Our mother, Lillian Carolyn Henshaw, died November 22, 2022, after a three-year fight against cancer. She was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on October 3, 1946. She grew up in New Jersey and on the night of the first snow would go out to the woods at the edge of her subdivision, looking for rabbit tracks. Her father, William Henshaw, served in the Ranger Battalion during World War Two. After the war he was stationed in Japan. When she was three, my mother and her mother, Lillian Gresham Henshaw, traveled on the U.S. Naval Ship the M. M. Patrick to meet him. It was there she began her love affair with reading when an officer’s wife brought over a large stack of children’s books and left them by her bedside.

Though she spent much of her adult life in Alabama, settling into her house in the Crestwood North neighborhood of Birmingham in 1991, she always considered the landscapes of Pennsylvania and New Jersey home. She was an honors student at Ocean Township Grammar School and graduated from Asbury Park High School in 1964. She attended Douglass College at Rutgers University in New Brunswick from 1964-1968, concentrating in Bacteriology. Once, she admitted that she would rather have been a student of English. She took courses at Douglass in English and American modern and Renaissance poetry, Shakespeare, Milton, and the Romantics. She received her Bachelor of Science in Biology from the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) in 1972. There she studied with biologist Ken Marion, who specialized in reptile natural history. She was curious and brave, and once brought her face dangerously close to a copperhead on a trail at Birmingham’s Ruffner Mountain for the sake of a detailed photograph.

A student for life, she returned to UAB and obtained her Masters in Secondary Education in 1981. This sparked a long career teaching the natural sciences and math in schools all over the south—Faith High School in McCalla, Alabama; Pebblebrook High School in Cobb County, Georgia; Buchanan Junior High in Florida; as well as Gresham Junior High, Leeds High School, Vincent High School, Smith Middle, and Kennedy Alternative School. By far her favorite teaching experience was teaching science at old Carver High School in Birmingham, where she had a particular fondness for her students, and they for her. She instilled in them “Ms. H’s Rules for Reality,” noting that “Chemistry is a serious business, but it can be approached with imagination, and understanding, and human-ness,” and also, “Keep your lab space clean and don’t be careless—your life and your grade depend on it.”

Her love of learning never ended. She went on to pursue education and careers as a massage therapist, a Licensed Professional Counselor, a children’s yoga instructor, and a chaplain. She spent much of her career working in hospitals and behavioral healthcare facilities such as Grandview, Bradford Health Services, The Children’s Hospital of Alabama, The Center for the Advancement of Youth Health, and Brookwood Medical Center, where she served as an on-call chaplain from 1997 until a few weeks before her death. She was married and divorced twice. She married our father, William V. Lewis, III, in December 1976, and gave birth to Seth William Lewis in 1979, and me, Quinn Caitlin Henshaw Lewis, in 1986. She never thought she would have children, she said, and called us both her greatest accomplishment.

She was a talented woman. She had many interests and passions over her life’s span. She played the guitar and piano. She painted. She published articles on tooth enamel in the Journal of Oral Pathology and Infection and Immunity. She collected leaves, acorn caps, and butterflies’ wings. Our mother could be a difficult person—at times clinical or cold—but she was otherwise exceedingly warm. She made a mean spaghetti. She sent lovely and strange care packages to me, her daughter, containing, among other things, a can of Barbasol and a dead cicada. She loved animals and the natural world. She wished she could have gone to Norway or Sweden or seen the Northern Lights. She had many pets over the years, both during her youth (cats Samantha and Chester, and her border collie Grunji) and our childhood (dogs Goldie, Jingles, Freckles, Princess Buttercup, Ari, and Lucca, and cats Charlie, Parcel, Minko, Khan Man, and Fuzzball “Queen of the Jungle”). For five years when I was a teenager, she took me to horseback riding lessons at Heathermoor Farm in Moody, Alabama. One of her fondest memories, she said, was riding “Happy,” a racking horse, who one Saturday broke into that ambling gait while she was on him, moving over the hard ground as if through water.