For Albany lawmaker, a devastating loss
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Since the summer of 2020, I’ve talked to Assemblywoman Pat Fahy more than a dozen times, I would guess, about a range of topics that included the future of Interstate 787, her burning desire to bring a children’s museum to downtown Albany and, recently, her legislation to protect the night sky from light pollution.
Fahy is a dedicated and conscientious lawmaker, a rebuke to the negative stereotypes the Legislature, more broadly, has earned over the years. That was true before June 2020, and, somehow, she seemed as committed to her work afterward. I don’t know how she did it.
That June nearly two years ago was when Fahy’s son, Brendan Fahy Bequette, was diagnosed with an aggressive, rare mediastinal germ cell cancer, beginning an ordeal that ended late last month when he passed
away in New York City at the age of 25.
This is where words fail. There is no adequate way to describe the tragedy of a young death, the unfulfilled promise. Every phrase feels deficient or cliche, including the obvious truth that no parent should know the loss of a child.
“He was a kid who really wanted to live,” Fahy said. “We’re just devastated.”
Brendan, born in Chicago, was a 2014 graduate of Albany High School, an introverted soul who initially figured he’d have a career focused on engineering and science. But his life changed course when he discovered filmmaking and photography, leading him to transfer from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to study cinema at Ithaca College.
His path wasn’t always easy to understand for his mother, a committed policy wonk most comfortable with good, hard facts.
“I don’t have an artistic bone in my body,” she said. “But when he started getting into arts and photography, I started to see the world differently. He changed how I saw the world.”
That’s what art, at its best, is supposed to do for all of us, and certainly the visual work Brendan made was both challenging and lovely. He’d chosen a tremendously difficult career path, though, and Fahy said he was just beginning to find his footing in the industry — and life more broadly — when chest pain led to the terrible, shocking diagnosis.
Brendan and his family — including Fahy’s husband, B. Wayne Bequette, and their daughter, Eileen Fahy Bequette — were told from the start that his long-term prognosis was not good, Fahy said, yet the 20 months that followed included times of belief and optimism, periods when all the worrying and the painful treatments and
the endless hours in hospitals and the latenight
calls with doctors seemed like they could stave off the worst.
Early last year, Brendan’s cancer was in remission, providing hope that the nightmare was at an end.
“And then it came back again with a vengeance,” Fahy said. “Life throws you curve balls.”
Having a son with cancer was a full-time job unto itself, and Fahy thought about quitting the Assembly. Juggling the Legislature and her son’s disease could feel impossible and overwhelming, given how there was always too much to do. (Fahy once Zoom called into a committee meeting from her son’s hospital room.)
But the Albany Democrat kept at it, perhaps because her work was a welcome distraction, a reprieve from the pain. It was also a reminder, as if she needed one, of just how trivial the Legislature’s partisanship and rancor could be. Important things happen in its chambers, of course, but sometimes in the silliest of ways.
When we talked last month about her legislation to combat light pollution, Fahy sounded relatively hopeful about Brendan — optimism was something she worked hard at, she said. But his health turned suddenly and deteriorated rapidly. Brendan died Feb. 28.
Decades earlier, when Fahy moved to Albany from Chicago with her husband and her infant boy, she felt like a new mom without a support network. They were outsiders in a new town, far from home.
The outpouring after Brendan’s passing, including at a wake and funeral held at St. Vincent De Paul Church on Madison Avenue, showed how much that had changed. The sharing of sorrow, support and love was staggering and comforting, Fahy said. It was a light amid the darkness.
“I’m going to spend the rest of my life saying thank you to people,” she said.
Fahy, first elected in 2012, said she expects that the loss of her gentle, sensitive child will change her Assembly work in ways she can’t predict. She has already become more engaged in medical issues, keenly aware of how frightened families are forced to engage with a bewildering system.
But Fahy will go about her work with a hole in her heart that can’t be filled. Her life, she said, will never be the same. Brendan, her beautiful Brendan, has gone.