Coleen was a symbol of openness and love in my and Rachel’s life. She was always there, ready to listen, to help and provide advice that came without expectation or assumptions. Coleen was an ever present wealth of love and support to us, well beyond what I would have expected from an Aunt. She never made claims about what she would do, or how she would be there, and yet she was always there. She was a woman of action. Her love never seemed to expend.

I’ve spent the past weeks looking back at the major signposts in my own life and I’ve been so thankful to rediscover the impact Coleen’s love has had on me and our family over the years.

Coleen and I always enjoyed nerding out with one another. I remember watching seasons of Stargate at grandma and grandpa’s house with Rachel and Coleen coming over and chatting with her for hours about it and other science fiction.

Both she and I shared awe in the universe and its fundamental workings. And this early interest in science was a core component that put me on the trajectory to my phd in physics and computational mathematics 15 years later.

Early on in that trajectory, all the way back in my mid high school years I made the decision that I wanted to pursue a career in physics and math. At the time, Arapahoe high school wouldn’t allow me to take the courses I wanted and needed for this due to standard curriculum prerequisites. I remember talking with Coleen and not unlike her own experience, she recommended I go around the high school requirements and take the needed classes elsewhere. In part with that advice I found myself taking summer classes for trigonometry, and night classes for calculus at Arapahoe Community College in my senior year of high school.

This enabled me to get in to and advanced physics program in college with scholarships and financial aide without which would have made it difficult to pursue the trajectory that I did.

After Rachel and I got married we moved in to the same apartment complex as Coleen. Not uncommon for just married couples we didn’t have much furniture or other possessions. I remember vividly Coleen bringing over furnishings from her apartment to ours to help us in this foundational time. One of the lamp’s she brought over to help lighten up the apparent we still have and use in our home in Oregon regularly.

After the birth of our first born Theo, even though we weren’t living in the same state any longer, Coleen called just the right amount to ask how things were going and provided very helpful wisdom and perspective from her own years raising her babies.

Finally - after I finished college I became more interested and exposed to software development. At the time I remember learning a few of the languages Coleen was using regularly for web development. I remember being surprised by one of the advices she gave to me at the time. She told me that its great that I’m getting excited about programming, but that I shouldn’t spend time learning the web development languages to start, but instead invest time in learning the more bare metal languages like C and C++. She believed I would be better served with this knowledge.

And so I did, and she was quite correct. Some of my early coding experiments in C++ helped me in my first weeks of data analysis in my phd program. Eventually that effort bloomed into running simulations of supernova explosions on some of the world’s largest super computers. And today I use that knowledge to program Artificial Intelligence language models on GPU accelerators and each new advancement we make reduces the amount of energy and therefore carbon footprint that AI has on our planet.

Coleen is some who truly saw the potential for greatness in all people and rarely judged or evaluated. Her actions towards each of us showed me that she believed that there are no ordinary people. I want to end by reading a section of the Weight of Glory that I am reminded of by the life, love and actions of Aunt Coleen,

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It may be possible for each to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter; it is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbor.

The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbor’s glory should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken.

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare.

All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations.

It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics.

There are no ordinary people.

You have never talked to a mere mortal.

Nations, cultures, arts, civilization—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat.

But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.

This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn.

We must play.

But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously—no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption.

And our charity must be real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner—no mere tolerance or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment.

Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses.


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We miss you Aunt Coleen. Thank you for teaching us what it means to live with a compassionate heart, accepting and loving people just the way they are, but also seeing and encouraging the potential in what we can become. May we also find love like this spilling out from our hearts as it did yours.

With everlasting love,

Chris, Rachel, Theo, and Atticus Sullivan