HIGH FIDELITY

I. During the 1960s, a time when most Americans still lived their whole lives in the same town, my Mom and Dad embarked on a great adventure.

I try to imagine how it sounded to her parents when my Mom broke the news: “Mama, Daddy, here’s the plan. Johnny and I are going to fly from Pittsburgh to London, buy a sports car, drive it through Europe to Athens, then board a boat to Beirut where we’ll live for a year and maybe have a baby. What do you think?”

It probably sounded like she was moving to the moon.

But they went anyway, driving a yellow Triumph Spitfire through France, Spain, Germany, Austria, and on to Greece and the Middle East, camping and making great friends along the way – including Ted and Ingrid Arend, from whom I have my middle name.

Their photos from that period are part travelogue, part love affair.

Back then they called it pluck, but what my Mom really had was courage – the courage to take risks, to embrace new experiences, and to live her life fearlessly.

After Beirut, Mom became an ER nurse at Mass General Hospital in Boston. Being an ER nurse at Mass General in the early 70s was like working on a MASH unit in Korea — you saw some really bad stuff, and you had to deal with it, and if it made you a little crazy in the process, well, just don’t let it affect your work.

I think it was during this time that Mom became fully herself. In addition to her obvious beauty and courage, some of the other qualities we now strongly associate with Audrey became fixed. They included:

1. the ability to remain calm in a crisis;

2. the ability to find the humor in a situation, even a really bad one;

3. and an extraordinary compassion for other human beings.

Sometimes I managed to put all three to the test at the same time.

For example, between the ages of 4 and 21 — during some phase of boyish idiocy that is even more stunning in hindsight – I  managed to land myself in the ER no fewer than 12 times. Some examples:

• stitches in the side of my head at age 4 from running into a door frame
• a broken vertebra on a playground
• a broken ankle on a playground
• a broken nose on the baseball field
• 3rd degree burns from catching my shirt on fire
• two concussions
• a dislocated collarbone
• stitches, once more, in my head
• and — to top it all off — a seafood allergy that swelled my eyes shut.

In almost every case my Mom would either take me to the hospital, or she’d already be there because she was on duty. Above the drone of pain, I remember my own bizarre calm in these situations: “Mom will be there, I will be ok, she’ll tell me jokes, why are my eyes swollen shut?”

She was – quite literally – Nurse and Mother both. And what more could a boy have wished for?

II.

One of my Dad’s crazier ideas – and he had a number of them — involved buying 10 acres of land on Lake Champlain, building a house, selling the old house, getting new jobs for him and my Mom, and moving everything to what is basically Canada (let’s be honest).

Like all my dad’s ideas, this one required a partner to do the heavy lifting. And that partner, as usual, was my Mom. For a whole year, she lived alone up here, through a bitter winter, in a half-built house like some frontier woman, making new friends and cultivating old ones – most notably, John and Barbara Duffy.

Flash forward to May 2011, and the worst flooding Lake Champlain has ever seen. I am walking down our driveway in chest-high waders, towing a boat with food and supplies for my Mom who has refused to leave her house. FEMA is up the road with Humvees and bulldozers, our good friend Bruce Noble is helping Jeff put sandbags around the house, and my Mom, living alone, still refuses to leave.

“This is my house” she says. “I am not leaving it now.”

And it was her house. She had worked hard for it, cooked a thousand meals in it, entertained two decades of friends in it, loved her husband in it, watched her grandchildren fall in love with its big oaks outside and the ducks and herons on the water.

It would not be taken from her so easily.

And so she stayed. And the lake, having met its match, receded.

III.

If you think for any length of time about my Mom’s life, you find yourself automatically thinking of other people – the people whose lives she touched.

Like the 10 firemen who rushed to our Randolph house one Christmas after my father set the chimney on fire. What began as a disaster ended up with the men gathered around our kitchen table, drinking eggnog spiked with rum (it’s true my Mom did not drink a lot, but she liked to get other people drunk), laughing with my Mom at some story, reluctant to leave.

Around that same table, my high school friends Joe and Jay and I trying to beat my Mom at poker, and she letting us win a hand every now and then.

And the old man living in a dirt floor shack in central Vermont, whom my Mom visited as a traveling nurse, and who cried when she massaged his crippled feet because, he said, no one had ever been that kind to him before

Olga’s grandmother, babulenka, whom we all visited in Moscow in 2005 – seeming to delight in my Mom’s stories for hours, though neither spoke the other’s language.

(On that same trip, I recall my Dad and Mom drinking wine in our overnight train cabin from St Petersburg, perhaps living their first voyage together, 37 years earlier).

Grandchildren Elena, Cormac, Lukas and Zoe, who called my Mom simply Tootsie, and knew they could always rely on her for a piece of candy or a back scratch.

The caregivers at Vermont Respite House where Mom spent her last 8 months, who tended to her with exquisite skill and respect, honoring her both as a fellow human and as a fellow nurse.

IV.

Last week, after she had passed away, an anonymous friend left a copy of Shakespeare’s sonnet 16 on my Mom’s bed, which ends with the lines:

“Nor shall Death brag thou wanderst in his shade,

When in eternal lines to time thou growest:

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see

So long lives this and this gives life to thee.”

Below the sonnet, her friend had written: “Many bows to a wonderful, loving spirit. She took part of us with her.”

And that’s true. And it hurts.

But it’s also true that Audrey gave us the best of herself.

And for that, we will always be grateful.

Audrey R. Engroff passed away on February 14, 2012, surrounded by her family. She was 72.

Beloved and devoted wife of the late John Engroff, Audrey was the mother of Autumn Engroff Spencer and Joshua Engroff, grandmother of Elena Spencer, Cormac Spencer, Zoe Engroff and Lukas Engroff, and sister of Carol DiPerna, Cassie Schweers and Maureen Gigler — all of whom she loved beyond words.

The youngest of four daughters born to Margaret and Herbert Reinehr, Audrey grew up near Pittsburgh, where she attended nursing school and met her husband John in the 1960s. Vivacious and fearless, in the summer of 1968 Audrey set out with John on a four-month tour of Europe, driving from London to Athens in a newly-purchased Triumph Spitfire, before embarking to Lebanon by boat. Beirut would be their home for the following year, and the birthplace of their son Joshua in 1969.

The young family spent the next four years in Boston, where Audrey honed her nursing skills at the prestigious Massachusetts General Hospital, before settling in Vermont. In 1973, Audrey gave birth to a daughter and named her Autumn, in recognition of Vermont’s most beautiful season.

Over the next two decades, Audrey and John lived in Burlington, Randolph, and finally Isle La Motte, where they built a house on Lake Champlain and enjoyed the close company of their great friends, John and Barbara Duffy.

As a nurse, Audrey specialized in palliative and geriatric care and became known for her extraordinary professionalism. As anyone who worked with her could attest, her standards were exacting and her compassion profound.

As a mother, Audrey excelled brilliantly, embodying the very values she taught: courage, self-sacrifice, industriousness, optimism, humor and, above all, love. If her children possess these qualities in any measure, it is due to Audrey’s example.

As a grandmother, Audrey was simply “Tootsie.” Always there to hold a hand, wipe a tear, sneak a candy.

Commenting on the unique impact Audrey had on the people around her, a friend recently wrote: “Many bows to a wonderful, loving spirit. She took part of us with her.”

We will miss you greatly, Mom, Tootsie, Sister, Friend. We loved you so very much indeed.

~~~~~~~

Memorial services will be held on Saturday, February 25, at 3pm, in the North Hero United Methodist Church, North Hero, VT. Funeral arrangements by Stephen C. Gregory & Son, Shelburne, VT.

Donations in Audrey’s memory are appreciated and should be made to Vermont Respite House, 99 Allen Brook Lane, Williston, VT 05495.