummingbirds: All things she was able to do in Vermont, her sister said.
After an orderly childhood in Massachusetts, which Johanna described as “very boop, boop, boop,” Brabham flourished among the people and nature of the White River Valley, Johanna said.
“She changed,” Johanna said. “Like a butterfly … she just came out.”
Serving Up Kindness
In 1994, Brabham found a steady job with benefits at the Tunbridge Central School. The schedule also allowed her to care for only child, Nathan Abbott, now 30, while he was young.
As a cook, Brabham’s specialties were foods that people liked. Friends and family fondly remember M&M and chocolate chip cookies; spaghetti with extra cheese, egg salad, goulash and soups.
“It wasn’t normal school food; she made it with love,” said Abbott. “I didn’t like the hot lunch a lot of times. She’d make me special food. She did that for so many kids.”
And, if a child didn’t qualify for free lunch, but Brabham knew covering the cost of a meal was a struggle for a family, she would make sure the child got to eat, Abbott said.
She was “always giving people food,” Abbott said. It was a “good thing she didn’t have her own business because I don’t think she would have ever made anything.”
She also knew her friends’ and co-workers’ favorite foods. Vesper, the Tunbridge administrative assistant, recalled that if she had a rough day, Brabham would bring her egg salad with crackers.
“I made your favorite,” Brabham would say.
Brabham knew how to “put a smile on your face,” Vesper said. She would “Just hug you and tell you you’re wonderful and it matters.”
Brabham also would step in if a child needed something other than food.
“A lot of times it would be out of Abby’s pocket,” said Penny Lewis, Brabham’s friend and Tunbridge Central co-worker.
Before Tunbridge had an afterschool program, Brabham would care for children at her home until their parents picked them up, Lewis said. When Lewis needed child care for her own three children, Brabham helped out.
“She loved my kids like they were her own niece and nephews,” Lewis said.
Family Struggles
Though money was tight, Abbott, who now lives in South Royalton with his wife and their daughter, said he never wanted for anything as a child, even if it meant Brabham left herself without. Things didn’t work out with Abbott’s father, and Brabham raised him on her own.
“I feel like I got more out of my mom in 30 years than a lot of people get in 90,” Abbott said. “She was such a giving person. (She) wanted to always make sure that I was taken care of.”
Abbott, who is in recovery for an addiction to heroin and prescription pills and did some jail time for a drug-related offense, said his mother was always there for him. She also treated his wife, Chelsea Blossom, who also has struggled with addiction, as a daughter, he said.
“She had a very good understanding of what (addiction) was and how hard it was to get over,” he said.
Brabham came to every court date and visited Abbott every week for the two months he was in jail, even though she was undergoing chemotherapy, he said.
Fortunately, Abbott said, his mother lived to see her son and daughter-in-law get sober. They have been in recovery for two years and are both in medication-assisted treatment for the disease, he said.
Brabham also lived to witness the birth of her granddaughter, Amiya Abigail, nearly a year ago.
“The day she found out she had cancer, (I) told her she was going to be a grandmother,” he said.
Tragedy was not unfamiliar to Brabham. Two of her nieces Andrea and Laura, her sister Amy’s daughters, developed cancer. Andrea, who also had Down Syndrome and of whom Abby was very fond, died.
“Everyone in my family … had a lot of pain,” Johanna said. “Abby tried to put it forward in a positive way.”
A few years after Brabham and Abbott’s father split, she and Gary Wight found each other. Wight also had a son from a previous relationship and he and Abbott got along well, Abbott said. The families moved in together in Tunbridge and Wight and Brabham remained together for 25 years, the remainder of Brabham’s life.
The couple would watch NASCAR together every week, Johanna said. Jeff Gordon was Brabham’s favorite driver.
Wight took Brabham to all of her appointments while she underwent treatment for cancer, and he was there with her to the end.
“Abby was so grateful for that,” Johanna said. “That’s what people need.”
Though she cared for others, Brabham didn’t always care for herself, Abbott said. She was a smoker, had been diagnosed with an eating disorder as a young adult and didn’t eat much later in life either.
Aside from snacking on foods such as chips and Goldfish crackers, “she never really ate,” Abbott said. “She got a little bit better once she got sick. It certainly wasn’t good on her body. I don’t know how she did it.”
Like the eating issues, Brabham’s generosity stemmed, in part, from insecurity, her son said.
“That’s how she felt better about herself,” he said. “But really everyone loved her. It was kind of hard to see sometimes because she got down on herself.”
Though she may have had a blind spot for herself, Brabham’s caring nature is what people who knew her most remember her for.
“She lived hard,” Johanna said. “She loved even harder.”
Valley News Staff Writer Nora Doyle-Burr can be reached at ndoyleburr@vnews.com or 603-727-3213.
