BROTHER REMEMBERS SISTER LOST TO COVID AS HIS BEST FRIEND

•1953-2020

Cathy Hamilton had retired and was ready to begin the next phase of her life, which would bring her closer to her beloved brother in a new city that for years had been her second home.

That phase will never happen. Hamilton died of complications related to COVID-19 on July 17. She was 68.

“We were best friends,” her brother Gaidi Finnie said.

Finnie, executive director of the San Diego African American Museum of Fine Arts, remember his sister as someone who enjoyed life and always thought of others.

“She was very kind, had a big laugh, a big smile,” said Finnie, an Imperial Beach resident who was profiled in The San Diego Union-tribune last year.

Hamilton lived in Atlanta but was in San Diego at least once a month and always flew out for new openings at her brother’s museum, and she was planning to move to the city. Her frequent flights were possible as a 30-year employee of Delta Air Lines, a perk Finnie also enjoyed.

“I was always traveling around the world, like a nomad,” he said. He and is exwife named their son Paris and daughter Milan after cities they had traveled to about nine months before their children’s births.

While the pandemic had restricted travel this year, Hamilton had planned to fly to San Diego for Thanksgiving. While she was in the hospital after contracting COVID, she told her brother that there was no way she would miss flying out. She died the next next day.

“She was getting better in the hospital,” he said. “She was coming home. She was planning on buying food for all the nurses who helped her and she was going to make barbecue.”

Finnie said their mother died when he was 17, their father died in the 1990s and their brother died 13 years ago.

“It was just her and I left,” he said. “She was the keeper of the history of the family. She knew everything that I could not remember. It’s hard to lose that.”

In her frequent trips to San Diego, Hamilton loved to make elaborate Sunday dinners at her brother’s house, where they would set out the best china. In another act of love for him, Finnie said she paid to have his house cleaned when he was laid up with a broken ankle.

She left behind a son, Ray Hamilton, and daughter, Joi Simmons, who called Finnie at 3 a.m. the day her mother died to break the news.

“It was devastating to me,” he said. “It was just hard to believe. Even to this day, it’s hard to believe. I wrote a letter to her after she passed.”

“I see your smile and your support for me to continue on my journey. I will hold you close in my heart until we meet again,” he wrote.

“I love you my sister (said like only a brother can). Gaidi.”

Cathy Hamilton with her brother, Gaidi Finnie. She died in July.