First of all I would like to thank Pete Leinonen for helping to write the majority of this obituary and posing important questions that helped shake me gently out of a fog. Thanks Pete for all your positive and glowing words about your friend Heather. And now a little story about her last months

I was fortunate to be able to reconnect with my mother and to help her in the last few months of her life as she had fallen in her trailer in Forks and had broken her hip. She was in the Sequim nursing home for sometime where my partner Shufen and i went to visit her once before being transferred to Seattle where my aunt Pam ( who drove up from southern California ) and I were able to be with Heather and comfort her as she began to fade and begin her journey home. Shufen was also with me and supporting me as we went to Richmond beach rehab and visited her during quarantine . She seemed very happy to meet Shufen , giving her a big smile and was excited to have the Haagen Daaz ice cream we had brought her. She was sitting across the window and she said she was wearing Rose colored glasses ( meaning she was going to try and stay positive and be gentle and kind towards the staff as I had encouraged her to do , sometimes she got upset and would need calming down, to know that she had someone who could help her negotiate the system in place at the rehab center ) she also pointed out that she wore a butterfly hair tie for me. I told her she looked very pretty , which she did and she was charmed and happy about that. I will always be grateful that i had a mother who was such a gifted and soulful artist who inspired me to improve myself musically and who always played such beautiful and melancholy music as i fell asleep as a young child..
I am very grateful to my Uncle Gene for coming to see her at the nursing home in shoreline, Wa and offering his help throughout the process. I also feel inspired by our Aunt Pam's selflessness in coming to Seattle to help support the passage of Heather lovingly and with great compassion throughout her last month of life. That was a great relief for me to have Pam present and a great comfort to Heather I’m sure. There was communication between all of her kids in some form or another through phone calls and letters and she even had communication with her granddaughter. In her last couple months she was feeling very strongly about family and enjoyed speaking about her 6 children with pride and joy.
If there had been time I would have liked to have recorded some of her stories about the coffeehouse scene that she spoke of as a golden age but things moved quicker than expected.

I feel very fortunate to have known my mother. Thanks for being my mom ma. Your music will always be with us. Love Harry