My dear old friend, Hilda Flemming. I met her in college at San Francisco State when I found a program there called CIC (the Community Involvement Center). At CIC, students could earn units for volunteering in the community, and I remember clearly the day I saw a sign that said, “volunteer and earn units!” Students like me would find roles at homeless shelters, suicide prevention organizations, women’s shelters, and any number of other agencies in the Bay Area. I chose the ACLU in downtown San Francisco.
The requirement for CIC was to do a certain number of hours at the agency we volunteered in, write a journal about it, and attend support groups at the CIC offices. After I completed that semester, I was hooked on the CIC system, in terms of loving the support group environment and appreciating their contribution to the school system and the larger community. I decided to become a support group supervisor, continuing my work with CIC as a volunteer there.
As a support group supervisor, I was required to attend weekly supervisor support groups (yeah, it got very layered with various groups). My supervisor was Hilda. The one other student in my group with Hilda was Gina. The three of us, with Hilda guiding, worked through so many issues together. We would sit in the long room we were assigned to in the Psychology building with pillows lining the walls, and we’d talk about our lives, our work with the student volunteers, and our troubles. It was the first time I talked about my life in depth in a supportive environment.
Hilda was in her 70’s back then in the late 1980’s, and until I met her I had thought of older people as untouchable and foreign. I remember meeting her and learning that she would be my supervisor and being disappointed. There was something there about not believing that she had enough to offer me, this little old lady in polyester. Boy, was I wrong.
Thinking back on my relationship with Hilda I’m reminded that she was a great, great friend. She wasn’t an acquaintance. She was a dear friend who knew me and cared and loved me. We spent time together, watching movies, attending the theater, eating together, and especially continuing our support groups in her home. We started a group with other friends from CIC called JACHEESI, which stood for Jennifer, Allegra, Caity, Hilda, Erin, Emma, Stephanie and Ivanna. The acronym JACHEESI represents loving friendship and connection to me.
Appreciations of Hilda cross my mind. When my fiance, Greg, went off the deep end into a psychotic episode, I called Hilda. Later, Hilda introduced me to Marcelle, who introduced me to her son, Stefan. At my wedding to Stefan, Hilda read a piece from Tuesdays with Morrie. Hilda and Marcelle used to have little fun battles about which one of them was responsible for Stefan and me meeting. Meeting her and getting to know her changed the course of my life, but she wasn’t a butterfly flapping somewhere far away. She was there, witnessing me.
We were in physical contact as recently as when I was pregnant with Colin. She came by our home in Martinez with her friend Abby to give me a New Baby present. That was the last time I saw her, and she was as happy as ever. Hilda was never fake in a kind of walled-up way. In her check-in’s she would tell us how depressed (particularly after her husband died) she was or how angry she felt about various political or personal situations she was facing. She would go deep, but she would always come up, turn to us and be laser focused on us.
She married when she was a teenager and her marriage, in its beginnings, was one of mild detachment and practical subservience. She had four children, and then in her forties she broke out and became a feminist. I imagine there are millions of stories like hers – woman educates herself and learns there’s more to life than her husband – but Hilda’s always fascinated me. Her path was so instructive and vital. She loved the exploration of the self. She would say, “what does that remind you of?” She would complain about her husband – I can’t remember exactly why, but she worried about him, too – and it wasn’t until he died that I learned on a raw level how much she loved him. She laid next to his body through the night, snuggling with him until the morning when she called the authorities.
A year or so after he died, in her early 80’s, Hilda connected with an old family friend, a man whose wife had died. I think they originally reconnected because they all four had been good friends and he and Hilda were bonded by the deaths of their spouses. But what’s thrilling about this is that they developed a romantic relationship and suddenly Hilda was a teenager. I had never experienced her so giddy and self-absorbed (or man-absorbed). She would be depressed when he didn’t call and would talk about the passion they had. What was the best (and is something I tell people in the context of female sexual development) is that in her 80’s she experienced her first orgasm.
I remember on her 80th birthday we gathered at a hotel in Pacifica to celebrate her life. We all stood at the microphone in turn to talk about Hilda – she visualized the event as a sort of pre-death funeral party where everyone would tell her about who she was to them. So JACHEESI stood up together and I shared that before the party I told someone that I was going to my girlfriend’s 80th birthday party. That got a laugh. She loved that party.
Hilda changed my life. Not only did she introduce me to group process and deep friendship and listening and my future mother-in-law, she introduced me to a new way of looking at the world. Even when she was depressed and talked about welcoming death, her tone was wise and thoughtful. I remember sitting with JACHEESI in Jennifer’s apartment in San Francisco, gathered around crying hearing Hilda’s check-in about looking forward to death. We all hugged her. That was more than 10 years ago.
I talked to her a few months ago on the phone. I had sent her a letter saying that I wanted to connect with her and she called me. She told me she was looking forward to death, that her body wasn’t cooperating and she was in pain. She was reflective and lovely and my dear Hilda. We talked about getting together next time I came up to the Bay Area, but it never happened.
I got an email from Gina today. I knew when I saw “Hilda” in the subject line that she was dead. And now all those memories flood in. I loved her so much.