With a heavy heart I write this. Our family tree has lost one of its sturdiest branches. Family matriarch, thoughtful and loving caregiver, zany companion, my dear sister Helen passed away last month, at the beginning of spring. My brothers, John, Bill, and Bob, mourn with me.
From my earliest years I was aware of her love and thoughtfulness. Helen planned my first birthday party when I was six and stayed up late that fall sewing dresses for my first school term. After she graduated from high school and moved to Minneapolis, she continued to help me. When I moved to Thailand to serve as a Peace Corps volunteer, she wrote long letters keeping me up-to-date on people and events, and reminding me—always—to stay safe.
Helen loved the natural world. Once, when staying in her small house, I arose just as the sun was rising. I found Helen at the kitchen sink, looking out the window. I joined her and asked what she was admiring. “Everything. And I’m thanking the Lord for the gift of another day.”
Helen especially loved flowers, wherever she found them: in gardens, in flower pots, along the roads, in paintings, and on china plates and teacups. She was a founder and life-long member of her district’s flower club, and helped plan educational programs for members and guests. She took a topic of a series especially to heart. Its subject was the profound value of imperfection in humanity and life, exemplified in the Japanese flower-arranging practice of ikebana. She and I shared that belief, agreeing that stems and objects slightly off-kilter were always more pleasurable to the eye than those upright and neatly cropped and pruned.
Each spring Helen and I would report on our sightings of irises, crocus, and columbines. Helen always commented on her blossoming peony bushes, describing the colors: white, pale pink and deep cerise, and her lilac trees: purple, white, and one tree, bearing the blossom’s namesake, lilac.
That is, until her peony bushes grew so lush and thick that they became home to nests of voles. After years of trying to eliminate the pesky animals (every way short of poison), she grabbed a shovel, and after days of hard labor, dug the bushes up, and placed the rhizomes in a rusty children’s wagon at the end of her drive with a “Free” sign.
During those same years, lilac roots were invading her house’s foundation, allowing rain water to leak into the basement. She managed to chop down and saw off the trunks and branches of the trees, but the roots proved a tougher adversary. After trying every tool she owned, she borrowed a plumber’s pipe cutter to break through them.
I was stunned when she eliminated the peony bushes, devastated when she tore out the lilacs. But Helen balanced practicality with emotion, and humbly recognized that nature had won.
Yet it’s the little things that Helen did that I cherish the most. Last week as I was going through keepsakes looking for photos of Helen, I came upon a slim illustrated children’s book about the first weeks of a fawn growing up in a woods. I remembered that, in July of 2014, I’d arrived in Minnesota from New York late the night before my husband’s funeral which was to be held early the next morning. Everything, everybody had been rushed. Guests, all of whom had also gotten up early and driven for hours, were arriving singly or in pairs with only minutes to spare.
The opening chords of the organ processional were thundering through the nave of the abbey church, and my sons Steve and Peter, Peter’s little son Theo, and the guests were all standing when Helen hurried up to us. She gave me a quick kiss and smiled at Theo.
“This is for you,” she whispered, and handed him a small paper bag, a ribbon at the top. It had contained the small book I found last week and a roll of Lifesavers. Later she told me the reason she’d arrived so late was that she’d been searching for that age-appropriate book. Her thoughtfulness helped a sad, rambunctious, talkative three-year-old sit still, remain quiet, and stay in place during the two-hour-long solemn service.
Helen and I laughed often, and, always, we compared and appreciated the beauty of the seasons in Minnesota and in New York. We talked in detail about the first trees and flowers to bloom, sightings of butterflies and songbirds, the first leaves to change their color in autumn.
The very day I learned that Helen had passed away, I spotted stems of crocuses and dwarf irises pushing up from the soil in flowerbeds on my street.
“I’ll have to tell Helen,” I thought. “She’ll like that.”
