In Our Hearts Forever

Samantha Doxey Porter

June 22, 1935 - October 16, 2024

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We invite you to join us in celebrating  Samantha's life on this dedicated webpage. Your condolences, stories, and pictures will be cherished by the family and will provide comfort during this difficult time. 

The following is Samantha's obituary, written by her, titled "About My Life"

 Samantha Doxey Porter

 =About My Life= 

There are two things we know. One is that we are born. The other is that we die. These are the only two things - the only truths - that we share with every other human being on the earth. Everything else we are taught or learn from experience while we're here. This is some of what I’ve experienced. 

 I was born on June 22, 1935 in Salt Lake City, Utah. My parents, Ed and Mildred (Doxey) Porter named me Sandra (Saundra). I don't remember ever liking that name, and when in 1974 my mother told me that she and dad had thought of naming me Samantha instead of Saundra, I happily became Samantha Doxey Porter. It’s who I should have been all along. 

 If I die of something unexpected, like an accident or heart attack, I won't know when, so someone else will have to add the date, which is very untidy and irritating to me. A person should know something as basic as that date, but I realize I probably won't. On the other hand, if as I age my life becomes devoid of the choices that make life LIFE, I will choose an appropriate exit on my own terms. To me life is not breathing, life is living, and if you can no longer live, you’re dead. I don’t want to keep breathing after I’m dead.

 On a less macabre note, I was the first of my parents’ three children, and I know I got lots of attention, which I’m sure I loved. When I was almost three, my sister Tibby was born. I wasn't happy about it at the time, but over the years she turned out to be one of the greatest blessings in my life. Then when I was almost eleven and Tibby was eight, we got our fabulous brother, John.

 As the years went by, I became an unhappy child, a talented underachiever, and a disappointment to my parents. In spite of all that, I had talent as a pianist, gave two solo recitals, taught piano, and was an accompanist for the East High a cappella choir. I began singing with the Salt Lake Oratorio Society in my early teens, and for most of my life have belonged to classical choral groups. I also loved to write, and was picked to present stories I’d written at a city-wide gathering of talented children given at the Hotel Utah in Salt Lake City when I was about nine. At the age of thirteen I spoke in the Salt Lake Tabernacle at General Sunday School Conference in October 1948. I won third place in the city-wide “Voice of Democracy” contest when I was seventeen, and much to my surprise, was elected president of the girls' association at East High School, where I graduated in 1953.

 During these years a wonderful person entered my life. Her name was Mary Mayne. She taught Mechanical Drawing at East High School - definitely a woman ahead of her time. She was not LDS (the religion I was being raised in), she was unmarried (not a chosen option in Mormonism), and yet was happy with her life. A happy, single, non-Mormon? That was a revelation to me. She taught me so much – ‘to thine own self be true’ she would say. I knew that she loved and cared about me. Then, sadly, she died in 1959 when I was in my early twenties. I didn’t realize until she was gone what she had meant to me. I’ve never stopped loving and missing her. 

When I was eighteen I met Mai Lundberg, the fifteen year-old cousin of a high school friend. In 1965, after a friendship of over ten years, we became life partners. For the next thirty-eight years our love brought out the best and the worst in both of us, and we were together until August of 2003, when the Alzheimer’s disease Mai had developed finally made our lives together impossible. As I write this, she is living in an Alzheimer’s facility in Utah, and I’m alone in Maryland with the memories of our life.  

 Both of us began working for the U.S. Postal Service in 1966, so for about twenty-five years we not only lived together, we worked together. During those years we also completed degrees at the University of Utah. I graduated Cum Laude in December of 1974 with a B. S. degree in Sociology, and Mai graduated Magna Cum Laude in June of 1975 with a B. S. degree in Criminal Justice. Instead of going on to graduate school as we had planned, we decided to remain in the Postal Service; eventually both of us went into management. In 1990 I became Postmaster of Randolph, Utah, and finally, after all my years of working, had a job I truly loved. It was wonderful! Then, in October 1992, the Postal Service offered an early retirement package, and as much as I wanted to stay in Randolph, the offer was too good to pass up, and Mai and I both retired. 

We had made some wonderful lifelong friends at the Post Office, as well as in our neighborhood community, but over the years the greatest relationships in our lives were with our family - mom and dad, our sisters and brothers, and nieces and nephews.  

I’m listing the families according to the years our siblings were born – Tibby - 1938, Warren - 1941, Juanita - 1944, and John - 1946. Here they are:

 TIBBY and her partner Barbara Kenny - James (Paula Hoppe) Middleton, and 

 Holly Middleton; WARREN (Mai’s brother) and his wife Betty - Lori (Blake) Burr, 

 Russ (Pam) and Tony (Kelly) Lundberg and Debbie (Rand) Winward; JUANITA 

 (Mai’s sister) and her husband Bill VanDomburg - Nani (John) Kyota, Becky (David) 

 Luna, Yvonne Kukahiko (Powell), Chad Kukahiko, Denny Kukahiko, Glenda 

 (Trevor) Rodrigues, and Bill Jr. (MauriLei) VanDomburg; JOHN and his wife Mary – 

 David (Nola) Porter, Emily (Ben) LeSueur, Matthew (Louisa) Porter, Sara (D.J.) 

 Stapley, and Garth (Melissa) Porter. 

We’ve loved and enjoyed all of them and they’ve all been wonderful to us. When our grandnieces and nephews came into the family we loved and enjoyed them like we had their parents. 

Then, at the beginning of the new millennium, something miraculous happened. On January 6th, 2000 our niece Holly had a baby girl, and Madison was different somehow. She wasn’t just another adorable grandniece. I don’t know how to explain it, but we felt like her grandmothers, not her grandaunts! It was truly unexpected and amazing. 

For over a year we kept flying from Utah to Maryland every couple of months to see Madison, and finally in 2001 we decided to sell our beautiful condominium at Park Place in Salt Lake, where we had lived for twenty-five years, and move to Germantown, Maryland so we could be a constant presence in her life, and she would be in ours. Being Madison’s “Yia Yia” has been one of the greatest privileges of my life. 

I’ve always felt that I was lucky. Out of many examples, here are a few:

When I was Postmaster of Randolph, and also times when I worked nights in the Salt Lake Post Office, I would fall asleep while I was driving. Irresponsible and terrifying! Another time I was caught in a blinding “whiteout” between Randolph and Evanston, Wyoming, but never once did I have an accident or hurt anyone. 

Over four decades I’ve dealt with numerous health issues. Among them were four malignant tumors - one of them in my lung - but all of them detected early enough to only require surgery, plus several severe bouts with pneumonia, and an accidental drug overdose, which sent me to the emergency room. I’m not very good at taking care of my body, and I’m paying for it these days, but at seventy-one the cardiologist tells me I have the heart of a sixteen-year old. In other words, my body’s the pits, but I’ve got a good heart! Of course I don’t know how long I’ll live, but Dad is almost ninety-nine years old, and Mom died at ninety-one, after being in what the doctors told us was a ‘fatal’ car accident ten years earlier, so I’ve definitely got the genes to live a long time. 

On a brighter note, I’ve also won two trips – one to Mazatlan, and the other one to PARIS! Of course while we were there Mai and I made a “pilgrimage” to 27 Rue de Fleurus, where Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas had lived and many of the 20th century’s great artistic and literary figures regularly visited. We met the woman who was living there, and to our amazement she invited us in to see the apartment. Can you imagine? We were just two tourists out of millions from the states, and we have been inside Gertrude Stein’s salon! 

I had never lived alone in my life, until Mai left Maryland in 2003 to live in Utah with Juanita and Bill. It’s been very difficult and sad for me, and there are always poignant reminders that she’s gone. Even residents here in my apartment building, three-and-a-half years later, still ask about Mai. As one woman put it, “I never saw one of you without the other.” I think most of the people who ever knew either of us would say the same thing. 

Life is so fortunate for a few of us, and so unfortunate for billions of others of us. I’ve been one of the most fortunate. I was born in the United States, in the twentieth century, with freedoms and opportunities most others in the world couldn’t even imagine. In all my life I’ve never gone hungry, never known war or disaster, rarely been discriminated against, never beaten or sexually abused, or held down because I was a woman. My life has been one of love, privilege, talent, education, and opportunity - everything it takes for a human being to thrive. In the remaining years of my life, thriving will be my goal, and I wish the same for you!  

January, 2007

Services entrusted to Beltway Cremation Center

124 E. Diamond Avenue, Gaithersburg, MD 20877-5009

 www.beltwaycremationcenter.com

(240)246-0400