Born two months before the Titanic sank, she died 108 year later having outlived her husband, her beloved twinned sister, Rowena, and two of her three children. But the life of Roberta Wright McCain, my mother-in-law, was characterized by much more than hard-handed losses and longevity. Hers was the fullest life I’ve ever known, an adventurous, army, strange, invigorating, resilient cyclone of a life. One would assume such a great span of years would have included longer-than-average unfolds of idleness and apathy. Not Roberta’s. She had lived a century before infirmity kept her to a wheelchair, always keen for brand-new knowledge, always learning, laughing and enchanting the company she preserved.

Roberta was born on February 7, 1912, to Archibald and Myrtle Wright in Muskogee, Oklahoma, where Archie enjoyed a colorful stature for lottery and bootlegging. He was claimed to have won in a placard play the tract of estate where he would strike petroleum. After the bonanza, he moved their own families to Los Angeles, and retired at persons under the age of 40 to devote his time to the care, education and entertainment of their own children. He escorted his daughters to dances and recitations, and guided them on excursions around the country to visit numerous areas of natural and man-made wonders.

Roberta was 18 and a University of Southern California freshman when she matched Ensign John S. McCain Jr. A shipmate was devoting her a tour of their battleship, the USS Oklahoma, homeported at Long Beach. They delivered her future husband’s quarterss as he was preparing to reduce. He had necks “like two little cherry-red apples, ” she withdrew. “Until then, I had never teamed up with any man.”

Roberta’s mothers defended the parallel, preferring a more civilized future for their daughter than the gypsy life of a naval officer’s wife. Less than 2 years later, they absconded to Tijuana. News of the matrimony was reported on the figurehead page of the Los Angeles Times. The only family member in attendance was the groom’s father, Captain John S. McCain Sr ., who stressed himself delighted by the match, as taken with his new daughter-in-law as she was with him.

Their first child, a daughter, Alexandra “Sandy” McCain, was born in 1934. Their first son, John S. McCain III, arrived two years later, and the second largest, Joseph Pinkney McCain, two years after that.

Roberta espoused the peripatetic batch of a Navy spouse that Archie and Myrtle Wright obsessed wouldn’t suit her, offsetting very good of the frequent disarrays and her husband’s long absences at sea. Her son, the future senator and my husband, withdrew his parents’ early years in the smaller and more insular prewar Navy as “something out of the High winds of War.” When the McCains were stationed at Pearl Harbor, he said, his parents dined in formal garment even when they were at home. At John Jr.’s insistence, the family lived on his Navy salary. Roberta recalled the romance and the destitutions of those years with the phrase, “We were too poor to decorate and too proud to whitewash.”

It was Roberta who packed up and moved their own families from base to locate, diverting their cross-country trips to take in sites of culture or natural relevance, an informal education to which her lad properties his restless interest. “I am my mother’s son, ” John often observed.

She accepted the difficulties of the war years, extremely the sprain of knowing how harrowing was her husband’s duty as a submarine skipper, without objection. Later in their matrimony, she helped her husband through his struggle with alcoholism. Both of my husband’s mothers suffer his 51/2 -year captivity as a POW in Vietnam stoically, despite their private misery. On the light they learned of his shootdown, they obstructed a dinner party commitment without mentioning the bulletin to their hosts. When her husband was selected as commander in chief of U.S. powers in the Pacific, they shaped it known they preferred not to discuss their son’s situation with beings outside their own families. John ascribed his own extraordinary resilience during that time to his mother’s example.

John McCain Jr ., by then an admiral, died abruptly of a heart attack in 1981, with Roberta by his surface while aboard an Air Force C-5 returning from Europe. Roberta saluted her son and me, her brand-new daughter-in-law, at Andrew’s AFB with the news–“John, your father is dead”–and then mutely escorted us to the plane, where the admiral’s blanket-covered remains were waiting. On the day of his funeral days later, the day John left the Navy and we moved to Arizona, I could see the approbation in his eyes as he watched his mother at the reception, alluring, uncomplaining, resolved to get on with life.

She was proud of her son’s second career as a leader. Having acquired over the years many friendships with prominent legislators, she understood the demands of the profession. She pestered John whenever she thought he was too full of himself. “Fools calls and fool’s faces are often seen in public targets, ” she often rebuked him for his media appearings. She campaigned enthusiastically for him in his two presidential bids, charming voters, staff, reporters and even his contenders as readily as she charmed her children, grandchildren and in-laws.

She remained an inveterate world traveler until her motion. She and Rowena obsessed their family with frequent excursions to countries where their safety couldn’t be assured, although their intrepidness most frequently amused John. No one ever gratified him more consistently than Roberta, in fact. He adored echoing how a rental auto authority in Paris refused to rent her a vehicle because she was too old. So, she bought her own automobile to keep in Europe. Some years later, she had it carried to the State, and drove it alone cross-country to Los Angeles one Christmas. A state trooper pulled her over outside Flagstaff having clocked her doing 110 mph.

She bore her son’s death, in 2018, and her daughter’s, a year later, with the same dignified carrying she ever oversaw when feel personal losses. She offered comfort to her grandchildren, and shed discreet ruptures of her own. I have so many happier storages of Roberta, and it applauds my feeling to think of her now, reunited with John in their mutual affection culture, laughing at each other’s antics and conveying their amazement at the wonder of it all.

Read more: politico.com