Yesterday morning I received the news that my mother-in-law Jeanne Hale had passed away, a few days after her 93rd birthday. She lived in St Johnsbury, Vermont, a town close to the Canadian border, for her entire life. Fortunately, I was able to see her there last month with daughter Erin, who was visiting from Taiwan. We took Jeanne out for dinner and a Cosmo—a cocktail my mother introduced her to—but this time I whispered to the bartender to go light on the vodka. She thoroughly enjoyed it anyway.
This past week, Jeanne had not been answering her phone. When I finally reached her, she told me the birthday flowers I had sent were lovely, but her voice seemed weaker. In my garden room, I have a sprawling, spindly plant called a night-blooming cereus, which transforms itself once a year—its spectacular flowers only last through the night. Coincidentally, it bloomed last week, the incredible scent wafting through the house. I remember wishing that I could have sent her those flowers instead. But this morning I thought how fitting the timing was—Jeanne really was a Queen of the Night.
I vividly remember meeting her and my father-in-law Richard for the first time. David had wanted to introduce me, and show me the town he grew up in and cherished. My father had discovered that our family too had a link to “St J” as people call it, on his mother’s side with the Paddock family. So David being David, he took me to see the town historian first.
We then picked up his parents to go out to dinner, and Jeanne immediately started bossing me around—but with a twinkle in her eye. A clothing buyer, I could tell she was sizing up my outfit. A petite brunette dynamo, she began by telling me how to drive, so I told her she could have the keys and take us to the restaurant instead if she preferred. She wanted me to push back to test my mettle, so I did. After that, we enjoyed a wonderful relationship for decades.
The Hale family owned a clothing store on Main Street, and after it closed she worked in women’s clothing at JCPenney until her late eighties. Once I went to visit her at work, as the Governor of Vermont was touring the store. He went up to her and asked her about David—he obviously knew her, but she was less impressed than her co-workers. This just added to her legendary status in the town, where she was known for her long afternoon walks, handing out biscuits to all the dogs along her route.
During our last phone conversation, she told me that I should know that getting old is very hard, in slightly more colorful words. Perhaps it was especially hard for her—she had lost both her eldest and her youngest sons, and her husband, Richard. After Richard’s funeral, she pulled me aside and told me that she had something very important to talk to me about. I told her of course, wondering what it might be, as she brought me to the kitchen stove:
❝ How do I turn on the damn oven—can you show me so I don’t starve to death?
I was flabbergasted, how could a woman who raised five boys not know how to operate her own oven? Then she told me, as a bride of 18 who gave birth to five babies in rapid succession, that she never did learn to cook, and that Richard had made most of their meals other than spaghetti for the past 50+ years.
Jeanne was very smart, and had graduated at the top of her class at St Johnsbury Academy (where Calvin Coolidge was a student). Instead of college, her French-Canadian parents enrolled her in secretarial school. Headstrong as she was, she got married instead. Relieved of cooking duties, and leaving the boys to their own devices— as was customary then—she began to write a column for the Caledonian-Record. Even though she along with three of her sons remained in New England for most of their lives, as my readers probably know her eldest son David travelled the world as an economist. Stephen, her youngest, was an accomplished photorealistic painter who was well-known in the New York art scene. Both left this world too soon.
When David and I got married, his whole family came to Chicago. We then took Jeanne to Europe, something she never forgot. Armed with David’s credit card, my mother took her to Water Tower Place to go shopping for a gown to wear to a dinner at the Palace of Versailles. It was magnificent, and although David remarked with genuine shock that the dress cost more than the average annual salary in almost every country on earth, I saw him smile. Jeanne never stopped asking to go back to Paris, and when she began to refuse to eat, one of the nursing assistants at her senior home asked how she expected to go back to Paris, if she kept refusing.
Another trip, with my youngest daughter Aria as navigator, was to Italy. We drove from Venice to Siena to Rome, and Jeanne loved every minute of it, never once commented on my driving. A staunch Catholic all of her life, she wanted to meet the Pope. The appointed day at the Vatican was very hot, and the line was very long, but David just marched her up to the head of the line and in they went. Aria and I, mortified, stayed where we were and missed our chance. I will never forget her astonished question as an honors Latin student when we first arrived in Rome:
❝ Is this really the Rome of the Romans, or is this some different place?
Had she been born in a different time or place, who knows what Jeanne Hale might have accomplished. But she left her mark on the world, and on her town, and she will be missed by all her family and friends. A few years ago, I went with my brothers and sister to visit her, and last night we were reminiscing. This fall marks the tenth anniversary of David’s passing—new losses always resonate with old ones—and so her departure has hit me hard. I owe her everything for the time I had with her eldest son. I benefited from her sacrifices. And she always made me feel at home.
So when you see someone on the world stage, who is changing the world, remember there is probably someone equally remarkable right behind them. Someone who gifted them with resilience and curiosity and courage, who allowed them to reach for the stars.
And my night-blooming cereus? It was a gift from my first landlady after college. Mrs Steele was about Jeanne’s age at that time, mostly blind, and I would go to read and talk to her on Sundays at her dimly-lit house on the lake. She gave me a stem cutting, which I have nurtured ever since, and now it too has been propagated—my goddaughter Claire told me that her plant had bloomed in June.
And so we continue, as we must, because life, like the Queen of the Night, reveals its unimaginable beauty in unexpected places, and in the quietest, most fleeting moments.
A personal reflection by Lyric Hughes Hale, Editor-in-Chief of econVue, in memory of her mother-in-law Jeanne Hale. At econVue, we strive to honor the personal stories behind the public lives that shape our world.
📍Chicago