Ellen was born on August 29, 1940, less than 7 months after my parents were married. We always celebrated Ellen’s birthday on October 31. The story I heard from Joan is Ellen learned the truth when at nineteen she joined the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary and she had to produce a birth certificate.
She was six years older than I was, a tomboy and the senior partner in “Ellen and Joan.” Growing up, we didn’t have much of a relationship. Joan and Ellen were in a different world, older, already the “big kids” by the time I started school. Ellen taught me how to ride a bicycle and once hoisting me up on her feet doing acrobatics, I fell and broke my arm. She was my big sister but far removed.
At school Ellen was the star and Joan a year behind her. In 1955 she went on to high school across the street at Bellarmine Jefferson. At 16 Ellen learned to drive. She got a summer job at Local Loan downtown. She drove whenever she could. She was a driver from then on, willing to drive wherever and whenever she could.
She and Joan were involved in a youth group under Father Coffield in Boyle Heights, where she was part of an activist community organization. There were good things and bad things about the Church in those days. I think Ellen’s social activism began then. Coffield’s name was on the list of predator priests released in 2000.
In 1959 Ellen entered the BVMs; their Motherhouse was in Dubuque, Iowa. She returned home for a visit after the first year. She and another new nun in her class stayed in a convent. They split time between families, us in Burbank and the Coughlins in Glassell Park. That visit set the pattern between Ellen and our mother. My mother treated her as a kind of saint and was desperate to tell Ellen how much she loved her and to hold her close, jealous of any time she wasn’t home. Mom couldn’t let Ellen be herself.
I think Ellen was desperate for our father’s love. There were flashes of affection, but mostly he seemed to act like we were all a burden he had to bear. I think he thought if we hadn’t come along, he would have been the star he should have been. To me it seemed he was never much of father. We had to be quiet when he was home, not to disturb him while he sat in his back room studying and listening to music. I think Ellen particularly suffered trying to please him, to feel the love he seemed to never showed.
The summer of 1959 I got to go to Missouri with my mother’s cousin. We went by train and it took 3 days. I stayed with our grandmother in St. Louis. Ellen was on her way to the convent in Dubuque and she stopped by grandma’s house. We traveled together by segregated bus to visit our grandfather in the Ozarks. On the trip we were both shocked by the segregated bathrooms and drinking fountains, Colored and White. From California we thought we came from an open society; it wasn’t. Its racism hid beneath politeness. That trip was an early moment when Ellen and I saw the world together, two young people discovering its harsh realities.
Our paths separated. While I went to high school Ellen taught in BVM schools for a time, including Wichita, Kansas, and later in Stockton. Teaching was never her love; she was a community organizer at heart. The BVMs were progressive, and by the late 1960s their habits had softened into simple skirts, white blouses, and comfortable shoes and Ellen was working as a Community Organizer in a Chicago parish.
When I returned from the Air Force in 1971, I visited Ellen in Chicago. I think she had left the nuns by then. She drove us to St. Louis and the Ozarks again, visiting our uncle in his tar paper shack. He was showing us his shotgun and accidentally blew out a window in the kitchen, an incident no one commented on afterwards.
Ellen eventually went to work for Jenner & Block, the law firm that represented the Contract Buyers’ League pro bono. With community groups organized by the parishes they fought predatory lending and red lining in South Chicago and won major victories. She lived for a time in a Lakeside condo in South Chicago, where I stayed during the blizzard of 1978.
Our relationship became strained when my marriage to Cathy failed. In late 1983 Cathy and I were breaking apart and I was newly sober, Ellen and Joan sided with Cathy. For a time I was an outsider to my own family.
Ellen was working in Chicago for a few years and then sometime in the 1980s she decided to join a contemplative order of nuns in Iowa. There she met Karen. Karen was having health problems and Ellen took care of her and together they moved to Arizona for Karen’s health. It became apparent they were a couple and so no surprise when they got married in Canada in the 1990s. Karen and I never became good friends but she loved Ellen deeply. They built a life in Arizona, went to community college together and became nurses. They accumulated a modest nest egg, and created a home. Ellen became a hospice nurse and loved the work. Karen was a visiting nurse. Ellen admitted to me she was a lesbian. I thought it would be good to say the word, but she never said it again. Their relationship was loving and equal, and it was good for both of them.
Ellen was Ted’s godmother and she took that relationship very seriously. Ellen and Karen helped Ted during his lost years after college in 1995 steering him toward language programs. Ted taught English in Japan and then in Saudi Arabia. After three years Ted came home and met Ellen Clancy in Monterey and Karen and Ellen came to the wedding. They gave them money for their first house. They told me to follow their example and make my intended loan a gift. Ellen and Karen came when Ted received his doctorate at the University of Oregon.
Ellen loved that I became a Park Ranger. Like Hopalong Cassidy I wore a cowboy hat and a gunbelt. Ellen and Karen visited me on Mount Diablo and later on Angel Island. When they came to the island crossing Raccoon Strait at night in a pontoon boat it was a moment of high adventure for Ellen.
Our closeness began in the years after Angel Island. I would call her during my long commute on I-80 to Richmond to pick up Paloma. Those long unhurried conversations became a rhythm of our lives. We talked about everything: family, music, books, politics, memories. We became peers, not older sister and younger brother, two adults, brother and sister and friends.
When Ellen and Karen retired they moved from Arizona to Dubuque, Iowa. Karen was from Clinton down the river and for Ellen it was familiar territory near the Mother House of the BVMs and Clarke College where for a short time she and Joan had been students together.
One conversation stands out. A year or two before her seizures began, I casually said that if I had my life to do over, I would have more confidence and take better advantage of opportunities. Ellen said she would be more forceful and effective in serving the community. She wanted to be better at helping people, more focused on making things better for others. I was an ordinary guy with ordinary goals. Joan was a warrior. Ellen was a saint.
When they moved to Iowa, they joined the local Orthodox Church. Ellen found a deeper spirituality in Eastern Christianity and the Orthodox traditions. When they joined a few members of the Congregation objected to Ellen and Karen’s membership together in the Church and the resistance had gone to the local Metropolitan. He had welcomed them when they came and when it became an issue later he told the objectors he had made his decision and it was final. God bless the Orthodox Church and its local Metropolitan.
In February 2019 Ellen had a terrible seizure. The diagnosis was Alzheimer’s. Paloma and I came to visit in June. She was still Ellen, I was relieved. She was shakier, less precise, but herself. She still belonged to a book club. She said they were reading Tommy Orange’s There There. She said it was very hard for her and she was having trouble making sense of it. I told I had read it and that it was hard for me too. Orange’s style is to tell fragmented stories that seem unrelated and confusing. And then he wraps it all up in the end. She was relieved, it wasn’t just her.
Her biggest disappointment seemed to be that she was not going to live into her 90s. She had really wanted to grow very old and 79 plus just wasn’t enough. We had a good time, going out to eat, long drives with Karen and her to show Paloma Wisconsin and a trip to a State Park with waterfalls and caves. The dementia she had wasn’t devastating; she still enjoyed life. Paloma and I enjoyed our time with her and Karen. So in February 2020 we visited again. I wanted to show Paloma Iowa in winter when it wasn’t so beautiful and green. It was cold, but it was beautiful and we had a good time with Ellen and Karen.
Unrelated to Ellen at the time the Covid-19 Pandemic started in China in November, 2019 and by February it had begun to spread worldwide. None of us thought much about it while we were there. At the Chicago airport on our way home a few people were wearing masks, but the Pandemic was far away and people didn’t seem concerned. Our flight was canceled and we stayed overnight in a hotel near the airport. From the airport we stuffed ourselves into a taxi with two other people, one a GI visiting home from Korea. A month later the lockdowns began and March 17 we began our Shelter in Place in California. That first weekend of concern I calculated the incubation time from our Chicago trip. At it passed we were OK.
Ellen began to weaken in the fall of 2021 and in November she had hospice care. I came in November. Laurie, Joan’s daughter came and Ted. Ellen hung on longer than we expected and they had to go home to their jobs and families. Father John came from St. George’s Orthodox Church in Cedar Rapids and did a service for the sick at the foot of Ellen’s bed. For the time the service took, Ellen was quiet and at peace. I stayed on for a few more days keeping vigil with her but she just hung on and finally I had to leave too. I drove to the Chicago airport and Karen called me. Ellen had died.
I miss Ellen. Writing about her brings her back to life a little bit, the girl who taught me to ride a bike, the nun who searched for meaning, the activist, the driver, the sister who struggled for our father’s unreachable love, and the friend she became. I was very fortunate to have both of my sisters. Joan and I were close when she was young; Ellen and I became close in retirement.
We like to believe that how we die will reflect how we lived, that there is some moral symmetry at the end. My experience has been that this is mostly untrue. We have very little control over how we leave the world.
My father died peacefully. He was old, sober, reconciled, and surrounded by his children. He seemed ready. There was no struggle, no unfinished business he felt compelled to resolve. He let go when it was time. It looked orderly, as if dying were the final task of his life.
Ellen’s death was the opposite. She was younger, in terrible physical pain, and seemed unable to rest. Even as her body was failing, something in her would not release its grip on responsibility. Ellen had always been someone who took care of others, who made things okay for everyone else. Near the end, it seemed a compulsion that trapped her.
I believe she could not let go while I was there, and that once I left she died with Karen holding her.
We do not die as we deserve. We die as we are. My father’s gift was peace. Ellen’s burden was love that she could not stop giving.
