The inspiration for the Helene Cody Foundation is my daughter, Helene. Tragically, she passed away from a brain aneurysm on her 16th birthday. She had planned a guest list for her party, and after her passing, we invited those friends over. Her friends described her with three words: community, compassion, and caring.
Helene had an infectious laugh and was a connector of people. She earned the nickname “Heleney Panini” during her freshman year at Princeton High. Through Freshman Choir, she met a wonderful group of friends, many of whom didn’t know her friends from Cranbury School. To bridge them together, she organized a panini party for all her friends.
She was full of ideas and made them happen. There used to be a dog and cat adoption place at a nearby farm store, and she decided, “We’re going to donate one hundred dollars, bake cookies, and sell lemonade.” So, they did that at their drug-free fair and donated the money.
She managed her time wisely. Despite being on the track and cross-country teams and having practice about half an hour from our place, she still found time for community service. One summer, she said, “We’re going to make Christmas cards for soldiers!” So, everyone in the car was making cards. She always had these “Ok, this is what we’re going to do” moments.
It took a while to start the Helene Cody Foundation to honor Helene and celebrate the values she stood for. She had planned to host a 5K race for her Girl Scout Gold Award. This race had previously been held, and her intention was to bring it back for the community. She had notebooks of her plans for all the vendors and everything. In the first year, her classmate Greg Carrol organized the race for his Boy Scout Eagle project, and we’ve been running it ever since. The Helene Cody Foundation has now organized it for the 16th consecutive year.
The money we raise funds the Helene Cody Scholars Program and the Grant Program. The mission of these programs and the foundation is to inspire youth to engage in volunteer activities that can better their communities and themselves.
Students apply, and we review the applications, selecting them based on their dedication and commitment to community service, their leadership potential, and their vision for community service initiatives. We provide the selected candidates with a $2,000 college scholarship. We also teach them skills such as how to plan a project, how to communicate with adults via email, and how to write effective letters. We match them with a mentor who has been through the program.
It expands my horizon, and I get to know amazing young people. It’s like we’ve discovered a secret sauce to find a group of incredible young individuals who want to make an impact. We now have fifty-six students who have gone through our program, and they are doing amazing things. I get to see the heart of these students, and it’s such a treasure to know them and witness the perspectives they bring to community service.
Ms. Linda Morris
One of the hardest things is going through your day after a terrible loss. What made it worse was that I have another daughter who found it very hard to deal with the loss. At Princeton High School, I was teaching chemistry to Helene’s classmates, who were also struggling. I was very concerned about the young teenagers and their feelings.
The school brought in grief counselors, but nobody went to see them because nobody knew them. I looked into how teenagers process grief. I wrote a grant and got the counselors trained in grief awareness. On my first day back, I told the students that I might cry, but I was okay. I gave them all a little piece of paper and asked what they were concerned about. So many kids wrote back, “If you need a shoulder to cry on, you can call on me.”
Oh my gosh, yes! For example, I think pretty much everybody in town made us dinner—I didn’t cook for a year. It was remarkable, the compassion that people in this town showed.
A brain aneurysm, which Helene passed away from, is something that people are born with. There’s a weakness in the cells, and this kind of aneurysm splits. The location was the brain stem, so it is called a dissecting brain aneurysm where the cells split. My understanding is that you can live with an aneurysm if it is in a non-critical location. But, her aneurysm was located at the brain stem, where it ruptured and flooded her brain with blood.
When she was in the hospital, it was a sterile place; nobody could come. They couldn’t send flowers; there was nothing that people could physically do. There really was nothing that could be done. There is a story of Sadako and the thousand cranes, so her friends organized crane-making at school. Pretty much everybody at Cranbury School and Princeton High School were making origami cranes. At the funeral service, there were about three thousand origami cranes.
I leaned on stories of other events to help deal with the situation. For example, we lived in Shadow Oaks where we had a nice pool. Usually, little ducks would come in the springtime and make a little nest there. That spring, just when the ducklings should have been hatching, there was a big noise in the night. I went out and didn’t see anything. However, the next day, the mother duck came and was looking all over. She had her mouth wide open but no sound could come out. I could imagine what the mother duck must have been feeling. On the ride back from the hospital, I related the story about the mother duck to my daughter Jenna, who was in the back seat. She replied, “But, you have one duckling left…” I didn’t realize at the time, but when something terrible like this happens, you still have to treat your children equally even though one is no longer there.
Another thing I remember is my driver’s license. I had a picture that would seem like a normal picture. I showed my license to the kids in my class and told them that the day I was going to get my license, Helene was also supposed to get her license. I had just been crying beforehand, but by looking at the picture, you can’t tell. I said, “When you are driving a car, you have no idea what is going on in the heads of other people driving the cars next to you.”
When something like this happens, you still have all this love there, but it has no place to go. So the foundation made a place for it to go.
Gratitude is a superpower. Even when it seems like the very worst thing that you could ever imagine has happened, there are always things to be grateful for. I think gratitude is what can get you from the lowest point to being able to walk, even take a step. I would sing over and over in my head, “This is the day. This is the day. This is the day that the Lord has made. I will rejoice. I will rejoice. I will rejoice and be glad in it.” Just having something that I could keep my mind on rather than going down into bitterness.
I am remarried. My anniversary is coming up next Monday, and we’re going to Italy and France on Thursday! I’m recently retired—I retired last year. I spend a lot of time on the Helene Cody Foundation, both with the 5K walk/run and the Helene Cody Scholars program, as we have monthly leadership trainings. I research different topics of what we’re going to cover, and then the students write project plans. I spend time here, but also in Florida.
I find education to be extremely important, not only for developing choices for what you can do with your life, but also because, without certain background levels of education, you may not have the choice to enter a field you’d like to go into. For example, in math, if you don’t know the basics, then going beyond that into fields like computer science can be very challenging.
For me, what sums up who I am as a person is God, family, friends, and health. People have a lot of choices, even if they don’t always see them. One of those choices is what foods you are eating, what you are consuming, and what you are taking into yourself. These choices not only make you a person who can give back, but they also help build yourself up. How much you exercise and what you do to build yourself up refills your well so that you can provide for other people.