Family, friends mourn fist-pumping mama.

Byline: Mark Baker The Register-Guard

She said she was scared, that she did not know how to die.

But Thursday, in the little church on River Avenue in Santa Clara that she called her own, Yolanda Williams left nothing but memories of strength and courage as 150 friends and family members gathered to say goodbye amid a lifetime of photographs and the Italian songs that she so loved.

"She looked for the good in everyone," Sabrina Matthews, Williams' eldest daughter, told those who came to the service at the North Eugene Faith Center. "My mom has touched so many lives in a way that they'll never be the same."

Williams, who died Saturday at 64 after a five-year battle with cancer, was the recipient of a special gift in April 2004. Her youngest daughter, Hollywood producer and North Eugene High School graduate Gina Matthews, brought a special screening of her latest film, "13 Going on 30," back to Eugene.

Back to mom.

Gina Matthews had hoped the gesture would help spur her mother's recovery, and for a while - through one chemotherapy treatment after another - Williams did get better. But in the end, the breast cancer that began in 2000, spread to her lungs two years later, and finally to her brain, could not be overcome.

"Of all the things that I got from my mom, it's her strength and courage and fearless nature to do anything that I remember the most," said Gina Matthews, 37, who gave birth to her mother's sixth grandchild, Roman, in Eugene on April 25.

Born in Naples, Italy, on Oct. 14, 1940, Yolanda Mafalda Williams was the ninth of 12 children born to Vincenzo and Concetta DeChiara. In 1951, the family moved to Roseburg to be closer to Yolanda's older sister, Italia, who moved to the United States after marrying an American G.I.

Yolanda became the first in the family to graduate from high school, receiving her diploma from Roseburg High School in 1958. She moved to Eugene in 1968. And nothing was more important to her, or gave her greater joy, than her three daughters and the grandchildren they gave her, said Donna Brink, pastor at the North Eugene Faith Center. "She was born to be a mother," Brink said. "In the birth of her daughters, she found true bliss."

She also found that she had a talent for making people laugh, even when she wasn't trying to.

At just 5-foot-1, Yolanda Williams would stand in the church on Sundays and pump her fist as she sang. Her favorite way to greet anyone she knew was: "I'm OK, are you OK?" And that's what her daughters, Sabrina, 42, Gina and Debra Healey, 39, had printed on T-shirts for last summer's cancer relay walk at Lane Community College.

Several wore the same shirts to the memorial service.

Too ill to attend the Los Angeles premiere of "13 Going on 30" last year, Yolanda Williams sat in the middle of a theater full of family and friends at Eugene's Cinema World and raved about her daughter's film that went on to become a success.

"Do I think she's got a hit on her hands? Yes I do!" Williams said with a characteristic pump of her fist.

Hospitalized again in March, doctors told her family that she would not make it through the weekend. But with daughter Gina expecting her first child at the end of April, Yolanda Williams told them they were wrong.

"I'm going to be here for my grandson," she said. "That's what I'm going to do."

"It was a demonstration of willpower like I've never seen," said Ron Scharbo of Atlanta, the father of Williams' son-in-law, Grant Scharbo.

And she did hold her grandson. And then she lived another month before dying in her bed with her three daughters and her husband, Al Williams, by her side.

She never felt whole without her daughters near her, Debra Healey said. "But when all three of us were there, she felt complete."

CAPTION(S):

Producer Gina Matthews hugs her mother, Yolanda Williams, during a movie premiere last year. "My mom has touched so many lives in a way that they'll never be the same." - SABRINA MATTHEWS, YOLANDA WILLIAMS' ELDEST DAUGHTER