Viera Pablant never thought anything was impossible. And with
her optimism and hard work, nearly nothing was.
Gilroy – Viera Pablant never thought anything was impossible. And with her optimism and hard work, nearly nothing was. She earned a doctorate despite being an impoverished immigrant, home-schooled her children in a rustic house on top of Mt. Madonna despite her husband dying while she was carrying their second child, and remained in great humor through the last moments of her life.
“The (Mt. Madonna park) ranger said she was the toughest person he had ever met,” said friend Joe Sims, who attended college with Pablant and her husband.
Tough as she was, her work and passion focused on defending the rights of children and helping people forge bonds of friendship. The trilingual psychologist ran her own private practice and consulted with Santa Cruz, Santa Clara and San Benito county agencies. She died Friday at 62 after a six-month-long battle with cancer.
“We lost somebody who was really a part of the soul of this area,” friend Jack Foley said.
Pablant was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina to parents of Ukrainian descent. At 18, she and her husband, Pavel, came to America to continue their education. They started in Baltimore, where her brother lived, but in 1964 began a trip out west that changed their lives.
“They ran out of gas in Houston and stayed to get their Ph.D. in psychology,” Sims said.
The couple spent 10 years in Texas universities, eking out a living from two small teacher’s assistant salaries.
“One week, they only had enough to buy flour and yeast,” said 25-year old son Novimir Pablant. “And they had to eat that for several weeks.”
After university, the couple, armed with the knowledge of Spanish, English and Ukranian, worked with impoverished populations in Arizona and Illinois for two years before settling in San Benito County in 1977. She began a career in psychology, aiding organizations that fought child abuse and promoted the psychological health of children. She also began teaching the practices and principals of creating and maintaining healthy friendships.
However, Viera Pablant still had high hurdles ahead.
In 1985, with a 2-year old son and a daughter on the way, Viera Pablant’s husband died. Rather than shying away from the work of rearing two children, she decided to home-school both of them, balancing their instruction with professional obligations and tending the Mt. Madonna-top plot where the family lived.
“She single-handedly raised these two kids,” Foley said. “She devoted every ounce of her strength to raising them and raising them well.”
Both Novimir Pablant and his sister, 22-year-old Antaeres Pablant, graduated college and are pursuing higher degrees.
Throughout these trials, Viera Pablant kept a positive attitude. Even as she faced a continual worsening prognosis concerning the colon cancer that would eventually kill her, she insisted that friends and family mail her not sympathy cards, but jokes. Her optimism was so grounded in science that she even began to affect her doctors, Novimir Pablant said.
She told them, “The best way to heal is to be positive and negativity isn’t going to help the situation,” Novimir Pablant said. “(The doctors) really changed the way that they were talking to us.”
Novimir and Antaeres Pablant have taken their mother’s attitude to heart and will hold a life-celebration ceremony Sunday at 2pm in the Gilroy Methodist Church, 7600 Church St. In addition, they have set up a scholarship at Gavilan College for donations in lieu of flowers.
“She had a wonderful life and she would rather we celebrated her life than mourn her death.”
