Quite some time ago, Lyndie sent me this picture of herself. She often uses the words on that T-shirt as her sign-off on letters to me: OOW# followed up a long nonsensical string of numbers.
Taking that journey with her blind friend, both widows in their 80s, was indeed rather outrageous. Whose idea was it, the risky impulse to cast caution to the winds, blow away the savings account, and take that cruise on the Danube together?
Whatever the answer, it was characteristic of Lyndie to want to step outside the ordinary comfort zone in order to do something to help someone less fortunate than herself.
(After writing this episode, I discovered that it had been posted almost to the day 34 years after Lyndie was ordained as an Episcopal deacon to, as she puts it, “become a servant of God forever.”)
Was this passion to help others born in Lyndie or bred into her? Neither, I think, considering her upbringing.
She was the unintended offspring of a brief marriage between a dancer and a journalist obsessed by his career. They were married less than a year. They divorced only seven months after she was born, and her mother quickly remarried a man who later adopted her and changed her name. Until her mother told her the true identity of her biological father when she was 10, Lyndie thought of Jack Wallace as nothing more than a family friend.
Her self-giving impulses must have arisen from a lonely childhood nourished by books and ideas more than by personal example. Distanced from her parents and classmates, she sought escape and interest in books she found around her home, including the Bhagavad Gita, writings by the monk Thomas Merton and the Buddha, and books by Russian and French authors in her adoptive father’s collection. As an adolescent, she was drawn to the intentional poverty and monastic lives of the Franciscan monks.
She was “found and possessed by joy, somehow,” Lyndie wrote me in an email. “My [biological’] father was all the ‘ex’ words: enthusiastic (if you know Greek, you know it means–at its best–divinely energized) exuberant, excitable, etc. I sorta ended up like that!”
I met Lyndie at a church event not long after I moved to Dubois, and she soon became my hiking buddy. Poor as a church mouse, as always, Lyndie had no car. I was pleased to drive her to parts of the surrounding wilderness that I had not yet seen, and we hiked in places she had loved here, before her world had begun to close in. I hike there still.
Back then, I had no idea who Lyndie really was; I merely found her an interesting companion.
Years later, as I was walking my dog in the town park one day (long after Lyndie had moved six hours away to Laramie to be closer to her son), I met another hiking buddy. Seth had grown up in Dubois, went away to college and a job elsewhere, and found his way back as a young adult. He was also walking his dog, and he approached me and asked if I would be willing to walk together. It was the start of many hikes that continue to this day, often spent in conversations deep in philosophy or religion, which fascinate him.
Eventually it came up that Seth is also close to my dear friend Lyndie. Seth doesn’t believe in coincidences, but at the time I was stunned by that discovery. His relationship with hers is far deeper and more longstanding than mine.
As he was growing up, Lyndie’s son was his classmate. One day when he was an adolescent, Seth turned up at Lyndie’s door and simply asked if he could live with her, because his family was having troubles. From that point on, Seth became another son to her, as he remains in a sense today. He was only one of several children she accepted into her family because they had nowhere else to live.
During her years in Dubois, she has also worked as a dispatcher for the sheriff, counseled victims of domestic abuse, and befriended murderers and rapists in prisons.
“I really felt like outreach to people who weren’t part of anything that supported them was my calling,” she says. These days, she sometimes tells me stories of helping neighbors in her senior living community in Laramie, at times of crisis.
“God gets the credit in the long run,” she told me once. “Myself, I’m mostly the Liver of Christ (brains and hands not so much), as I love life and being alive, and livers are supposed to process toxins in our food, and my notoriously jolly nature has occasionally neutralized poisonous situations in troubled families and even in the prison system!”
Here is how Lyndie sees herself today:
“I’m grateful to be on this earth with people to care about and adventures to experience … I want to live to be at least 105 so I can go skydiving one more time, because there’s a lady that did it last year when she was 104 and I want to beat her record!”
The trip on the Danube was meant to be another adventure to experience, with someone she cared about.
Next time, learn how it went wrong.