Esther Tabitha Andrews '98 died in an automobile accident on Sept. 17, near her home in Bothell Washington. She had graduated from Reynolds High School in Portland, Oregon and came to Wellesley in 1994, where I met her the following year. During her years at Wellesley, she majored in Economics and minored in Computer Science. In what would have been the last semester of her senior year, she decided that she was not yet ready to graduate, and took off to Europe, alone, to stay in hostels and travel through the Czech Republic, Switzerland, Austria, and Spain. Every week brought me a new postcard from the city where she was staying; she wrote about the sailboats and the mountains in Geneva, which she wrote "reminded me of our beloved Pacific NW," the stray cats who she befriended in Madrid, and the photographers selling their work on the streets of Prague. She returned to Wellesley in September 1998 to finish her classes, and walked with the class of 1999 that May. She moved to Redmond, Washington, to work as a software tester at Microsoft in January 1999.

Esther was warm & caring, & had an amazingly infectious laugh. She loved children, and had just begun working at Robinswood Middle School with students with learning disabilities as a teachers aide. She described her first weeks there as the hardest work that she had ever done, but intensely rewarding, and a job she was glad that she had adopted. She was gifted with an amazing selflessnes & contributed her time & money to a number of local charities and animal shelters, as her love of animals was surpassed only by her love of children. She loved teaching and learning, and had begun taking evening classes at a local college to work towards receiving a master's degree and teaching certification. She moved to a farm in Bothell last year, where she cultivated plants native to the pacific northwest and helped care for the goats, chickens, and horses. She delighted in the births of the baby animals this past spring, nursing to health one of the baby goats in her kitchen. Through the too short six years that I knew her, she had a hedgehog, Nietzsche, a number of fish, named Macbeth, Petruchio, and Kate, three cats, named Silvia, Aslan and Caspian, and a dog in Oregon, named Ceaser. As one might guess from the names of her pets, she was a prolific reader, and loved combing through bookstores for great childrens books, which she was collecting into a library for her future children.

A fiercely loyal friend to those she loved, Esther also had a great openness and honesty. Her knack for always speaking exactly what was on her mind made for many amusing stories which she would relate, laughing along at herself. She went out of her way to show how much cared for her friends, traveling from Washington to the east coast for Cady Alpert '98's wedding, or baking a batch of her special chocolate chip cookies & beer bread for the residents of Simpson West, wrapping them up, and mailing them from Seattle to Wellesley after she had graduated in January 1999. I was lucky to share so many meals with Esther, for she was a wonderful cook, and thought that there were few problems which couldn't be solved over a cup of hot chocolate (from scratch!) and some cookies.

She had recently joined the Bothell Latter Day Saints Church, where a service was held for her on Sept 22. In memory of the delight that she took in singing along to music, a number of hymns were sung, including the christmas song "Joy to the World" which she had particularly loved. Esther is survived by her older sister, Beth, younger brother, Tim, parents Margaret and Arthur, and companion Jason.

--Wendy Knox '99

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