Patrice Porter was the matriarch of the family BBQ business. COVID-19 took her away
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Elizabeth Porter is nearly certain her mother knew her condition was worse than she was letting on.
Porter last spoke with her mother, Patrice Porter, the day before she died. It was a lengthy phone call, Porter recalled, the type the two often shared.
But in retrospect, there was also something strange about it, Porter said. Her mother — who had received positive COVID-19 results five days earlier — kept mentioning how she had been “working so hard,” and felt like it was finally time to “take a rest.”
Porter said her mother also mentioned several times during the conversation that she hoped she had adequately prepared her five children for life.
“She just started telling me, ‘I hope that I’ve taught you enough,’ and ‘I hope I’ve taught your siblings enough,’” Porter, 27, recalled. “I was like, ‘This is a little weird, but OK.’”
“And then (the next day), my brother called me and said they were trying to get mom’s heart started,” Porter said.
Patrice Porter — who grew up in Kirkland but spent most of her adult life in Tacoma — passed away from COVID-19 on Sunday, Dec. 20 at Good Samaritan Hospital in Puyallup. She was 58.
After a life largely spent in services to others — including her family — she was certainly no stranger to hard work.
For the previous seven years, Patrice Porter had spent long hours at Fred Meyer in Puyallup, struggling to earn enough to pay the mortgage on the house she shared with four of her college-age children. It was a career she was forced into by necessity, after the sudden death of her husband, Alton Porter, in 2012.
Before that, Alton and Patrice had sacrificed nearly everything to establish and grow the popular Porter’s Place Southern Cuisine & BBQ, which first opened in 1994 on Tacoma’s Eastside. For more than two decades, the couple operated the restaurant at several locations, including staffing a booth at what was then Safeco Field. The restaurant closed shortly after Alton’s death.
Most important of all to her mother, according to Porter, was the work she put in to practice her faith. With her husband, Porter’s Place Southern Cuisine and BBQ often seemed to be more about helping people than the food, she said.
Looking back, Porter recalled her parents offering jobs and second chances to people with nowhere else to turn. She remembered how, when she was little, employees would often stay at the family’s home. She remembered how, sometimes, people would take advantage of her parents’ generosity, and how her dad would just shrug, certain that “God will take care of it.”
She remembered how, every year, the family would gather to cook for anyone who was hungry at Emergency Food Network’s free Thanksgiving dinners.
Her parents were driven to make an impact in people’s lives, even when they barely had enough for themselves, Porter recalled.
“They believed the restaurant was their ministry,” she said.
A long-time parishioner at Church For All Nations, Patrice Porter’s faith carried her through many tough times in her life, her daughter said. After initially marrying her high school sweetheart, her mother lost her first child. Shortly thereafter, her first husband left her.
With Alton — who Patrice would later meet at church — all five of her children, including a set of twins, were born prematurely after she developed preeclampsia. Two of the children later developed a disease that causes the bones around the knee to grow abnormally, resulting in multiple childhood surgeries and hospital stays.
Perhaps the hardest challenge of all for her mother, Porter said, was when Alton passed away. Not only did she find herself without the partner she loved, but she suddenly had to find a new way to support herself. She had worked for more than 20 years in the family business, but didn’t have a high school diploma or a GED.
Her mom “went into survival mode,” Porter said. Sometimes, her grandma would help pay for groceries. After moving away to college, she would frequently send money home.
“It was hard. She barely made ends meet,” Porter recalled. “A lot changed. She worked her butt off at Fred Meyer, trying to get as many hours as she could.”
The loss of her father in 2012 is one reason why her mother tried so hard to minimize the impact COVID-19 was taking on her in her final days, Porter believes. In the years that preceded Alton’s death, the family had also lost a grandfather and an aunt.
Even as she was suffering the most, her mother was thinking about others, Porter said.
“I think she didn’t want us to worry, because we just don’t have a lot of family,” Porter said
This story was originally published February 6, 2021 at 6:00 AM.
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