![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kathleen_daileyAnother colleague gone too soon.
I worked with Helen J. for years--decades, actually--on a recurring project. She had a brain the size of a planet and an intense, driven, competitive personality. My organization's director often said that my most important job responsibility was not wrangling Helen's prose, but wrangling Helen herself.
It's true that I spent many, many work-hours acting as her sounding-board and counsellor. Helen's private life, like her personality, was complicated in the extreme, and she was deeply scornful of anyone who wasn't on the same intellectual and conceptual page that she was. That scorn encompassed her spouse, her birth family, and most of her professional colleagues. But because I was in paid service to her writing and thinking, she didn't see me as a threat to her status or her amour-propre, and thus we got along well.
Interestingly, she was one of several lawyers I've known whose abilities and interests were dramatically bifurcated. She was a brilliant corporate lawyer, but she was also a gifted painter, sculptor, fabric artist, and woodworker. She had degrees in both law and fine arts, and (maybe because of her own struggles with family and mental health) she eventually undertook training to be a psychotherapist.
Most of her emotional energy was focused on her son. She'd guided him from birth towards a high-achieving, high-status life, and she'd seen to it that he had all the opportunities (academic, artistic, athletic) that her birth family had denied her. Her colleagues often said that he'd probably rebel by leaving his high-profile investment-banking career and becoming a poverty-stricken poet or painter, but that didn't happen.
Helen and I lost touch after we both retired. She moved away from the city to a small town near her birthplace, and until a colleague sent me her obituary I hadn't known she was ill. She was one of my most high-maintenance authors, but she was also a friend for many years, and I'll miss her.
I worked with Helen J. for years--decades, actually--on a recurring project. She had a brain the size of a planet and an intense, driven, competitive personality. My organization's director often said that my most important job responsibility was not wrangling Helen's prose, but wrangling Helen herself.
It's true that I spent many, many work-hours acting as her sounding-board and counsellor. Helen's private life, like her personality, was complicated in the extreme, and she was deeply scornful of anyone who wasn't on the same intellectual and conceptual page that she was. That scorn encompassed her spouse, her birth family, and most of her professional colleagues. But because I was in paid service to her writing and thinking, she didn't see me as a threat to her status or her amour-propre, and thus we got along well.
Interestingly, she was one of several lawyers I've known whose abilities and interests were dramatically bifurcated. She was a brilliant corporate lawyer, but she was also a gifted painter, sculptor, fabric artist, and woodworker. She had degrees in both law and fine arts, and (maybe because of her own struggles with family and mental health) she eventually undertook training to be a psychotherapist.
Most of her emotional energy was focused on her son. She'd guided him from birth towards a high-achieving, high-status life, and she'd seen to it that he had all the opportunities (academic, artistic, athletic) that her birth family had denied her. Her colleagues often said that he'd probably rebel by leaving his high-profile investment-banking career and becoming a poverty-stricken poet or painter, but that didn't happen.
Helen and I lost touch after we both retired. She moved away from the city to a small town near her birthplace, and until a colleague sent me her obituary I hadn't known she was ill. She was one of my most high-maintenance authors, but she was also a friend for many years, and I'll miss her.
