It was the spring of 2002 when Gavin Newsom’s mother Tessa, dying of cancer, stunned him with a voicemail. If he wanted to see her again, she told him, it would need to be before the following Thursday, when she planned to end her life.
Newsom, then a 34-year-old San Francisco supervisor, did not try to dissuade her, he recounted in an interview with the Washington Post. The fast-rising politician was wracked with guilt from being distant and busy as she dealt with the unbearable pain of the breast cancer spreading through her body.
Newsom’s account of his mother’s death at the age of 55 by assisted suicide, and his feelings of grief and remorse toward a woman with whom he had a loving but complex relationship, is one of the most revealing and emotional passages in the California governor’s book, Young Man in a Hurry: A Memoir of Discovery, which will be published Feb. 24.
Newsom, a potential Democratic candidate for president, has seldom spoken of the chapter in his family’s life, which is likely to generate controversy if he enters the race. Assisted suicide, at the time, was illegal in California and remains illegal in all but 12 states and the District of Columbia, according to the advocacy group Death with Dignity.
When that Thursday in 2002 arrived, Newsom and his sister Hilary did as his mother asked and sat by her bedside in Pacific Heights, Newsom said in an interview this week. He wanted her suffering to end, he said, but it would be years before he could forgive her for asking him to be there.
“I hated her for it — to be there for the last breath — for years,” he said in an interview in San Diego this week. “I want to say it was a beautiful experience. It was horrible.”
Forty-five minutes before the “courageous doctor” arrived to administer the medicine that would end her life, Newsom and his sister gave their mother her regular dose of painkillers to keep her comfortable, he said.
When the doctor arrived, Tessa Newsom lucidly answered his questions and told him she was sure of her decision, Gavin Newsom said. Her labored breathing and the gravity of the moment became too much for Newsom’s sister. She left the room. Newsom stayed.
“Then I sat there with her for another 20 minutes after she was dead,” he said, his voice breaking briefly and his eyes welling as he told the story. “My head on her stomach, just crying, waiting for another breath.”
Despite his painful memories, Newsom said that he believes assisted suicide should be legal nationally, that people should have “the freedom to make that decision themselves.” California legalized the practice in 2015 with the “End of Life Option Act.”
Six years after voters approved the practice, and two years after he became governor in 2019, Newsom signed a second bill that reduced the waiting period for a drug-induced suicide from 15 days to 48 hours and eliminated a requirement for a formal written declaration of intent at the end of the process. Last year, Newsom signed a third bill that eliminated a sunset clause in the 2015 bill, making assisted suicide legal in California indefinitely.
When the bill came up in the California legislature, Newsom heard objections not only from churches and religious groups, but also from “the old Irish Catholic side of my family.”
They were “up in arms about that bill, and obviously, by extension, by what my mom did,” he recalled. But Newsom said his own experience with his mother strengthened his support for the bill.
“I watched the physical deterioration, the mental deterioration, just the cries of pain,” he said this week. “She would have just suffered.”
Last year in an interview on the Diary of a CEO podcast, Newsom said he had no regrets about his role — “If you want to come after me, come after me, she needed to do it,” he said.
Tessa Newsom worked three jobs to support her two children after her husband left, Newsom wrote in the book. His father, William Newsom, an attorney who became a judge, was the best friend of the billionaire Gordon Getty — and had for a time helped manage the Getty Trust. Their father’s friendship with the Gettys, which began in high school, created what Newsom described as a “surreal” double life for the two Newsom children, who joined their father and the Gettys during summer vacations that involved private jets, resorts and limousines.
Tessa Newsom, a quiet but dominant force who shaped his work ethic, he said, did not approve of Newsom’s political ambitions.
She urged him to stay immersed in his business, the PlumpJack Group, a wine and hospitality company that he founded in 1992.
“Get out before it’s too late,” Tessa Newsom told her son after he had become a San Francisco supervisor in 1997 and was considering a 2003 run for mayor of San Francisco, which had been his father’s dream.
She never fully explained the admonition. But William Newsom had also harbored political ambitions for a time — running for San Francisco county supervisor and state senator. And the younger Newsom learned years later, through an oral history his father recorded, that his electoral failures and subsequent debt had led to the unraveling of his parents’ marriage, Newsom said in an interview with the Post and in his book.
Newsom — a father of four who is married to Jen Siebel, a documentary filmmaker — said his mother’s warning still haunts him.
“I think about it any time when things are really going down — that she was right,” he said with a laugh. And while many people don’t believe that Newsom is still wrestling with whether he will run for president, his mother’s warnings are part of the quandary, he said.
“I don’t think people are taking me as literally as they should. We’ll see what happens,” he said of a potential presidential run. “Every day, I just try to get better, and be a better husband, be a better father. I’ve got to take care of them, and I can’t do what my father did.”
