Remembering Mary Helen

Mary Helen Eggenberger

Mary Helen, beloved friend and companion on the Way, disciple of Mother and Sri Aurobindo, left this beautiful and hallowed earth she so cherished at 7:30 a.m. on February 7, 2002, a day before her 58th birthday. 

Mary Helen read about Mother and Sri Aurobindo when she was just out of her teens and, as a young woman at the age of 22, she sent her photo to Mother and received Her blessings to come and live in the Ashram. She traveled with a girl friend to India, taking with her a few belongings and leaving everything else to meet Mother in August of 1966. She returned to the Ashram in 1968 for the inauguration of Auroville and worked for some months in the Auroville Information and Design office opposite the Ashram main complex. After returning to the U.S. for a few years she once again came to the Ashram in 1971 later moving to Auroville with Mother’s blessings where she worked in the Matrimandir Gardens for 10 years, collecting and studying numerous plant species that she help collect and propagate. She also began one of Auroville’s first journals, Progress, chronicling the development of the pioneer communities in those early years. 

She was diagnosed with late-stage ovarian cancer in 1998 and underwent extensive exploratory surgery. The cancer was so widespread, however, that no removal was possible surgically. She was given three weeks to live. Determined, as the Mother’s child, to conquer this disease on the life plane or proceed as far as possible towards its elimination with her guru’s ever-present help, she concentrated her work on the body’s cells, calling in the Light while exploring both traditional therapies and a host of alternative protocols. She slept each night with blessings packets Mother gave her and a packet of sand from the inner chamber of the Samadhi under her pillow.

She knew the Ashram to be her spiritual home and considered the Patels, Lilou, Maniben, Pushpa and Jayantibhai her closest family but cherished her friendships with many Ashramites and Aurovilians. Her calm and gentle demeanor, her sweet and warm disposition, her generosity and good will towards all masked a warrior soul on the path of the Integral Yoga. 

Photographer, writer, horticulturist and artist, she did many of the line drawings for the first major revision of Flowers and Their Messages, the compilation of the spiritual significances of flowers given by The Mother. She is lovingly remembered by plantsmen for her research on tropical plants, gained primarily from her years of work in the first stages of the Matrimandir Gardens. Together with her husband she authored The Handbook on Plumeria Culture as well as  The Handbook on Oleanders. In tribute she has been honored by having three flowers named for her, Bougainvillea ‘Mary Helen’ by John Lucas, President of the Bougainvillea Society of America and Phlox ‘Mary Helen’ by Richard Saul of Saul Nurseries, Atlanta, Georgia and a now famous plumeria, Mary Helen Eggenberger by Jim Little of Hawaii.   In 2001 she was also extended the honor of being made a lifetime member of the Southern California Plumeria Society. After her passing many disciples of Mother and Sri Aurobindo wrote tributes in her honour,

She devoted her last few years to an immersion in Sri Aurobindo’s epic poem, Savitri, working with Narad intensively on a dictionary of words and terms in Savitri, entitled Lexicon of an Infinite Mind, and reading the poem aloud each night before sleep.  

She is survived by her husband, Narad, her sister, Sue Bailey, and her daughter, Chali, an Aurovilian who help found and now directs the Center for Further Learning, now Future School, preparing teenage students for entry level accreditation into colleges and universities in Europe and the U.S., and two grandchildren, Aaron and Dylan. 

In 1972 Mother wrote to her: “I am with you, fear not.”