Leadership Is Legacy
Let’s talk about my oldest and dearest friend Tamatha Thomas-Haase
We were in 8th grade, on a Rhine River cruise with our classmates, when it became obvious—even to me—that Jimmy Anderson wanted to kiss me. I was a wreck with nerves. So I went to the smartest, strongest, most no-nonsense person I knew.
“Tamatha, how do I kiss a boy?”
She leaned in, whispering fervent instructions as the wind whipped around us on the deck of the riverboat. The detail I remember most? “Do not open your mouth too wide—like, no wider than this.” And then she leaned back from her whispering to demonstrate, opening her mouth just so. I have replayed that moment through tears of laughter a million times in the forty years since. I can’t imagine what everyone else saw: Tamatha leaning away, demonstrating “the correct width,” then leaning back in to fiercely whisper the rest of her advice.
That’s Tamatha Thomas-Haase in a nutshell. Fierce. Funny. Practical. And the embodiment of leadership from day one.
We met in 7th grade at Kaiserslautern American Junior High School—go Vikings! She was the coolest person I’d ever met, and I couldn’t believe my luck when she wanted to be my friend. Nearly every weekend, I’d bike a mile from my house in Weilerbach across the barley fields to her family’s rented farmhouse. Whenever I “ran away from home,” as bratty 12-year-old girls sometimes do, it was always to her house. Her dad was in the US Army, her mom taught at Ramstein American High. My dad was a civilian contractor from 1984 to 1988. For those four years, I grew up in her orbit.
Tamatha was the ultimate teenage leader. Whenever I call her my favorite person, she protests: “But we met at such a horrible time! I was such an awful person in middle school.” That is far from true. She was a guiding force in my choices back then, and for all our brattiness, we were very good girls. I credit much of my growing up to her. I learned from Tamatha—sometimes by example and often by direct instruction—how to stand up to a bully, how to flirt in two languages, how to say no to bad influences, and yes, even how to use a tampon.
Tamatha, me, and Tracey at the Santa Monica Pier in 2021
She wasn’t just on student council our sophomore year of high school—she recruited our whole friend group to run as a slate: president (Tamatha), vice president (Tracey), secretary (me), and treasurer (Dede). She was goalkeeper on varsity soccer and an unexpectedly amazing cheerleader in the fall.
And that was just the beginning.
For more than 30 years, Tamatha has been a fierce public health practitioner—facilitating communities of practice, writing curricula and tools, leading meetings and conferences for state and federal agencies as well as national nonprofits. She’s spent decades rooting her work in connection—linking people to each other and to knowledge in service of collective wellbeing.
She also brought her leadership home to Vermont, serving as Chair of the Town of Duxbury Selectboard. In one public letter about a proposed homeless shelter, she wrote: “If our systems fail one of us, they fail us all.” That’s Tamatha: naming hard truths, demanding accountability, and still rooting it all in compassion.
“If our systems fail one of us, they fail us all.”
And yet—right now, she’s underemployed. (The Queen of Never Sitting Idly By has plenty to keep her occupied, but is not currently under contract with the government agencies she should be leading.) Not because she stopped being a badass, but because the current administration doesn’t value the expertise, equity lens, and lived wisdom leaders like her bring. The system that should be supporting her instead shut the door. That, too, is part of her story—and part of the reckoning we need if we’re serious about legacy leadership.
Tamatha never stops leading. Diagnosed in 2018 with a rare and aggressive form of breast cancer—one with well-documented racial and socioeconomic disparities—she’s made this disease itself a focus for her leadership. She’s pulled back the curtain on breast cancer as a social justice issue and challenged the militarized language that frames treatment and patients alike.
The other legacy of her lifetime is Grand Exit—the podcast she co-hosts with Chelsea Leader Gold. Now entering its third season, it’s all about what Tamatha loves most: having conversations, easy and hard, with those who have something to say about the life–death–legacy continuum. Go. Listen. Now.
Seven years after being diagnosed with Stage III-C triple negative inflammatory breast cancer, Tamatha is living, now metastatically, in what she calls “a beautiful pile of juxtapositions.” She is still a wife, a mom, a practitioner with a radical mission: to be remembered for the whole damn thing—her pretty parts and her ugly bits—so that her legacy is really hers.
This November, I’ll see Tamatha on stage for the first time (unless you count the time she took the dais at my father's funeral to give the funniest and most heartwarming eulogy ever) at End Well 2025. Tickets are available—and if you want to learn what it means to live, to lead, and to leave a legacy, I can’t imagine a better place to be.
Tamatha’s leadership is fearless and tender, practical and profound. She’s taught me that legacy isn’t what you leave behind after you’re gone—it’s how you live, right now, with love, courage, humor, and community.
My invitation to you: Who in your life is embodying leadership and legacy right now? And how can you let them know what they mean to you—this week, not someday?
