Fearless After Losing Her Husband And Child, Phyllis Holmes Found The Strength To Become A Success

Imagine no fear.

You could slip into the pilot’s seat of a small plane, uneasy or not, and learn to fly. You could drive your 6-year-old daughter around Europe, confident of your safety. You could invest your savings in a slack real estate market that you knew, just knew, would take off.

The summer Phyllis Holmes turned 26 she lost, in brief succession, her husband, her 3-year-old son and, in the end, all fear.

Saturday, she’ll mark the 30th anniversary of their deaths with a keynote speech at the Solo Strategies Conference at Spokane Community College.

The Spokane city councilwoman used to be uncomfortable speaking before large groups, but afraid? No. Since that summer she no longer fears the worst can happen.

For her, it already had.

“People used to really envy my mother and what she did,” said Shannon Bednorski, 32. “Then they’d find out about the tragedies and nobody would want to trade places.”

From Spokane Falls Boulevard, it’s always looked as though Holmes had it all.

In Old City Hall, she’s an insurance agent at Principal Financial Group, recognized for sales and long-term planning. She helps people prepare for a long life, an unexpected death or disability.

Across the street at Spokane City Hall, halfway through her first term on the City Council, Holmes is known for her deliberateness and civility.

Political life, she admits, has been frustrating. Awash in paperwork and representing the council on the Spokane County Health Board, Growth Management Steering Committee, Regional Transportation Council, City Employees Health Board, Solid Waste Liaison Board, Plan Commission and Public Works Committee, she often logs 70-hour weeks.

Results seem to come slowly or not at all. For a woman who studiously avoids negative people, city politics can seem like a festival of nay-sayers.

When attacked personally, Holmes visualizes angry words as a boomerang that will return to their source if she steps back. Still, the pettiness can test her patience.

“Sometimes, I listen to people whine and I think, ‘If you knew what real tragedy and loss is,”’ she said.

She found out, of course, that summer long ago.

Tall, tennis-playing Don Holmes faced testicular cancer with all the limitations of 1965: with some therapy and no hope.

Diagnosed just before Christmas, the California English teacher was dead by May. The blind date Holmes had left college to marry was gone. She packed their two preschoolers into her Volkswagen bus and came home to Spokane.

In her parents’ house at 420 W. Montgomery, she grieved and regrouped. She spent hours rocking her children. The July morning she packed to return to their home in Simi Valley, Donnie, 3, and Shannon, 2, asked could they please get in the car? No, she said, it was parked on a hill and she could just see them hitting the parking brake.

“I’m getting my man’s hat,” Donnie announced, pulling it low on his head. “I’m going to Dad.”

Moments later, as Donnie and Shannon watched a neighbor mow the grass, the borrowed lawnmower struck a rock. As the blade broke, an 8-inch slice of steel spun across the air and hit Donnie in the chest, puncturing his heart.

His sister can still see it, “the Kodak moment, frozen right there”: his body lying flat, his mother reaching him, his funeral the day he’d have turned 4.

Later, Holmes would ask her father, should she have let the kids get in the car?

“It would have happened no matter what,” John Stalick said.

Holmes began to believe that perhaps Donnie’s life wasn’t about her. Perhaps it was about her husband Don, about the boy completing his father’s life, about them needing to be together.

She knew she could choose to be a remorseful person or let them go.

She let them go.

From that moment, “my girl and I became a team,” she said.

“It made her determined to do everything for the one child she had left,” said Bob Voris, who married Holmes 10 years later.

Holmes didn’t spoil her daughter. In fact, Voris often thought she was too strict. But Holmes was intent on raising Shannon to be an educated, self-sufficient adult. She did so by being one herself.

Enrolling Shannon in day care, Holmes went to Whitworth College and earned her history degree while teaching in the family’s business school. She returned to California to attend graduate school and teach third-graders in Simi Valley.

For a brief period, she had to sell her furniture to make ends meet. She told no one. But in her “Scarlett O’Hara moment,” Holmes vowed never to be poor again.

On a teacher’s salary, she began building security. She went without gas in the car before dipping into savings, cleaned her own house, did her own car maintenance. She did without a dryer, a color TV, the extras.

“The grieving process is one in which you get better day by day, but a financial problem only gets worse,” said Holmes, who will also teach a class on financial security Saturday.

Starting with her small savings, she invested in an apartment building on Nora (which she still owns). Returning to Spokane each summer, she’d paint, repair and steam clean, always doing what others wouldn’t do themselves.

Each New Year’s Eve, she and Voris wrote out professional and personal goals, and they spent the next 12 months meeting them.

Over the years, Holmes showed an almost uncanny ability to predict the real estate market, investing and reinvesting, eventually in more than $1 million worth of property in four states.

But don’t expect to see any of it.

Holmes still doesn’t use a clothes dryer. Her old car is a 1962 Chrysler, her new one a 1983 Olds. Until three years ago, her flat-roofed Garden Springs area home was, by her own admission, the ugliest in the neighborhood. Holmes and Voris began remodeling the fixer-upper after the living room ceiling began to cave in during a snowstorm.

Although they’d been planning a redesign for nearly a decade, the couple have paced the work only as time and money allow. The result is a lovely, though half-finished, home.

As for the investment property, that’s for the future.

“My goal is to make sure my daughter doesn’t have to take care of me in my old age.” Holmes said.

Of course, her daughter is dying to take care of her. But old lessons linger. Holmes never has dipped into savings, still does jobs others won’t, and didn’t allow a power mower on her property for nearly 20 years.

She has no fear.

Without it, Holmes learned to fly, drove a first-grader around Europe and amassed a real estate portfolio by age 50. She learned to negotiate, speak before large groups and love again.

Holmes met Voris through their work in the California Teachers Education Association, where both served as presidents. When they returned to Spokane in 1977 to live, Voris commuted for years before retiring from teaching.

Twenty years of marriage has blurred their differences, although he is still mellow, she much more driven. Since she was elected to the City Council, he wishes she was less so.

“Spokane is her home, her city. She has a great deal of feeling for it and a great deal of frustration,” said Voris. “I feel like she’s fighting the good fight. But she can’t go to bed at night and turn it loose. She works all night in her head.”

Neighborhood activists say she’s too close to business. Other critics say she’s too close to Bev Numbers and Joel Crosby. Many don’t know her yet.

In a council chamber of talkers, Holmes often says little, following a deliberate plan that is often sketched out before her on a pad. She strives to be positive and compromise and uses considerable humor and compassion to get there.

To escape, she and Voris dance almost weekly, from swing dancing at the Spokane Club to line dancing in North Idaho. They visit with Shannon, now a teacher who is married and raising a young son in California.

Mother and daughter are best friends who share a passion for business, letter writing and bargain hunting. It is frank adoration, eerily like the relationship Holmes had with her own father, a role model invoked frequently in conversation.

Holmes now holds the City Council seat her dad once ran for and did not win. When he died the year Holmes moved back to Spokane, it was a loss she had dreaded for years. Instead of furious grief, she felt a peace and realization.

“When people die, they don’t take it all with them; they leave behind what they said, what they taught and instilled in the others - and isn’t that what a person is?”

As she speaks, her 5-year-old grandson Christopher plays on the balcony above. At one point, a newly pulled tooth falls from his hand to the floor below.

His mother, Shannon, inhales sharply. She does not like heights. But since that summer long ago, she’s not been afraid of anything either.

“I know you can never stop the inevitable,” said Shannon Bednorski, grabbing her mother’s hand and looking at her. “But I’ll always have me and I’ll always have you and everything will be OK.”

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: PREVIEW Solo Strategies, a conference for the widowed, will be April 28-29 at the Lair Conference Center, Spokane Community College. Friday events include a banquet at 5 p.m. and activities from dancing to bridge to massage. Saturday events begin at 8 a.m., and include the keynote address and 19 workshops on such topics as transition, grief, finances, dating and living alone. A professional track will also be offered. Cost: $10 for the widowed, $15 for others, $45 for professionals. Register by Monday for Friday’s banquet ($11) and Saturday’s lunch ($7). For more information: Call 484-8636 or 1-800-344-SOLO. Scholarships, day care and transportation are available.