Jo Ann Smith, 66, Pala Indian Reservation

Not quite three years ago, Jo Ann Smith got a new liver — a transplant — and a new lease on life. Her old liver — damaged from years of unhealthy eating and diabetes, her family says — had forced her to retire after about 30 years as founding director of the Pala Youth Center in Pala, one of the loci of life for the Pala Band of Mission Indians, to which she belonged.

For a time, Smith was back to her old self; even though she’d retired, she kept showing up at the youth center again, telling the new director — who happened to be her daughter, April Cantu — how she had done things. “It was like she never left!” Cantu marveled.

And with her new liver, she tried to police what her kids and grandkids ate and drank: “She would criticize what I was eating all the time. That’s how our phone calls were: ‘ What are you eating for lunch? A pizza? Oh my God.’ And she was like that with alcohol. She didn’t like the fact that we had drinks.”

When the pandemic started, Cantu said, her mother “was very strict with us — ‘ You guys need to do this, do that’ — and she’d take precautions, wear a mask, but she wouldn’t listen when I told her to stay home and stay away from people. “She didn’t want to let it consume her life.” And then, at the end of August, she came down with COVID- 19. She was hospitalized and then put on a ventilator. Although she couldn’t talk much, and at the end couldn’t speak at all, the family got to say its goodbyes, thanks to a kind nurse who shared her phone so that Smith could FaceTime with her loved ones. She died on Sept. 11. She was 66 and had lived on the Pala reservation her entire life.

Hers was not the family’s only COVID- 19 death. Within days of each other, one of Smith’s aunts and the husband of another aunt also died. There’s somber understatement in what Cantu says: “It was a hard month; it’s been horrible for our family.”

Smith was an only child, but she made up for it by solo parenting her four kids and their kids and her extended family; every year, she took them all on vacation to Disneyland and picked up the tab.

The kids who came to the Pala Youth Center were almost like family too. Almost every summertime Friday for decades, she took the youth center kids on some field trip — to the fair, to Legoland, to SeaWorld. By the time she retired, the kids she first knew were sending their own kids to the center. She liked to say that “these darn kids keep me going and keep me young.”

The family has been watching home videos of their pre- COVID- 19 get- togethers — like a grown nephew creeping up behind Smith and scaring her with a lizard — and listening to “hilarious” voicemails of her gossiping about people they knew.

No one remembers how she got her nickname, Goo, and no one ever called her anything else. But Cantu, her daughter, and her granddaughter Gabriella Munoz remembered fondly that there was nothing soft or gooey about her. If she didn’t like something, you knew it. And if she did, you’d know it too.

“She was a very straight- to- the- core woman,” Munoz remembered. “If she had something to say, she was going to say it.”

For April Cantu, her mother’s legacy is that “she raised us to work for our community, to work for our tribe. That’s what she put in our heads.”