Lights of Remembrance to honor Ryan Farnsworth, others lost in 2019

During the year that Ryan Farnsworth lived in Sonoma he met so many people, stopping to chat with passersby as he traveled the bike path in his electric wheelchair. He was nearing the end of a years-long battle with ALS by then, yet his positive outlook, warm spirit and desire to live life with an open heart never diminished.

Rather than making people feel sad or sorry for him, he uplifted the mood of everyone he met. “His goal was to help people,” his mother Trish Rice said. He created a website and uploaded videos online, reaching out to others with ALS and to his healthy followers as well with the message that life is precious and should be lived with joy.

Farnsworth’s optimism will resonate at the annual lighting of the Hospice tree at the Lights of Remembrance event Dec. 8 at 6 p.m. on the Plaza. As his friends, family and many who never met him gather to light a candle in the darkness, raise their voice in song and remember all those whose lives have ended, including Farnsworth, a sense of happiness will prevail. He would not have wanted it to be a somber occasion.

Farnsworth was living in Telluride, Colorado, working as a server and avidly hiking, mountain biking and snowboarding. “I was in the best shape of my life,” he said in a video, when he started having trouble holding onto plates in the restaurant where he worked. No matter how hard he worked out, his muscles were getting weaker, not stronger.

At first, in part because he was only in his 20s, doctors suspected motor neuron disorder, until he was officially diagnosed with ALS at UCSF in 2015. He had been living with his father in Colorado for a few years after graduating from Fresno State with a degree in communications. Once the fatal diagnosis was received he returned to his native California, moving in with his mother and her husband Bob Rice.

ALS is a degenerative disease that causes the body to slowly shut down as muscles fail to work, while the mind remains untouched. Usually those with the disease lose their ability to speak in the early stages, yet Farnsworth could speak up until his final days, and he was comfortable talking with both friends and strangers. After he died on Feb 19, 2019, at age 32, his mother received many messages from people she had never met, telling her that they had met her son on the bike path and found him to be a remarkable young man. “In the short time he lived here he became part of the community,” Bob Rice said. “He would sit and talk to everybody.”

His mother is still amazed that he never complained. “He would share his love of life with everyone,” she said.

Rather than become depressed living with a fatal, debilitating disease he sought to make a difference. In the early phases when he could still manage to get on and off a plane he volunteered to spend a month in India, teaching impoverished children to read. “It was one of the coolest things I’ve done,” he said in a news article at the time.

He was very active with the Muscular Dystrophy Association, which supports ALS patients, becoming a spokesperson and participating in many fundraising walks. MDA provided him with a specially equipped computer that he could operate with his feet when his hands failed. He used it to create a website, ALS Wellness, where he wrote a blog and shared advice,

Farnsworth also became a poet, self-publishing “Seeds of Light Sown,” which he wrote to inspire others to seek out the “best version of themselves and appreciate the beauty of life right now.” In its forward he wrote, “ALS is the great simplifier, reducing physical function so that the only choice given is to look within as outer responsibilities fall away. As I look, love is what I’m finding.”

“His videos and his spirit go on, everybody still watches them,” his mother said, as she scrolled through the hundreds of photos of her son she stores on her iPad. He videoed a “Farewell Message” only days before he died, and it has been viewed on YouTube almost 1,600 times.

“My life has been a beautiful story and a life well lived,” he said in the video. “Had I never received the diagnosis of ALS I would never have experienced the personal and spiritual growth I’ve known.”

His light will shine from the hospice tree throughout the holiday season, a glow to help Sonomans remember to live their best lives. As Farnsworth did.