Acton's Elisabeth Andrews: 'Woman of Indomitable Spirit and Grace' Dies at 62

The following is the obituary for Acton resident Elisabeth Andrews:

Elisabeth Lawson Andrews – psychotherapist, potter, photographer, devoted mother and wife, and a woman of indomitable spirit and grace – died peacefully on September 23, 2014, at her home in Acton with her family beside her.

Beth was diagnosed with stage-4 lung cancer in 2010, and with excellent outpatient care at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, she was able to live a very full life for more years than anyone expected.

Beth had many talents and had successful careers in both pottery and clinical social work – but she always managed to balance those pursuits with a dedication to her family. They were what she cared about more than anything else.

Born in Hinsdale, Illinois in 1952, Beth was a child of the 1960s. She embraced the music, culture, politics, and free-wheeling spirit of that era. Although she, like her mother and oldest sister, attended a New England boarding school (they attended Concord Academy, and Beth attended Abbott Academy, the sister school to Andover), Beth chose to go to liberal Sarah Lawrence College rather than a more traditional college, and chose pottery as a career after graduation.

Beth’s parents – the late James W. Andrews, an executive with General Foods, and the late Joan L. Andrews, who had a degree in horticulture and was a Garden Club of America judge – valued tradition. Each of them traced their lineage back to the Mayflower, her father graduated from Harvard Business School, and her mother attended Smith College. Like her two older sisters, her mother, and her mother’s female ancestors, Beth was a debutante, though by the time of her “coming out” ceremony in 1968, she had begun to question the values of New England gentility – she considered herself a hippie!

She forged a trail of her own, while maintaining warm and loving connections with her parents, her sisters, and her large extended family (which held reunions every five years in Duxbury, where they had spent summers). Photos of her from that era show a beautiful, long-haired young woman who was most comfortable in flannel shirts and bib-jeans.

Beth spent her junior year in college at a Danish “folk school,” where she studied pottery. After graduating from Sarah Lawrence, with a major in fine arts, she moved to Highlands, North Carolina in the Blue Ridge Mountains, where she lived in a log cabin and served a year-long apprenticeship to an established potter, Bob Vermillion, who owned the Lick Log Mill Store there. Among her adventures during the apprenticeship were visits by skunks and other creatures who found their way into her cabin, including a gigantic black snake that had wound its way around a pipe in her kitchen.

The following year, Beth created her own pottery studio in Salt Springville, a rural outpost near Cherry Valley in upstate New York, where she lived with other craftspeople in a rustic farmhouse. A wood stove was the primary source of heat. Beth was able to support herself by selling – both wholesale to craft stores and to the public at craft fairs – a line of stoneware bowls, mugs, vases, casserole dishes, candle holders, wine glasses, and dinner plates. One of her more unusual designs was a ceramic container for a birth-control diaphragm, with a cover that featured delicate sculptural lips that managed the fine line between floral and suggestive.

In 1977, two years after launching her own studio, Beth was exhibiting at the Keenan Arts Center outside Buffalo, where she met an Ithaca-based woodworker, David Hoffman, who was also exhibiting there. David persuaded her to move to Ithaca and join the local crafts co-op (Handwork, which still maintains a downtown crafts store). By 1978 they were living together.

During their years in Ithaca, they traveled to craft fairs throughout the Northeast to sell their work. Beth’s pottery was featured in dozens of handcraft stores, and was accepted many times for prestigious shows such as Rhinebeck, New York.

Like others in the counterculture of that time, they heated their house with wood, venturing out into the woods in Beth’s Datsun pickup truck to fell trees and haul the logs back to their driveway for cutting and splitting.

She and David also participated in anti-nuclear rallies, marches, and other protests. Like Beth, David grew up in a fairly traditional home but had embraced the values, culture, and politics of the 1960s. Beth and David made their home available to the local battered-women’s shelter as an off-site safe house for women, and Beth served on the board of the county Task Force for Battered Women.

They married on September 27, 1980, in a chapel at Cornell, where David had been a graduate student. They had their first child (Jacob Hoffman-Andrews) in Ithaca.

Marriage also meant being a stepmother to David’s daughter Jessica from a previous marriage. Beth always considered Jessica to be her own. In May 2000, when Jessica married, Jessica arranged for the invitations to read: “David Hoffman and Beth Andrews invite you to the wedding of their daughter, Jessica.”

In August, 1981, Beth and David moved to the Boston area, where David, who had sold his woodworking business, was about to enter Harvard Law School. Moving was not Beth’s favorite thing — she had been periodically uprooted as a child when her father’s work assignments at General Foods took her family from Illinois to New Jersey, then to Connecticut, followed by Canada, then back to Connecticut. But she good naturedly packed up her pottery studio, kiln, supplies, and inventory and, in a caravan with David consisting of two gigantic U-Haul trucks and a trailer, moved with him to Acton, in order to be supportive of his new career in law.

Beth built an elaborate metal-and-brick car-kiln for her studio in Acton (by hand!), located behind the two-family house that she and David purchased. She skillfully balanced motherhood and pottery, hiring two assistants, as she had done in Ithaca, to keep production flowing. In addition, behind the studio she created a large organic garden, which she enriched with frequent trips to a nearby sheep farm, and where she grew a cornucopia of vegetables each summer,

Shortly after having their second child, Lily Hoffman-Andrews, Beth decided to transition to a new career as a clinical social worker. She volunteered with a crisis intervention hotline, and then enrolled in the part-time program at Simmons University School of Social Work, graduating with an MSW degree in 1992. While in school and seeking an internship, she had one of her first job interviews, in which her characteristic candor was on display. Asked by the interviewer if there was any specific population that she would find difficult to work with, she quickly and candidly responded, “Men.” Judging by the look of mild alarm on the male interviewer’s face, she concluded that she could have found a more tactful way to answer the question and made note of that for future interviews.

In her first job as a psychotherapist, at Eliot Community Mental Health in Concord, Massachusetts, Beth worked with a predominantly low-income population, many of whom suffered from chronic psychological problems.

After a fellowship year with Harvard Pilgrim focusing on techniques for brief psychotherapy, and two years with a Dartmouth-affiliated clinic in Nashua, NH, Beth hung out her shingle in a solo practice in Acton. In 1999, she joined Family Associates of Merrimack Valley, in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, as an associate. In 2001, Beth became co-director of that 14-member practice with psychotherapist Joel Siegel.

Beth loved each of the modalities of her practice – individual psychotherapy, couples counseling, group therapy, and supervising younger clinicians – and developed many long-term professional relationships with her clients. She looked for ways to enhance her effectiveness, studying and becoming certified in both EMDR techniques and Internal Family Systems.

“Beth’s work as a therapist was noteworthy for her creativity, diagnostic skill, professionalism, and her enormous empathy for her clients,” remembered Joel Siegel. “Beth was also a wise and valued co-director and talented supervisor and consultant to other clinicians.”

When Beth retired from her clinical practice in December 2012, because of the side effects of her cancer treatment, she received laudatory letters and cards from numerous clients thanking her for the ways she had helped them and improved their lives.

In addition to trying to make the world a better place through her clinical work, Beth and David continued to be involved in political protest and social change. During the mid-1980s, they belonged to organizations opposing U.S. intervention in Central America. An amusing photo of Beth, David, Jacob, and Lily from 1989 shows them in Washington, D.C. at a rally for reproductive rights, with Lily, in a stroller, carrying a pennant borrowed from a Wisconsin group, proclaiming “Cheeseheads for Choice.” She and David participated in anti-Iraq War rallies and, with her women’s support group (which she co-founded in 1982), she marched in the year 2000 in the Washington, D.C. “Million Mom March” to promote gun control.

In 1991, Beth and David joined a group that was planning to build a cohousing community in Acton – New View Cohousing. Planning meetings occurred every ten days, with the group eventually narrowing its search to a site just around the corner from Beth and David’s home in West Acton.

The site, located near Idylwilde Farms, featured a farmhouse built in 1735, set back from the road with 20 acres of open land. Beth had literally dreamed of living in that house, which she passed frequently on errands in and around Acton, but it would have been far too expensive. New View Cohousing purchased the site and, in 1995, began construction of 23 new homes there, with a large common house built in 1998.

Beth and David, who loved old houses, chose the original homestead to be their home within the cohousing community. Beth lived her remaining 19 years there. During that time, she was an active member of the New View community, working in the gardens, helping with landscape planning, and participating each year (with David) in the community’s New Year’s Day music jam.

During her years at New View, Beth resumed her work in photography, which she had explored in college. She compiled the best of her work at two web sites (www.flickr.com/photos/rosiecheeks andwww.flickr.com/photos/mycancerjourney). The latter explores the emotional dimensions of her cancer diagnosis and treatment. Beth also exhibited her photographs in several shows in the Boston area.

Many of Beth’s photographs capture the beauty of Cape Cod and, in particular, Truro, where she, David, and their children spent part of every summer since 1985. In 2006, she and David purchased a summer house in Truro. After her lung cancer metastasized to her brain in May of this year, Beth and David spent most of their time there. Beth felt the extraordinary beauty and peacefulness of Truro made it the best place in which to spend the concluding stage of her life.

Beth’s artistic interests – in photography, pottery, and perennial gardens – may have been, in part, an inheritance from her great-grandfather, Frank Benson, an American Impressionist whose work is in the collection of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Benson’s daughter Eleanor (Beth’s grandmother) was also a painter, as is Beth’s older sister Ellen. Beth’s oldest sister Faith is the author of several art history books.

Beth’s cancer diagnosis in 2010 came as a complete shock. Beth knew that her mother had died from lung cancer, but she did not realize, until after her diagnosis, that all of her four maternal aunts and uncles had developed lung cancer during their lives.

Beth’s medical team at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, led by the head of thoracic oncology, Bruce Johnson, M.D., and his colleague, Pam Calarese, R.N., provided superb care. With a strong network of support from family, friends, and her neighbors at New View Cohousing, Beth was able to live a very full life while managing her cancer. Her illness did not deter her from travelling with David and others to Greece, Paris, Aruba, Jamaica, and the Grand Canyon.

Beth was an active member of a cancer support group at the Healing Garden in Harvard, Massachusetts. She also supported David’s efforts to raise money for cancer research through the annual Dana-Farber Marathon Challenge.

Beth and David chronicled the ups and downs of her treatment – including her participation in two cutting-edge clinical trials co-led by Dana-Farber – in an online journal at www.LotsaHelpingHands.com, in order to stay in touch with their support network and for the benefit of others who might be struggling with similar issues.

According to David, who founded Boston Law Collaborative, LLC in 2003 and teaches at Harvard Law School, Beth described her most important and satisfying accomplishment as raising their three children.

“Beth worked hard to make every birthday of theirs special, to make every Christmas and holiday wonderful, and to make every year’s Halloween costume magical,” David said. “She taught them about love by loving them so well, and she also never lost her capacity to be silly with our kids, and even with grown-ups.”

Lily recalls a time when she and Beth were on their way to the supermarket, and Beth was feeling grumpy, and so Lily (then age 7 or 8) suggested that the two of them do the “Hokie Pokie.” Beth quickly said OK, and the two of them did the “Hokie Pokie” in the supermarket parking lot, burst into laughter, and Beth’s grumpiness was gone. Beth later began recommending this “Hokie Pokie” technique for some of her psychotherapy clients. Lily remembers this as an example of Beth’s goofiness and the loving respect with which she treated her children’s whims and ideas.

Beth also had a huge capacity for connecting with friends, including those with whom she and David lived at New View Cohousing, her women’s group, her Internal Family Systems peer supervision group, and a number of women that she had known since childhood. “The same empathy that made her a great therapist also made her an extraordinary, irreplaceable friend,” said Caryn Bradley, who was Beth’s closest confidante. “She will be missed by me – and her many close friends – more than I can say.”

Beth is survived by her two older sisters, Faith Andrews Bedford, a writer, and Ellen Perry Harris, a businesswoman; her stepmother, Barbara Andrews; her husband David; her son Jacob (and his wife Allyse), her daughter Lily, and her stepdaughter Jessica; and a host of devoted nieces, nephews, and in-laws.

A memorial service will be held at Kerem Shalom Congregation in Concord on October 12, at noon. Contributions, in lieu of flowers, may be made to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute or the Healing Garden. As her final gift, Beth donated her body to UMass Medical School, where she will be assisting medical students and medical researchers through their anatomical gift program.