RE Log Fall 2019

She started cultivating this interest at the Everglades School for Girls. When she enrolled, “she was going through some turbulent times,” Andy Neale explained. Her parents had gotten divorced a few years back, and she had moved, with her father, from New York to Coral Gables, where she lived in a blended family with five other siblings. The school offered a new family – especially since her father, M. Chapin Krech, served as both assistant headmaster and her 10th-grade English teacher. But it also brought her out of her comfort zone. She got involved in anything and everything: varsity tennis, the glee club, operettas. So did her father: Fleming vividly remembers a talent show where Lili and her father sang a funny duet of an Italian opera in front of the whole school, with Lili “just hamming it up.” By all accounts, M. Chapin Krech was beloved by students. The 1967 Everglades yearbook begins with a poetic dedication in which the students imagine themselves as helpless wanderers, afraid of the ocean’s immensity, until he arrives to teach them its wisdom. Even to this day, Lili runs into alums who talk about the difference her father made in their lives. Fleming remembers being “painfully shy” as a new student to the school, and feeling emboldened for the first time when Mr. Krech, her English teacher, shared one of the stories she’d written with the rest of the class. “That was one of the first times I received recognition for a school assignment,” she said. “It was very meaningful to me. He was a wonderful, giving person.” Inspired by her father, who strongly emphasized service, and by her own experience volunteering at places in the Grove such as Bayshore Preschool and Frances Tucker Elementary, Lili decided to embark on a career in nursing. After completing a BS (and later an MS) at the University of Miami, she started working as a critical care nurse at Mercy Hospital, treating some of the most challenging trauma patients in the metropolitan area. When the job got tough, she remembered her grand- mother Sheila Healey, who extolled the virtues of mindfulness, and tried to pour herself into patient care the way Healey had poured herself into painting. Still, it was difficult to remain purely task-oriented – and sometimes necessary not to be. “You become very attached to people and their problems,” she explained. “You just learn to be very human with them. You don’t stuff down your emotions; you go with the flow.” With 10 years of intense clinical work under her belt, she started teaching at UM, and it was there that another ghost from the past – in this case, Giles Healey – drew her to a different way of looking at things. With his search for curare in the back of her mind, she became deeply interested in transcultural nursing, a new approach to care pioneered by the nurse-anthropologist Madeleine Leininger, and structured around the idea of incorporating (rather than dismissing) non- Western healing practices. Lili developed an elective for the students at UM based on Leininger’s theories. Soon enough, transcultural nursing became a huge part of the curriculum, and proved to be an effective and flexible approach to patient care in Miami’s multicultural melting pot. “It’s basically being respectful of families’ belief systems – and the patient,” she explained. “Even in the critical care units, you might see a patient where the family brings in certain poultices, religious symbols, sacks of herbs. Whatever they are, they’re just as important as the antibiotics and the Western medicine that’s going through the veins, because [they affect] the confidence of the patient and the journey of believing that you want to get better.” Lili still fights for transcultural nursing wherever and whenever she can. And her energy, as irrepressible as ever, has also led her in new directions. She served on the board of the Barnacle Society; she plays, with Andy, in a seven-member ukulele band. Inspired by Sheila Healey, she took up watercolor painting 20 years ago: all over the house hang her sun-soaked studies of flowers and tropical foliage. Since Sheila passed away, in 2017, at the age of 102, Lili has become interested in aging. She’s inspired by those centenarians who remain active into their second century, maintaining a good quality of life. She thinks part of the secret is moderation – “balancing things, healthy choices, healthy habits.” But another part might be a secret she already knows: learning from the past to live, as fully as possible, in the present. 18 Ransom Everglades LOG FALL 2019