She made every grandchild feel like the favorite.

Her life

Helen Margaret Brennan, of Erie, Pennsylvania, was born in Buffalo in 1947, the older of two O’Hare girls. She graduated from Mercyhurst College in 1969 and taught fourth grade at Lincoln Elementary for thirty-eight years. Generations of Erie children learned to love reading in her classroom. She married Thomas Brennan in 1971. They raised three children, Sarah, Michael, and Kathleen, and welcomed four grandchildren who knew her as Nana. Her gardens were the best on the block. Her cardinals were on time every morning. Her butter cookies could end any argument.

A short eulogy

The first thing my mother ever taught me was the name of a bird. I was four. We were at the kitchen window. She lifted me up and pointed and said, that one is a cardinal. The boy ones are red. The girl ones are the color of toast. She said it like a secret. That was Mom. Always pointing. Always pulling you close to show you something.

She loved her fourth graders. She remembered their names twenty years later, when they came back to visit. A boy came up to her at the grocery store, years after he had been in her class. He was a grown man with a baby on his hip. He just said, Mrs. Brennan. And she said his name back, and his friend’s name, and where they used to sit. She walked out to the car and cried. She would say it was the onions. ...