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Abby Hafer
Abby died 4am 2025-07-31(Thu).
My boy-friend-in-law wrote:
After a nearly two-year standoff with cancer, my beloved and
thoroughly amazing wife Abby Hafer -- biologist, lover of life,
radical atheist, and pillar of our church -- passed away early
Thursday morning. She was 67.
As many of you know she had gotten steadily weaker in the last several
months, although this did not keep her from attending No Kings
protests and some of the Friday Bedford standouts in front of the
church. Around the beginning of summer she entered hospice end-of-life
care, after about 19 rounds of various chemotherapies, which she put
up with well but which eventually failed to hold the line.
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She lived at home with the help of many friends and church
members, but in recent days she started weakening faster and
needing heavier medication to stay comfortable. On Wednesday she
had a meeting with her hospice team, and she decided to move
into the Care Dimensions hospice house in Lincoln for round the
clock professional care. She and I went there Wednesday evening,
and they set us up in a big room in a shared bed. Later I drifted
off.
Around 4 a.m. a nurse gently woke me: "She has passed." There she was,
same as ever next to me, but perfectly still, silent, unresponsive.
She had just stopped. As if her body felt it was time to turn off the
lights.
I stayed with her. Our daughter joined me before we left. Our
son and his wife met us at home. This day has been a
whirlwind -- of love, remembrance, support and community. Thank
you, all.
A memorial service was held Sunday afternoon September 14,
at First Parish Unitarian-Universalist Church in Bedford MA.
There is a You Tube Video
of it.
For some idea of what this means to me, look at the
polyfidelity flag
and imagine the right circle ripped off.
The
Bedford Citizen
has an informative obituary.
As an academic, she has a publication list. She wrote
about biology, and some articles
for a Canadian Law Journal, but my favorite is her book
The Not-So-Intelligent Designer:Why Evolution Explains
the Human Body and Intelligent Design Does Not.
In that book, she argues that the human body has so many easily fixed
flaws that it could not be the work of an "intelligent designer."
One reason I like that book is that it has my name in it; not just
in my copy where it was signed by the author, but in print.
Fortunately, not as an example of a poorly designed body,
but in the acknowlegements. I didn't really do much; just read a book
she gave me that claimed that Information Theory proved that evolution
could not have produced the human body. I don't really know a lot
of information theory, but I know enough to tell her that the book
was drivel, and give a quick proof of that.
I don't remember when I first met Abby. We saw her husband at occasional
events and sometimes Abby was with him. A couple of times the event
was a party at our house. Later it was enough of an event that we four
had a chance to get together. We took long walks, exploring the
mountains,
chasms,
rivers,
and
ponds
around Bedford and Worcester.
This got more frequent until it happened almost every weekend.
The four-way hugs were a high-point of our walks.
As I got worse at walking (due to
Multiple Sclerosis)
we spent less time in the woods and more time in the hot tub.
I never got the nerve to call her my "girl-friend", but I
called her husband my "boy-friend-in-law".
Some people might think that such an arragement must lead
inevitably to jealousy, disagreements, and fights.
It did not.
We were at her house a few days before the end. (Of course we
did not know that was what it was.) The last words I heard her
say as we left were "I love you all."
So, what we had was not love at first sight, and it wasn't marriage,
but it was a high-point of my life, and it was 'til death did us part.
There was every reason to expect she would outlive me by decades.
She was younger than me and much stronger. She had good genes.
Her mother survived her by two weeks, and
died (Aug. 16, 2025) at the age of 100, as reported by
Bedford Citizen