When driving from Butte to Missoula, you will see Pana Jo’s mountain.

Heading west as you go past the Bearmouth Chalet on the Clark Fork River, it looks like Interstate 90 is going to drive right into it. Then, the highway bends to the right to curve around what Google Maps calls “Medicine Tree Hill.”

It is a little hill that is mostly covered by trees, but it is one that distinctively stands out.

“I must have seen that mountain a thousand times,” Pana Jo told me a few months before her sixth birthday.

That was in the fall of 1996, and I have thought about my cousin Jody’s daughter each of the dozens, if not hundreds, of times I have driven to Missoula since that day.

Pana Jo, who lost her mother to an illness when she was just 15, passed away at the age of 35 a little more than a month ago. Every time I see that “mountain,” it makes me smile to think about how happy she was.

At the time, I was going to college at the University of Montana, studying journalism. Pana Jo was stuck in the middle of a divorce that was contentious, to say the least. Her mom moved to Missoula, while her dad still lived in Butte.

Every time I went home for the weekend, I would call to see if Pana Jo needed a ride so I could save her parents a few hours and some gas money. The chance to visit with my little cousin made me want go home more often because she was so much fun to be around.

She would roast me like Nikki Glaser, and she would engage in some incredibly deep conversations for such a little girl. Even though she was living through what I figured must have been a nightmare, she was always in a fun mood.

Sometimes we would get back to Missoula before her mom was ready to pick her up. So, I would take her to my dorm room, where we would get a pizza, watch cartoons and do a whole lot of laughing.

Pana Jo was so beloved by her entire extended family. She was born on Jan. 10, 1991, which was nearly three years after my cousin Jerry, an uncle Pana Jo never got to meet but heard so much about, was killed in an automobile accident in the Highlands.

Jerry was only 20 years old, and his death devastated our family. It still hurts.

Late in the night of Jerry’s wake, a few of us stood around his coffin in the front of the church. My older brother, who was amazingly stoic for the first couple of days after Jerry died, broke down and started to cry hysterically.

Jerry’s dad put his arm around him and said, “It’s OK. Something good will happen.”

It took a few years, but our uncle’s words proved to be correct. That something was Pana Jo. For the first time since Jerry’s death, Pana Jo’s arrival made it seem like it was OK for us to be happy again.

Thinking of my time driving Pana Jo also takes me back to a stressful time in my academic career. Back then, I was having some serious doubts about my chosen profession as a writer. I wasn’t sure I was good enough.

That was coming to a head as we were assigned what I thought was a difficult assignment in a 300-level class called “specialized writing,” which was taught by my favorite journalism professor Sharon Barrett. I had her for three or four classes previously. She was good, and she was tough. She held her students to a very high standard.

Today, this assignment seems rather easy. Back then, however, it was a different story.

Each student had to draw a piece of paper out of a hat. Each piece of paper had a word typed on it, and we had to write a story featuring that word in the first paragraph.

I drew the word “roof.” We could write about anything, but we had to use that word.

I don’t remember how long of a story this had to be, but it had to be a real piece of journalism. To pass one of Sharon Barrett’s classes, it also had to be good, and I was not sure I could make it good enough.

It was also early December, and this was our last big assignment. Adding to the pressure was the fact that I had to print one copy for the teacher and one for every student in the class.

We would dissect each story as we sat around the University of Montana School of Journalism’s iconic horseshoe table. If my story stunk, all the classmates I respected so much would see how badly it stunk.

As I stewed over the project, those doubts multiplied. Maybe I should try a different profession, I thought. Maybe I could go home and try a field at Montana Tech. Sure, I was three and a half years into my college career, and knew that I wanted to be a writer for years. But I could still change majors.

Then I drove Pana Jo to Butte on a Friday night. Like always, I picked her up on Sunday afternoon, and we headed back to Missoula.

As we drove down Continental Drive on our way out of town, Pana Jo spotted a Santa Claus decoration on the roof of a house, and she got excited.

She turned to me and boasted, “I’m lucky. Santa Claus comes to my house twice.”

I smiled as the little girl bragged about what must be about the only thing “lucky” about being the child of divorce.

When I was a kid, nothing scared me more than that scenario. Every time my parents would fight, I would fear the devastation of them splitting up. One of my best friends had a step-dad, and it just seemed to make his house feel like anything but a real home.

Never would I want to go through that, and I felt so sorry that Pana Jo was put into my worst-case situation. Somehow, though, it did not seem to faze her. She genuinely seemed to think she was the lucky one.

In an instant, I knew I had the story for my class. I was going to write about Pana Jo, the little girl who would not let a nasty divorce stop her from being happy.

I told her story as I wrote about all the fun we had on our rides back and forth from Butte. I wrote about how difficult that time was supposed to be for her and how she never made it seem that way.

Throughout the story, I sprinkled in some quotes from an interview I did with a social work professor at the school. I can still remember the first sentence, even though I do not have a copy of what I wrote.

“I’m lucky,” she told me as we drove past the Santa Claus on the roof of a house.

Then, I closed with a question she posed to me as I described the Santa Claus fading in my rearview mirror.

“Don’t you wish Santa Clase went to your house twice?” she said. “Yep,” I said. “You sure are lucky.”

To this day, I think that was my favorite story I ever wrote. My classmates really seemed to like it. More importantly, Sharon Barrett loved it.

In front of the class, she told me that when she read the story, fireworks were going off and campaign bottles were popping in her head. She said that I finally became the writer that she always knew I could be.

Just like that, those doubts were gone, and I once again felt like I was doing what I was supposed to be doing.

And I owe it all to Pana Jo, that adorable little girl we already miss so much.

Yes, having Santa Claus go to your house twice must be pretty cool for a child that age. But of the two people riding in that car, I was the lucky one.

We were all lucky to have Pana Jo in our lives, even if she only lived to be 35.

I will get a reminder of that every time I drive past her “mountain.”

— Bill Foley can be reached at foles74@gmail.com. Follow him at twitter.com/Foles74 or Bluesky at @foles74.bsky.social. Listen to him on the ButteCast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you find your favorite podcasts.