Lyme
But Lyme was her world.
In 2002 she moved to Lyme where she spent countless winter weekends growing up and immersed herself in the town’s life and people, leaving family and friends as grateful for her presence and abiding service to the community as they were knocked off their feet by her homemade maple syrup, rhubarb pie and blackberry jam.
Kilmarx, whose family had roots in Hanover and fostered a spirit of public service, died Oct. 21, 2018, at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in the presence of a brother and a longtime friend. She was 54.
In a cruel irony, the cure for a terrible disease Kilmarx suffered as a young teenager would be the cause of her death as a middle-age adult.
A survivor of childhood Hodgkin’s Lymphoma that struck her when she was 14, the intensive radiation treatment she received at the time to wipe out the cancer cells resulted, 40 years later, in progressively worsening and finally fatal damage to her heart and lungs, family members said.
Kilmarx didn’t let her failing health slow her down, however, even in the final months of her life when she was lugging around a green cylinder oxygen tank.
Family and friends attest she lived a life of extraordinary energy and physical stamina — solo hiking (always with her dogs, Gracie and Salty, and later Java) all 48 mountain peaks of 4,000 feet or higher in New Hampshire, cross-country skiing and Nordic skating.
She also joined in public life through Lyme’s historical society, the Democratic club, the Prouty and volunteering on the Congressional campaign of her cousin, U.S. Rep. Annie Kuster, D-N.H.
“Elizabeth lived more than most people in a shorter period of time,” said a longtime friend, Landis Hudson, who was with Kilmarx when she died. “She was fully present in the world.”
Wonder and Frogs Eggs
It was an engagement that began early, when Kilmarx was growing up in a house overlooking Narragansett Bay in Barrington, R.I., the only girl in a family with two older brothers.
As a little girl, Kilmarx “had a natural capacity for endless wondering and observations,” recalled Hadley Soutter Arnold, who first became friends with Kilmarx when the girls were 4 years old and living a short bike ride away from each other.
“Elizabeth could find life in a mud puddle,” related Arnold. “She had this inclination to share. She was the one scooping up frogs eggs and wanting to share with you why it was so interesting and not gross.”
Even before she made Lyme her home when she was 38, Kilmarx was practically a native.
The Kilmarx family long had ties to Hanover: Elizabeth’s mother, Mary Kilmarx, a Rhode Island state legislator, was the daughter of Dartmouth College Dean Lloyd (Pudge) Neidlinger and grew up in the college town. Her father, Bob Kilmarx, a Boston attorney, was in the Dartmouth class of 1950 and later a college trustee (both Elizabeth’s grandfather and a brother also attended Dartmouth).
Kilmarx’s parents, who along with two other families bought an 18th-century farm on Dorchester Road in Lyme in the late 1960s as a weekend ski and vacation house, liked to joke that they were “outdoor Unitarians” for the way the family embraced nature, skiing, skating and hiking. Elizabeth Kilmarx accepted the calling to become a member of the family congregation.
“She was always up for hiking, downhill cross-country skiing, camping. The cancer never really diminished her activity,” said John Leggat, whose family shared the Lyme house with the Kilmarx’s. “She loved the woods. Conservation was very important to her.”
After a gap year at a school in the Swiss Alps, Kilmarx went to Williams College, where she majored in English. After college, she followed her older brother, Peter, into the Peace Corp., where she was posted to the Caribbean island nation Dominica.
“Part of her treatment (for cancer) was having her spleen removed, so she couldn’t go anywhere that had malaria,” explained Peter Kilmarx, an epidemiologist with the National Institutes of Health who now lives in Bethesda, Md.
After the Peace Corp, Kilmarx, propelled by her twin interests in the environment and outdoors, earned a master’s degree from the College of Environmental Sciences and Forestry at the State University of New York in Syracuse.
A voracious reader — she had a stack of books at her bedside right up to when she died — friends marveled at how quickly Kilmarx could penetrate and grasp a difficult subject.
“I was in ecology class and I realized the material was going by pretty quickly and I’d better find somebody” to study with, said Hudson. Kilmarx cheerfully made herself available.
“She was clear, direct and organized,” Hudson marveled.
Following forestry school, Kilmarx visited her brother Peter and his family in Thailand, where he was working — and stayed, first teaching English, then working as consultant for the United Nations Development Program on an impact assessment for a road project. Moving on to full-time job with UNDP in Laos, she in typical fashion threw herself into the local culture, participating in women’s traditional “war canoe” races and playing on a woman’s rugby team, Peter said.
Settling in Lyme
Then, in 2002, Kilmarx moved back to Lyme, where her parents had earlier bought out the other two families who co-owned the get-a-way farmhouse and were now living. There, on the 85-acre property only one mile from Dartmouth Skiway, she maintained a flock of a couple dozen chickens, tended to a thick blackberry stand and boiled sap during the sugaring season in the farm’s sugar shack.
“Elizabeth was so knowledgeable about the outdoors,” her friend JoAnn Berns, one of a group of four women who called themselves “the Bladies” (derived from combing the words skate “blades” with “ladies”) and who got together to skate on area lakes, ponds and the Connecticut River, said via email.
Being friends with Kilmarx meant having a personal tour guide for the trees, woods, fauna and wild animal habitats around Lyme, Berns said, enthusiastically revealing the wonders of nature just like she did when she was a little girl.
“Where others might trod past in a hurry to a destination, she stopped to name the flowers, trees, and natural processes around her. She slowed to appreciate, explain, and express her understanding of the natural world, its history, and, even more importantly to her, describe her concerns and efforts to maintain and conserve the natural world for future generations of all the plant, animal, and human communities who depend on it,” Berns said.
Then there was her dry sense of humor.
When it came time to process her hens for eating, Kilmarx would tell friends they were going to “freezer camp … a better place,” recalled her brother John Kilmarx. Her tracking and record keeping of egg production and sugaring was meticulous, charting the results like a data scientist.
“We had a record sugaring season — 30 and 7/8ths gallons, which beats our previous record from 1975 (25 and a half gallons) ,” Elizabeth emailed her brother John Kilmarx last April. “… Might have ended up missing another run this week, but enough is enough.”
Berns noted how when Elizabeth’s blackberry crop was ready for harvesting she shared the bounty “generously with friends and neighbors, and also picked weekly in season to donate to Lyme’s food support program, Verggiecares.”
Unlike many of her elite educated peers, friends and family said Kilmarx chose to have her work align with the lifestyle she sought rather than pursue a high-powered career.
A trained forester, Kilmarx would employ her professional skills to earn money as as a consultant in GIS mapping and forestry, taking on assignments for the timber management and investment company Lyme Timber Co., by mapping forests on behalf of the firm’s clients.
“She was very good and very dedicated at her work and did it well,” said Peter Kilmarx. “But it wasn’t like she was trying to rise up the corporate ranks or start her own company.”
Her live-first, work-second philosophy enabled Kilmarx to have the free time to pursue the service she believed was important, such as for Lyme Historians, the town’s historical society, where she served as board member and secretary and was “unbelievably efficient and scrupulous about details and very imaginative,” said fellow officer Adair Mulligan.
Elizabeth involved herself in the group’s activities, such as organizing logistics for the River Ramble in which a flotilla of boats followed in the wake of the Lyme Town Band performing on boats down the Connecticut River or whipping up batches from her own recipe for switchel, the haymaker’s thirst-quencher of water mixed with vinegar, ginger and maple syrup during summer events.
She also put her skills as a professional cartographer to service in the benefit of Lyme Historians’ multi-year “cellar holes” project, which maps the locations and foundations of the remains of old homesteads in the forests around Lyme. From the data Kilmarx gathered she was then able to produce maps that marked the spot of farmsteads that were long ago lost to history.
“Elizabeth made these beautiful maps that were so easy to understand,” Mulligan said. “That takes a special understanding of how lay people interact with maps. She had that insight.”
(Lyme Historians homepage currently is featuring a tribute to Kilmarx on the group’s webpage with a collection of photos of her — sporting a favorite red felt hat — mapping cellar holes in the Lyme woods).
Her willingness to have a public profile extended into a deep engagement in politics, said Peter Swart, chair of the Lyme Democratic Party.
“If we did a visibility event, she was there,” he said. “Holding signs when people were voting at Lyme School, waving to people, setting up a table at the Lyme flea market, canvassing door-to-door, phone banks, she showed up for everything.”
“She was a strong progressive,” Swart said.
For Kilmarx, her engagement with the town and people of Lyme was about how to exemplify a life well-lived. When faced at a young age with our own mortality, it can gather a person’s will and propel her to act.
“I think she knew she wasn’t going to live forever and that she should do something good,” said John Kilmarx. “I think she knew that for 40 years.”
John Lippman can be reached at jlippman@vnews.com.
