Pamela Fecht

1946 - 2024

PAMELA FECHT

October 4, 1946 – May 23, 2024

To be honest, writing this is the hardest thing I have ever done. How do you boil down the extraordinary life of your mom into a few paragraphs? It would take a book. No, an entire series of books to accurately encompass who she was and what she meant to everyone who knew her.

On May 23rd, Pamela Dawn Fecht, left a huge hole on this Earth. I know I'm supposed to talk here about who she left behind and how she died, but who cares how she died. What mattered was how she lived. And, oh boy, did she live.

She was born to Frances and David Edward Sechrist on October 4th. The year is irrelevant, but she was 77 when she died. So, as she would say, you can do the math. From an early age, Dawn was trouble. She was a middle child. You know, all the good stuff, sandwiched between two slices of wholesome wheat bread. Dawn made her sisters, April Barcus and Paula Thompson, look like saints. Roughly five minutes after getting her driver's license, she began regularly taking out the family car at night, then driving backwards in circles to turn back the odometer. I spent my entire childhood listening to her say "I can back better than I can forward". By the time she was 17 years old, she could skip a math test and get the principal to apologize to her, offering her even more time off school. By the time she was 18 years old, she could back into a cop car and leave the cop convinced it was all his fault. Like I said, pure trouble.

By 19 years old, she did what every woman did back then and got married. She would be the first to tell you, the best thing to come out of her first marriage was her daughter, Tiffany Lasiter. Her passion for being a mom also led to the second best thing to came out of her marriage to Loren, a realization that she didn't want to be dependent on anyone for financial stability ever again. So, despite having a young child, parents who lived 3000 miles away, and a husband who was often gone on military assignment, she went back to school and got her degree to be radiology technologist. During this time, she also got an A+ in her Nuclear Medicine class by leading her study group in an elaborate cheating scam, Ocean's Eleven style, just to spite her misogynistic professor. But that's a story for another time.

At 33 years old, Dawn walked into her 15-year high school reunion as a single working mom who loved a good romance novel and walked out with Russell Fecht, her high school best friend (AKA husband number two). Again, my mom would be the first to tell you the best thing to came out of her second marriage was her second daughter, Crystal Carney. What can I say, she liked being a mom more than being a wife.

But I can't end here because she was so much more than just a wife or mom. For instance, she was also a boss. An amazing boss. For two decades, she managed the radiology and laboratory departments at her clinic and eventually all the clinics in her region of Orange County. Anyone who worked with her would tell you she was a singularity as far as managers go. She was funny, encouraging, and loyal to anyone who worked for her. Oh, and she was still trouble, always working behind the scenes to ensure her department had the best of everything.

She would haunt me forever if I forgot to mention that she was an avid traveler. If I said the words "I think we should go to...", she had her bags packed before I could even tell her where we were heading. She visited nearly forty countries over four continents: North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. Dawn wasn't afraid of exploring. Whether it was wondering through the souks of Tunisia, searching for the Northern Lights in Finland, avoiding spiders the size of her hand hiking in the rainforests of Costa Rica, sneaking into the exit at the Acropolis in Athens, peeking into the windows of Amsterdam's red light district, gawking at the David in Florence, laughing at the miniscule size of the Mona Lisa in Paris, threatening to charge up the steps of Chichen Itza in Mexico, sipping cocktails in parkas at the Ice Bar in Stockholm, eating night market dim sum in Hong Kong, ordering bear and wild boar at Olde Hansa in Estonia, shamelessly flirting with a Hawaiian chief in Oahu, or cheering along to a drag show in Bangkok, Dawn's answer was always, "I'm in!".

Lastly, but most importantly to her, Dawn would want you to know that she was "Nanny" to three remarkable grandchildren, Graydon Lasiter, Amelia Carney, and Jacob Carney. She loved them with every heartstring, spending every second she had with them. I would like to note here, however, that while her motto with my sister and I was "whatever you are planning, just don't because I have pulled off way more elaborate schemes and you will never get away with it," her motto with her grandchildren was "psst, let me know what you're plotting because I can help."

And yet, she was so much more than even this. She loved Tweety Bird, anything Disney, 50's music, Adam Lambert, the news, Friends, online solitaire, horribly watered-down coffee, seasonal socks, cruises, neon colors, Go Fish, crafting, and crazy earrings shaped like animals. She was a tour de force in every room she entered. People could meet her once, and remember her decades later. My mom will be sorely missed, not just by the people who knew her, but by all the people who never got a chance to meet her. She was the best kind of trouble, the kind that leaves you laughing so hard your side hurts and feeling so loved your chest aches. Let's just hope heaven is ready for her.

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