Lebanon
Knitting was one of the myriad ways Houde Quimby cared for loved ones, a community that included her second husband, William “Tony” Quimby; six children — Robert Houde, John Houde, David Houde, Judy Houde Hardy, Beth Houde and Matthew Houde — three step-children, 11 grandchildren and many other relatives and friends.
Members of a knitting group to which Houde Quimby belonged have since completed 4-year-old Haddie’s sweater, and family members have distributed Houde Quimby’s leftover yarn.
“We have these things that have been held in her hand,” said Mindy Schorr, a fellow midwife and longtime friend from West Lebanon. “It’s so bittersweet just even touching this yarn or just even thinking what she might have been planning to do with it.”
Houde Quimby’s hands — holding pencils, delivering babies, knitting and adding emphasis to her words — have left an imprint in Schorr’s memory.
They were “beautiful, striking, competent and expressive,” Schorr said.
Friends and family members mourn the loss of a loving wife, mother, grandmother and colleague and friend, known for careful listening and dispensing sage advice. They also reflect on her many accomplishments, including those as nurse-midwife, teacher, New Hampshire state representative and, most recently, author.
A book she co-authored, The CenteringPregnancy Model: The Power of Group Healthcare, was published just before her death and, last month, the American College of Nurse-Midwives selected it as the group’s 2017 Book of the Year.
The book describes a model of group care for pregnant women and their infants in which a clinician guides group discussions to “let the wisdom come out of the group,” said Sharon Schindler Rising, a fellow midwife, co-author of the book and founder of the centering model.
Centering also supports women in gathering their own records to better understand their health and in developing relationships with, and caring for, each other, Rising said.
“That kind of interconnectedness and support and love, that’s just how Mom approaches everything,” said Houde Quimby’s son John Houde, an orthopaedic surgeon at Alice Peck Day Memorial Hospital in Lebanon. “(The book) was really a crowning project to her life’s work for sure.”
Charlotte Agnes Theriault was born to French Canadian immigrants Arthur and Josephine Marquis Theriault, in Nashua, N.H. on May 10, 1938. She showed an early aptitude for learning and reading. To continue her education after graduating from Mount St. Mary High School in 1957, she chose to enter the convent.
But, as it turned out that path was not for her. In 1960, she graduated from St. Anselm College — with the school’s first graduating class to include women — cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in nursing. That same year she married Robert Joseph Houde, her first husband and the father of her six children.
Her interest in helping women give birth was spurred by her own experience of labor, which included hefty doses of medication and the care of male doctors, said John Houde.
“She loved babies and she loved kids, but she didn’t like the (birthing) experience that she had had,” he said.
After the birth of her youngest son, Matthew, she attended the Yale School of Nursing in Connecticut. There, she earned a master’s degree in nursing and became a certified nurse midwife in 1972. In New Haven, she delivered many babies and served as an assistant professor at Yale’s nursing school from 1973 to 1978.
She came to the Upper Valley in 1983, to start the midwifery program at Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital, which was then in Hanover. She left Dartmouth-Hitchcock in 1990, and then devoted more than a decade to setting up midwifery programs internationally in developing countries such as Senegal, Uganda, Vietnam and Indonesia.
“Her intellectual curiosity was just never sated,” John Houde said.
Houde Quimby spent her career trying to improve health care for women and their children.
“She’s a feminist,” Schorr said. “All her children are feminists regardless of their gender.”
Houde Quimby’s children admire her for her ability to keep the family together, even under challenging circumstances. She suffered the loss of a stillborn son, Stephen, in the 1960s. It was a loss she later described in an essay published by the Preservation Foundation.
“Bob and I begged them to let us see Stephen, but in the ‘60’s, mothers weren’t allowed to see or hold their stillborn infants. The nurse told us he’d been sent to the morgue. ‘Oh, no. Please, please don’t send my baby there,’ I begged,” she wrote in the story, which was published in 2010.
The story, which is available online, primarily focuses on a Ugandan woman’s loss of a son, Andrew, so that the message the story conveys is of a shared bond between women who have experienced such losses.
“We talked quietly about the day, and about Andrew, and I told Sara the story of losing my own son, Stephen,” Houde Quimby wrote. “She quietly placed her hand on my arm where it stayed while she navigated our way out of the bush.”
In addition to Stephen, Houde Quimby also experienced loss when her first husband died of suicide in 1978, leaving her to care for their six children, the oldest of whom was 17 at the time.
“There’s not a person I admire more than my mom,” said Matthew Houde, Houde Quimby’s youngest child, a Cornish resident and former Lebanon-area state senator who is director of government relations for Dartmouth-Hitchcock, and soon will take on the role of vice president.
Though Houde Quimby was often busy, she had a way of being present when she was talking with loved ones, some of her children said. She dispensed wise advice, sometimes leading her children to her way of thinking by creative means.
Matthew Houde recalled not wanting to make the move from Connecticut to the Upper Valley as an eighth-grader. But, his outlook changed following a trip to Hanover when the family stayed at the Hanover Inn in a room overlooking the Dartmouth Green, where a bonfire took place. He now maintains that the location of the room probably wasn’t an accident.
“She was good,” he said. “She was very wise. And my hope is that I can continue to glean some of those lessons that she was trying to instill.”
Houde Quimby brought her professional skills into her family sphere — offering her children lessons when warranted — when she attended the births of many of her grandchildren.
During Haddie’s birth, Houde Quimby asked her son, ever the nervous father, to leave the room.
“I was just like where are the drugs? Where are the meds? Because my wife is uncomfortable right now and I want to fix it,” Matthew Houde recalled. “She said ‘Matthew, I think you need to have a couple moments. You’re not being helpful in this situation.’ ”
Houde Quimby attended the birth of all four of her daughter Judy’s children. Judy Houde Hardy described the experience as “truly a gift of a lifetime.”
“She was like the condensed version of her graceful motherhood.”
Houde Quimby approached motherhood and midwifery with a fierce tenderness, Hardy said.
“She was this brilliantly intense lover of all people,” she said.
Relationships were at the center of Houde Quimby’s life and work. After her first husband’s death, Houde Quimby remained single for about 10 years, but she always had a group of friends — primarily women — surrounding her.
“She was never not connected with people,” John Houde said. “Her closest friends that were there 40 years ago when my dad died, were around when she died. That’s how strong those bonds are.”
She met her second husband Tony Quimby, a widower and gentleman farmer from Meriden, on a blind date in 1988. After six weeks, the two decided to wed.
They built a home in Meriden, which has continued to serve as a family gathering place. After the Quimbys moved into a smaller home in Lebanon, Charlotte’s daughter Judy and her family moved into the Meriden house.
“I am literally embraced by her spirit each day,” Hardy said.
Houde Quimby also nurtured many new friendships in the Upper Valley.
She shared her wisdom and advice with friends, including members of a women’s group that has met one Sunday per month for nearly 30 years, said Schorr, who is also a member of the group.
“She wasn’t an ambivalent person,” Schorr said. “When things were presented to her, she had a very clear mind about how she felt about it. Her stance always had a lot of love and justice in it.”
Houde Quimby brought her sense of justice to the New Hampshire House when voters elected her to a Sullivan County seat three times in 2004, 2006 and 2008.
While in Concord, Houde Quimby, a Democrat, advocated for New Hampshire to pay what she viewed as its fair share to support the Good Neighbor Health Clinic in White River Junction, said Laurie Harding, who is a registered nurse and a former state representative from Lebanon.
“She was a real champion for the causes she believed in,” said Harding, who would often carpool with Houde Quimby to Concord.
She brought her talents as an avid reader and rapid absorber of information to her work in the Legislature.
Houde Quimby was “so adept at just taking in new information,” Harding said. She was able to “sift through the things that were important and the things that were not.”
When she spoke to them, each family member and friend felt important and heard.
“In the way listening is a loving thing to do, she was a great listener,” said Schorr. “She gave your words thought. She was very empathic. She could really take one’s place.”
Houde Quimby made each of her grandchildren feel like her favorite.
“Her love was all encompassing and anytime we walked into a room she made us feel like we were her entire world,” said Jasmine Hardy, 27, her second oldest grandchild.
Hardy, who was delivered by her grandmother at the old Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital in Hanover in 1990, graduated from Amherst College in 2013, and then spent a year on a Fulbright fellowship in Vietnam.
That experience was “inspired by my grandmother’s stories about the time she spent working with midwives in Vietnam,” she said, in an email written from Costa Rica where she is spending the summer leading trips for high school students.
Houde Quimby’s grandchildren miss her “not only as our grandmother but also as our mentor, inspiration, and friend,” Jasmine Hardy wrote. “Her legacy will live on with us.”
Staff Writer Nora Doyle-Burr can be reached at ndoyleburr@vnews.com or 603-727-3213.
