A Remarkable Persson

Things come in bunches.  And so this spring was a season of loss when first a friend passed away, then my mother-in-law, and finally another extraordinary woman, whom I actually only met three times in person, but who impacted the world in important and aspirational ways.

The remarkable Helen Persson was 95 years old when she died.  And although I recognize that none of us are going to ever cheat death, especially in their ninth decade, the news stayed with me for days.

People throw around the description that someone has a “sparkle in their eye,” but in her case it was a physical fact.  Her hazel eyes virtually twinkled and snapped with life, interest and a little bit of healthy mischief.

She used her influence wisely, and understood the power of giving back when the world has handed you good fortune.   And to that end, she gave generously during her lifetime in the areas of education, the arts and assisting our military families.

Helen is one of those American dream stories that continue to reinforce that a little luck, combined with elbow grease and chutzpah, can carry someone a long way down the road.  She grew up in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, the daughter of Russian immigrants who imbued her with a strong faith and a love of music.  And she would go on to sing professionally, encouraged by an officer in the Navy who had heard her perform.  Music and opera singing became both her passion and vocation.  And after leaving the military, Helen would have many roles in operatic productions, often playing the lead.

She got her nursing degree at the University of Pennsylvania College of Nursing and shipped out after Pearl Harbor during WW2 with the Navy Nurse Corp.  Working her way up, she attained the rank of Lieutenant Commander.  When I met Helen for the first time, she emotionally recounted some of her experiences caring for the wounded in the war.  She spoke of the boys she could not save, the ones who asked for their mothers before they died.  She understood first hand that head injuries were among the most devastating and severe wounds of war.

It was this connection, her close association with caring for those who had sustained blast injuries that brought me into Helen’s orbit for the first time.  She had followed my husband Bob’s career as an anchor on television.  When the news was announced that he had been hit by a roadside bomb, Helen instantly understood that the prognosis was not good.


On my first visit to her home in Pam Beach, Helen told me that she would never forget the young men she had cared for.  The experience of tending to young soldiers, who were wounded in battle, would forever forge her appreciation for and dedication to our nation’s military families.  Helen considered herself connected to them.

I would hear the sentiments and sorrow articulated by Helen echoed by many of the nurses who served in Vietnam.  Their pain and trauma was, like so many of our medical personnel in wartime, never given an outlet or acknowledged by the military and the public.  No one, in pervious wars, recognized the post traumatic stress that comes with treating injured and dying soldiers.  Most of the incredible medics, nurses, doctors and other health professionals who served our troops lived silently with their internal scars of trauma and stress.

It was our mutual connection to Colgate University that brought me into contact with Helen.  Her husband, Ted Persson ’42, was a generous benefactor to Bob’s and my alma mater and a mutual friend from the University introduced us.  Although I was eager to speak with her, at that first meeting I was unsure of what condition she might be in at her age.

The woman who greeted me, with that signature twinkle and wonderful laugh, was not compromised one bit by any cognitive clouding.  She was sharp as a tack, asking brilliant questions and telling stories of her gutsy, accomplished life.

She had read our book, “In an Instant,” and she wanted to know more about the Bob Woodruff Foundation, which helps injured service members and their families cope with the wounds of war.  She asked thoughtful questions about our mission and drilled me on how our dollars were spent. 

It was a few weeks later, after that first visit, that our fledgling foundation got a phone call from Helen.  She wanted to make a donation, to help give us the wings we needed to tackle some of the long-term issues plaguing our service members.


I can picture exactly where I was standing when I got the call from the foundation’s Executive Director.  I was at a spa where two dear friends had kidnapped me to “caregive the caregiver” as they called it, following the grueling year of putting our family back together during Bob’s long recovery.  I stepped outside into the sunlight to take the call.

“Are you sitting down,” our executive director asked.   I wasn’t.

“I just got off the phone with Helen Persson.  She’s writing us a check for one million dollars.”  Silence.  I was speechless.  And then I burst into tears and sat down. 

For each of those remaining years of her life, Bob and I were honored to be invited to her annual birthday party in Palm Beach.  They were always intimate affairs, with the people surrounding her she loved most, her family, her fellow opera buffs, some of the folks from the hospital where she was a benefactress and many others who were the definition of devoted friends.

At the first party I attended, Helen belted out a song for her guests, accompanied by a pianist.  I remember being captivated by the look of pure joy on her face at the ability to entertain us all.

Over the years we stayed in touch through phone calls and notes.  We put a scrapbook together for her of some of the families that her generous donation had helped.  I was able to travel to one more of her birthday celebrations, but each time Bob was called away for a journalistic assignment.  Once he was actually holding plane tickets and then got called away the night before.

Both of us had Helen’s 95^th birthday written in pen on our calendars.  But this past year she pulled a fast one on us, holding the party on the weekend presumably so that it would be easier for out of town guests to travel there.  We were both very disappointed to realize that we had solidly booked commitments on the date of her soiree.  We would miss another year.  But Bob taped a video message to her and told her he would be there next year, regardless of whatever news was breaking and where.

Helen’s death shouldn’t have shocked us.  At some point the body simply gives out.  But the news filled me with remorse.  We would not get another chance to see Helen, to hear her stories about the past, to listen to the laugh that always made you smile when you heard it. 

Weeks later, once again, a call from our foundation.  Helen Persson had remembered the military families and the wounded in her will.  She had honored the work of the Bob Woodruff Foundation with another substantial donation.  More tears of joy. This time I made sure to sit down.

This year we will be establishing an award for Helen Persson as a way to honor her legacy of service.  It is fitting that the intention of the award is to recognize a “Persson” who has given admirably in the area of veteran’s causes and veteran’s service organizations.

I like to imagine that somewhere up there in the big old heavens, Helen is reuniting with many of her old friends, her husband and family, and I imagine a number of the young men whom she once cared for during World War II.   That’s the way I like to picture it, anyway.

Helen Persson left her mark in ways too numerous to detail here, and if I did it would sound like a lengthy obituary.  She lived fully and loved large, and she remains a shining example to me that there are big and little ways to positively impact this world.  She didn’t just twinkle, she shone.  May we all move through the world a little like Helen.

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FEVER BLISTERS AND EX BOYFRIENDS

Picture this:  I’m about to see my college boyfriend for the first time in 15 years.  I’m flying into his town for a book talk and will be staying at his house.  That’s right.  With his wife and kids.  He’s picking me up at the airport now and we’re triangulating where to meet via cell phone. 

 

Background:   This isn’t some prom date kind of boyfriend.  This was my first serious college relationship, my first adult love, the kind of solid, healthy relationship I’d wish for all of my daughters.

 

Disclosure:  We’ve remained in touch for years, and my husband loves him.  I love his wife.  The four of us lived in Northern California back when they first met and before we had kids.  So, if you imagined me starving myself for two months to get down to some kind of skinny jeans fighting weight, it’s not like that. This is a guy who lovingly cleaned my meatloaf splattered vomit off his record collection (and my face) after my 20th birthday celebration.   This is a good guy, the kind of guy that has prompted my husband to regularly remark “You had good taste.”  I’d like to think I still do.

 

Regardless, 15 years without seeing someone and you might be hankering to put your best foot--- or face—forward.   But here was the thing.  A few days earlier I had booked a facial laser treatment, to scrub off all those pre-cancerous sun spots and hope for some new collagen and a more youthful visage. Clearly, I had not thought through the timing of the recovery.

 

So, sit back for a moment and imagine meeting your old love.  Now imagine your face, red and puffy like a broiled tomato, two small, hard, raisin eyes.  If the swelling and the irritation weren’t bad enough, somewhere on the flight across the country my immune system had begun to respond to the procedure the way it does to an extreme sun burn, by forming a fever blister. Except that my face thought this was Armageddon.


This was no one little boo boo.  This was a blooming beard of blisters, a veritable Fu Manchu of herpes tattooed around my lips like a ring of fire.  Have I traumatized you enough yet?  Because let me just lay on the last visual.  The top layer of my skin had begun to peel, which was the desired result of the treatment. But don’t picture tiny little flakes off the bridge of a nose.  I want you to imagine a full Komodo dragon molting, big patches of dry skin hitting the ground with leper colony speed.  Yes, you are probably thinking, these are not optimal conditions under which to see your old boyfriend?  All that was missing was a dowager’s hump and a black tooth.

 

Naturally, I was quick to explain.  Luckily, he is a doctor.  So he was somewhat sympathetic to my plight. At the very least he understood the human body.  I did tell him that I’d been considering an eyelid lift for some time and if he knew anyone in Denver maybe we could book it right now and I could get all the ugly healing drama over with at once.  Adding insult to injury, envision how desperate you have to be to ask your old boyfriend to write you a prescription for cold sore meds.  Did I mention the swollen, burned face and oozing blisters were uncomfortable?  Did I mention it was actually his wife who kindly called it in and drove me to the pharmacy to pick it up?  Did I also mention how much I like her?

  

All of the above either takes a giant pair of stones or a total lack of vanity, neither of which are particularly desirable qualities in a woman.  So I’m not quite sure what this story really says about me. The visual alone is unsettling.

 

If it seems odd to be in that kind of touch with an old boyfriend, I’m in the camp who believes it’s a gift to know people from your past.  Yes, yes, if your ex turned out to be a serial rapist or an Internet porn king, you might want to cut ties.  But I’ve actually kept up with a number of old boyfriends.  There was a solid reason I was attracted to them in the first place and in most cases those reasons are still valid.

 

Listen, I get it.  I understand why people don’t keep in touch.  I know there are sickos and stalkers and people who change dramatically or never get past high school.  I’ve seen those movies.  Lord knows I dated a few ratfinks.  But for the most part, I’m happy to have kept in contact with the good eggs.


We move on, we grow up; we begin to define ourselves and figure out what we want and need in a partner. And all of the people we meet along the way are part of that process of discovery.  There is a sweet nostalgia in connecting with the people we used to be, that freer, younger, less encumbered version of our present selves.  People from our past help us to do that, in admittedly both positive and sometimes negative ways.  Old loves helped to bring us to the place we are now.  My sister calls past boyfriends “the first pancake” – the one you cook and then throw out, the one you use to temper the skillet for the real breakfast.

 

Still, I have a hard time understanding people who are jealous of their spouse’s past relationships, especially the people who predated them.  I am grateful for my husband’s former experiences, his old loves.   He got some great practice time in the field.  The way I think of it is – I won the prize.  I got the ring.  Relax; I want to say to the haters.   But I guess I’m not a very jealous person by nature and neither is he.

 

Recently, I was reminded that my kumbaya approach to the past is not shared by all.  I agreed to meet an old high school and family friend (note= not a boyfriend) for a quick drink during his business trip to New York.   My husband knew where I was, but it was obvious the next morning that he and his wife didn’t share the same level of open communication.

 

I woke up to a series of psycho emails, the Internet equivalent of a jealous woman scrawling lipstick threats on your mirror.  She had clearly been reading his email and monitoring our back and forth as we chose a restaurant location and bantered around some stupid inside jokes from high school.   As I opened each email I read with growing dread the comments she had edited into our correspondence, phrases like “don’t you know he’s married?”  or “isn’t this cute that you are meeting.”  Cue the Hitchcock soundtrack.

 

The level of crazy was so preposterous for a harmless 45-minute beer that at first I was convinced my friend was playing a joke on me.  And then I realized this was dead serious.  Radio silence from my friend.  He may still be tied up in a basement bomb shelter somewhere with a pillowcase over his head. Suffice it to say that kind of behavior was a good reason to cut ties with the past.

 

After I returned from the Denver trip, still slightly swollen but with the fever blisters medicated down to milk moustache size, my friend’s wife sent a copy of what their youngest daughter had written as an exercise in school that next day. “…then I swimmed at the pools and ate S’mores and then we had to go home and see my Dad’s girlfriend Lee.”

 

I can still picture it now, the look of astonishment on his daughters’ sweet faces as I walked in their house, hot sauce-red face, squinting like Popeye minus the corn cob pipe.  I could see their young brains processing how in the world their beloved father had ever given this raggedy assed woman a second look, let alone dated her for two years.  Perhaps it was an act of grace, his eldest daughter must have concluded.  Like a “Make a Wish” foundation experience.

 

And as three sets of eyes flicked between their mother, and me I could almost see the cartoon bubbles above their beautiful heads…. “Thank Heavens Dad picked Mom.”


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Remembering a Friend

I cannot fall back asleep.  I am stuck on the dentist, the mechanics of how this works, identifying a person by their dental records.  Does he get a call at 2:00 AM, when family members and loved ones are awaiting an answer?  Or does he come to work at a reasonable hour?

 

I am struck by the term “lost his life,” as if it was simply an object he misplaced and someone will find again. As if you could walk out a door, never to return and then somehow walk back in again.  What an odd and inappropriate turn of phrase.

 

I am thinking about his last minutes and hoping that there was no suffering.  As a wife I would need no suffering.  I would want to know there had been that moment of being there and then suddenly not there, before you could even flicker through the fullness of your life, before you had time to tell yourself that it was abundant and well lived and that you had more than you even deserved.

 

I am remembering what that call feels like—to go from a before to “after” with one piece of news, a few words that ripple out to change the lives of an entire clan.  There is the cool ceramic shock that follows, the membrane that appears over your brain to prevent the truth from sinking in all at once.  The information digests slowly, as you toggle between numbness and disbelief at the oddest times. This is the only way a wife can absorb the enormity of that kind of loss, you cannot otherwise compute the circumference of such a thing. 

 

 

She will still expect to hear his shout out from the front hall, see his lopsided grin and wire glasses askew, his full head of ginger hair.  She will listen for, but not hear, his footfall and the familiar sound of his briefcase being hefted up on the counter where they will eat.  “You’re dragging the dirt of Manhattan onto our table,” she might say and now she smiles to think of it.  Impossible that someone could be there one day, taking up all that space and then simply vanish so fully that the dentist must be called.  “Never” is a difficult word for humans to grasp—we are creatures who crave.

 

In the early days following his death, the kitchen is warm and bustling with covered dishes and deli food. The fireplace crackles, the doorbell rings, flowers arrive and then more food.  In these early days there is way too much food.

 

The household spins with industry, the cluck clucking of the community of women and the spiked laughter of his pals, yes laughter, because this is still unreal.  She will not sleep, at least not without pills and aids, because the images both imagined and real and the questions and “what if’s” will swirl in her mind like a thick pudding.  She will replay the film loops of the past, the time they first saw one another in Manhattan, how he held himself, so sure and confident, a boy from a modest home who was determined to make a mark with his good education.  She sees a freeze frame of them in the maternity ward, holding their daughter, how they thought their hearts would burst with so much love.  And then more children, more love. 

 

She thinks about his passion for all things outdoors, of hiking and biking and being out on the water in the Adirondacks.  She pictures him coaching hockey and wakeboarding with his boyhood friends and their children on the lake.  He was a person always in motion, whose presence bulged, so that he seemed to occupy a larger space, in a way that made the people around him feel more alive.  He had a childlike sense of wonder and enthusiasm that made those of us in his presence smile.  He was the leader, the aggregator, the congregator, the do-er.  He was where the fun was.  He was the “Fun Dad.”

 

 

He always said exactly what he thought and he was forthright, never cruel.  Even when he was goading or teasing you there was something still appropriate, still loveable.  He was loveable.  He jibed and joshed and his self-deprecating manner made us all feel we knew him better than maybe we did.  We smile just remembering it, each of us reviewing our own cache of highlights.

 

But then there will come that period in the house when the activity will slow and sag.  All the plates will stop spinning.  The hugs, the calls and the people dropping by will diminish.  The cars that have occupied the driveway will pull out and friends will go back to their lives because that’s what people do.  And then the real life part begins.  The living with it part.  And this will be the difficult part for the family. 

 

In the quiet of their home, grief will settle around her like an unwelcome arm on the shoulder and she will ache for the sound of that briefcase hitting the counter, the small dog’s incessant bark, rejoicing that her husband is home.  I want to say to her, do not fester over recreating your last moments together, the fact that you might have discussed the credit card bill that last night instead of something more weighty.  Do not worry if you can’t recall exactly when you last embraced him or told him what was in your heart.  Do not punish yourself if the last night you slept together - and how could you know that - you didn’t spoon him or kiss him passionately, but instead poked him when his snores woke you.  None of that matters now.  It was a marriage and he adored you.  I saw it.  We all did.  You made each other stronger and more complete in the weaker places.  And that’s simply what the best of couples do.

 

And when you are ready to feel us, we will all be woven strong.  Each of your varying and diverse communities, all of the places you have lived and worked, played and learned, will be interconnected, like the reeds in a basket.  Although we will never come close to replacing him, we will hold you up, and cradle each one of you.  We will be here to remind you how well you are loved.

 

 

In memory of Tighe Sullivan—devoted father, husband, friend, brother, Colgate University alumnus and lover of Silver Bay on Lake George. 

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