Christine Cooper, 67

We lost our mother on March 16, 2018. Christine Cooper died at her home in Spokane, Wash., after a year-long bout with gallbladder cancer. She was 67. There will be a service for her at 1 p.m. Wednesday, March 21, at the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist, in Spokane.

She is survived by me (Grayson Schaffer) and my brother, Ethan Schaffer; her sister, Marga Sproul; her brothers, Paul Cooper and Hal Cooper; and her Labrador dog, Gibbs, who was a constant and reliable companion. She was predeceased by her husband, Matt Schaffer, in 2006.

She went by Chris. We called her Mama. The fact that she didn’t take our dad’s last name always annoyed our paternal grandfather (though not our father). She was, as her five-star oncologist Corliss Newman noted a little over a week ago, “fiercely independent.” When we were thumbing through the file cabinets trying to take stock of the enormous vacancy in our lives, we came across her author bio for the 1980 Mandinka ethnography she co-authored with our father after living in Senegal for two years in the mid-1970s:

Christine Cooper grew up in Massachusetts and attended the Buxton School in Williamstown. She studied anthropology at the University of Michigan and at Oxford in England and received her bachelor of arts degree from Michigan in 1973. She was employed in the harpsichord workshops of David Rubio in Oxford and Frank Hubbard in Waltham, Mass. She plays the flute and enjoys skiing and gardening.

She taught me and my brother to ski with great results and tried less successfully to teach us music. She lived in the Washington, D.C., area for about 10 years while Matt was employed in the Carter administration and, later, an independent consulting company. In 1989, she and our dad moved us to a farm outside of Sandpoint, Idaho, where she sold real estate, raised me and my brother, parented Ethan through lymphoma in his early teens, and experimented with beer brewing and beekeeping. The beer brewing made her popular with our high school friends, and the bees were a big hit with the local black bears. Once, when some illegal loggers attempted to cut a road through her property, she faced them down with a camera and then beat them in court.

After the fall of the Twin Towers on 9/11, at age 51, Chris enlisted in the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, where she outshot, outran, and outscored many of her fellow recruits. She trained in hand-to-hand combat. In one training exercise, she and others learned to retake a hijacked jetliner with paintball guns. It aggravated her male superiors that a nice older lady could do their job without a buzz cut or a jockstrap.

In her last decade, Chris became even more self-reliant. When some drug dealers stole her truck from her driveway in White Center, south of Seattle, she found the truck and stole it back. In 2014, she moved to Spokane and bought a five-bedroom American foursquare on the South Hill for herself and Gibbs. Anybody who knew her is aware Chris was extremely good at spotting value, whether in a thrift store or in real estate. For mama, “buy and hold” was so much more than an investment strategy.

After her move-in, she noticed that her handgun had gone missing. She confronted one of the movers she’d hired off the street, shamed him into confessing, and made him get in her truck and show her where he’d hidden it in the bushes. Early on, my brother and I used to clench our teeth and worry when she’d next make a scene, but more recently we were just happy that she’d become the least scammable senior citizen of all time.

In Spokane, she relished singing with the choir at the Cathedral of St. John, walking Gibbs, swimming at the YMCA, and attending the Spokane Symphony. She spent the last year of her life traveling widely, much as she did during a year off from college when she went to Europe with a bicycle, a backpack, and no plan. She and her college roommate Christina Norris floated the Green River together in May, putting in above the Gates of Lodore in a snowstorm. In July she drove to McCall, Idaho, (sleeping in the back of her truck because only suckers pay for hotel rooms) and ran the Middle Fork of the Salmon with one outfitter before continuing right on down the Main Salmon with another to observe the eclipse.

She visited me in Santa Fe, where we went hot air ballooning over the desert. She tried magic mushrooms for the first time and described a vision of a dragon — her cancer, she thought — eating its tail.

We spent Christmas in Nosara, Costa Rica, and she traveled to Arizona in February with her sister, Marga, where she fulfilled a longstanding wish to see the Grand Canyon.

The last couple of weeks were difficult for her. She was hospitalized for six days, but a week ago, last Saturday, she walked up the steps of her beloved house, where Gibbs had been waiting. She died peacefully a few days later. The last intelligible thing any of us can remember her saying when we asked if she needed anything — water? morphine? head scratch? — was, “I’m fine.” We’ll miss her dearly.