Heather Morris

A celebration of life TBA for April

Heather Morris, 70

April 17, 1954 - March 22, 2025

Blessed are the meek, the merciful, the pure of heart. Blessed was everyone fortunate enough to have loved, and be loved by, Heather Morris - certainly one of the kindest, most honest, generous and brightest spirits on God’s green Earth.

“Though not as green as it should be,” Heather might have shot back, denying she was anything special. Then, as she did, she’d write yet another one of an untold number of checks to Green Peace or the Sierra Club, the Nature Conservancy, ASPCA or Heffer International, because that’s what caring people do.

It’s what Heather did.

On March 22, 2025, Heather died at peace, asleep and too young, in Leawood, Kansas, one month shy of her 71st birthday, after six years of gradual decline from early Alzheimer’s disease.

Dementia took much from Heather. But never her smile or the core of who she was. Never the gentle love that glowed in her blue eyes particularly when she saw her nephew, Aidan, brushing his cheek with her elegant fingers, or her sister, Tamara, or brother-in-law, Eric, who teased her because it made her laugh.

Heather loved to laugh.

It couldn’t take away the truth of who she was, or the dynamic life she lived, although she’d never think of boasting. Blonde hair dipping toward her guitar, she had a voice like Joni Mitchell’s. Music meant everything to her.

On March 1,1969, just short of her 15th birthday, she was at the rear of the Dinner Key Auditorium in Miami, Florida, when on stage, Jim Morrison, lead singer of the “Light My Fire” Doors reportedly pulled out little Jim (debate on this) and was arrested for indecency.

Heather insists she was too far from the stage to see it happen. Believe her. She would never lie. But she was there. Why, at age 14, she was there at all, unaccompanied, speaks to the sweep of her life, born in the black-list 1950s and raised in the 1960s.

Her mother, Ina Logan (d. 2020) was a farm girl from Country Antrim, Northern Ireland. Her father, Robert Morris, (d. 1996), in his second marriage,had been a Protestant chaplain, later a psychologist, whose conservative church board found his ideas so radical that he was accused of being a communist. The couple, with Ina 8 months pregnant, fled the U.S.

Heather was born in England - fragile, with a hip dysplasia so severe, she was placed in a “frog cast” and moved about on a rolling scooter built by her father because she couldn’t crawl. Surgical scars railroaded the length of one leg. She lived in pain for decades, until better medicine arrived.

Heather never complained.

The family of three eventually moved back to Pittsburgh, Pa. Heather didn’t complain when - at age 9, with a new baby sister, Tamara, age 1 - her parents suggested that Heather might love to move back to England on her own and attend boarding school. It’s a move that continues to bewilder family that remembers.

It was the ‘60s. “It was a different time,” Ina used to say.

A tender-heart, Heather flew across the ocean with a girlhood friend entering the same school. From age 9 to 12, she attended Summerhill Academy in Bristol, a free-spirit, non-traditional school considered experimental even for the 1960s. Hours were spent reading in her den mother’s room avoiding the wild boys in the corridors. Typical of Heather, she saw only the best in everyone.

At holidays, she had family in County Down, Northern Ireland, - Tom and Auntie Bette, who, with no children of their own, became her second parents, in their beautiful home with a pristine English garden along the golf course on the waters of Belfast Lough.

She was witness to “The Troubles,” the men with guns in Belfast in the battle between north and south. She found love and silly fun with her Irish family, Aunties Portia and Margaret, Uncle Britain and cousins Steven, Philip, Michael and Ronnie, who’d have “a crack” at her expense.

Heather loved to be silly. She danced in the living room, to Etta James, the Rolling Stones.

At 12, she returned to the states, to Miami and, for a stint, to a villa in Puerto Rico, where Heather learned advanced math sitting on a bar stool at the beach across the street. Back to England, at 16, for high school. Back to the states - parents separated, mom at the Jersey shore, dad in Miami - she studied voice at Upsala College in New Jersey.

If Heather even quietly expressed a single regret, it was that she didn’t stay when her voice was at its purest. Instead, after a year, she returned to Bristol and Summerhill, but this time to work as the den mother to 20 untamed 4-year-olds.

When she returned home at age 21, it was to a little sister who adored her. For the rest of their lives - Heather, Tamara and their mom; like earth,wind and fire - became inseparable elements in each other’s lives.

Teas, and sumptuous meals, champagne toasts at every occasion. Sitting and talking and talking and laughing.

Heather graduated Montclair University, with a degree in communications. She had a job as an executive assistant. She had many devoted friends and fun, dancing into the wee hours at New Jersey’s Dirt Club.

She could be stubborn, immovable in her ethics. The joke was that if someone asked Heather to hold a dollar, they could come back 40 years later and she'd have the same dollar.

"But, Heath, I'm broke. I'll pay it back."

"Sorry, that's so-and-so's dollar."

In her liberal politics, Heather lent her upraised voice and upraised fist to causes of social justice. In a coincidence that would only come to light many years later, Heather lived in Montclair across the street from a young man that one day would move to Kansas City and become her sister’s husband.

Boyfriends and love came. She chose not to marry. She had no children. But, in 1996, when she heard that her little sister was having a son, she quit her job, picked up her life and moved to Kansas City. She was in the room in November 1997, on the Thanksgiving morning that Aidan was born.

She stayed a Kansas Citian until the day she died.

She took a position at the University of Missouri, Kansas City as the assistant to the dean of the Miller Nichols Library, where she retired after 20 years.

As she did with her sister, she enveloped her nephew in limitless warmth and support. There, on his floor, playing games. There at his kindergarten events. There, through middle school and high school and cheering him on through college, watching him grow into a man and professional guitarist.

Aidan and his Auntie Heather: a pair for a lifetime.

Then, when her own mother, having moved to Kansas City, began to suffer dementia, Heather was there, too. Selfless, unbounded, exhausting herself beyond all reason - so much so that, by the time her mother passed, Heather, too, had begun to show early symptoms.

Heather passed in a room that, each morning, streamed with sunlight. Reminders of all that brought her joy were around her. Colorful art, music, photos of her family.

In her ear, her sister telling her, she was the best sister, the best daughter, the best auntie, the best friend that anyone could ever have asked for.

It was spring. Birds sang outside her room.

Heather leaves behind her sister, Tamara Morris, brother-in-law Eric Adler, nephew Aidan Aidan, half-brother Jeff Morris, niece Katie Morris Askew and family, nephew Eddie Morris and family, cousins from Northern Ireland, Steven Totten, Ronnie Smith and Michael Smith, cousins Pat (Nick) Vannicolo and family, and cousin Alan Calvert.

A celebration of life TBA for April.