Obituary
LUCILLE
MAUD HAYNES
February 9, 1914 – January 5, 2009
In 1914, the daughter born in Queenstown, Guyana, South America
to Irene Fowler, an elementary school teacher of mixed African
and Amerindian descent, and Vaitringam, a clerk at the
Georgetown Public Hospital (PHG) whose parents Armohum and
Goindu had been brought from Chennai, in India, to work as
indentured laborers on Guyana sugar plantations, embodied the
globalization with which the world is still struggling to come
to terms at the time of her death in Natick, Massachusetts, USA
in 2009. She was to remain an only child when a brother, born
five years later, survived only five days, and throughout her
life, as the cultural, political, and social currents that
divide and hurt coursed around her, this singular person showed
extraordinary astuteness, courage, and grace to the thousands of
people from as many backgrounds with whom she came into contact.
Although her family was Methodist, she received her elementary
school education at Christ Church Anglican School and then
attended The Bishops’ High School for Girls, where she completed
the Cambridge Junior Certificate Examination. She first worked
as a clerk in the Census Office and then studied nursing,
becoming both a State Registered Nurse and a State Certified
Midwife. Her several years of nursing at the PHG were among the
most rewarding and fulfilling of her life, and she would
frequently relate with great amusement stories about incidents
and personalities whom she encountered there.
In 1943, she married the bespoke tailor, Oscar Elgin Leopold
Haynes, and moved with him to Pike Street, Kitty, where she bore
a daughter, Lilith Margaret, in 1944. Her neighbors filled out
the ethnic spectrum and she formed lifelong friendships with
them all, well into several succeeding generations. Upon the
death of her father and the subsequent birth of her son Ian
Keith (Peter) in 1945, the family moved to Alberttown to
form an extended support network including her mother and
maternal grandmother. After another four years, her mother
emigrated to join relatives in New York, and the family moved
east once more -- to Newtown, where they lived for the ensuing
eighteen years.
In Newtown, she proudly affixed her professional shingle to a
small rented cottage and proceeded to deliver hundreds of babies
in their homes – and in hers, in at least one emergency case –
for many decades. Through this work, she became a pillar of
quiet and sure education, compassion, and expertise to patients
of every type imaginable. She raised her own children and also
welcomed in the fold her cousin, Jacqueline Hawkins from
Manhattan, as well as her niece and nephew, Leo and Peggy, after
their mother’s death, and several tailor’s apprentices, notably
Barrington Dalrymple and Victor Walters.
She was a steady and deeply spiritual member of Trinity
Methodist Church, regularly attending and supporting women’s
study and service group meetings in the areas near her homes.
Her avocation was playing the piano, having started lessons as a
young girl and happily using the upright that her father had
bought from a departing Dean of St. George’s Cathedral until she
moved back to Queenstown in 1967 and passed it on to a patient’s
children. The women in her mother’s family were renowned for
their fashion sense and thrilling soprano voices, and she
effortlessly maintained and passed on these standards, although
on turning 50 she despaired of living “50 more years…” penning a
note to that effect: “I don’t want to live that long; I’ll be
too fat and ugly by then and won’t make a pretty corpse.”
At this point, she began to work as a special nurse to cancer
patients, either in their homes or by providing hospice care at
her beloved PHG, and then she went to work for several years at
St. Anne’s Orphanage in Georgetown, where she thoroughly enjoyed
helping the Ursuline nuns to provide guidance to children from
many backgrounds and welcomed the spiritual and cultural
sophistication that the convent and the nuns provided. When she
finally stopped working, it was only to take care of her
grandchildren, Sukim, Paul, and Patrick; then her mother, who
retired at age 86 and returned to Guyana; and then her husband,
who died in 1993, a few months after celebrating their golden
wedding anniversary.
From 1966, when she traveled to Barbados for her daughter’s
first such ceremony, university commencements became her forte,
as her children and grandchildren proceeded to graduate from
tertiary establishments in Turkeyen, Palo Alto, New York,
Maryland, and Massachusetts. In 1996, she was finally granted a
visa to emigrate to the USA, and was gratified to be able to
receive the two knee replacements -- which relieved her of years
of arthritis pain -- and, when she began to suffer a series of
transient strokes, the professional care that she had so long
provided for others as a resident of the Riverbend and Beaumont
Skilled Nursing Centers and, briefly, a charge of Evercare’s
Hospice facilities. Having helped them materially and
academically, she vicariously enjoyed her children’s later
educational exploits, and took special joy in attending the
Staff Appreciation dinners of the Harvard Division of Continuing
Education.
Her abiding faith buoyed her spirits until the very end: she
never complained, telling her caregivers that she was feeling “a
little better” and trying everything until she did not have the
strength for caloric intake. Early in the morning of January 5,
Lucille Haynes sailed peacefully into her final sleep, leaving
us the prayer in which she entreated God “for everyone, every
day”:
| They need your hands to continue to bless; They need your lips to continue to speak; They need your body to continue to suffer; They need your heart to continue to love; They need you to continue to save; Stay with them. |
