ETNA — More than most, Alexandra Corwin had an eye for detail. 

At Christmas, her friends knew to expect her handmade, hand-painted holiday cards, written in the fluid calligraphy she had perfected since learning it in childhood. If the spacing of the lettering of a public sign looked off, or a comma or apostrophe was out of place, or lacking, she would point it out. 

Alexandra Corwin with her parents Peter and Helen and twin siblings Pat and Pete in an undated photograph. (Family photograph)

When a patient died at the Jack Byrne Center for Palliative and Hospice Care, Corwin, who worked the night shift as a psychiatric nurse at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, volunteered to address the letters of condolence to the families left behind, using her calligraphy. She handwove textiles on her own loom and hand-painted and hand-lettered posters and cards for her family, her own small business, and her community. She sewed Halloween costumes for her two children, and liked to embroider. 

Corwin was so deft that she could walk through a mall and knit at the same time without missing a step, leading passersby to ask how on earth she managed it. She had no difficulty knitting in a darkened movie theater, relying on the muscle memory built over years of handwork, while she watched the film. 

“She was really actively engaged with everything around her visually,” said her daughter Dorothy Hickson, who lives in Washington, D.C. 

Artistic by temperament and training, Corwin grew up in Etna and graduated from Hanover High School. She earned a BFA in textile design from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1964 but later made a career turn into nursing. When she died at 83 on Jan. 8 at the Byrne Center from complications of pneumonia, she knew where she was and it brought her comfort, said her son Ben Hickson and his wife Kat, who live in Tucson, Arizona. 

Alexandra Louise Lihatsh Hickson Corwin had roots in the Upper Valley. Her father Peter Lihatsh’s family emigrated to the U.S. from Minsk — then part of the Russian Empire; now the capital of Belarus — during the Russian Revolution. Lihatsh grew up during the 1920s and ‘30s in Claremont’s sizable Russian-speaking community. He eventually became a co-owner, along with Lou Bressette, of Lou’s Diner in Hanover. 

Corwin’s mother Helen Louise Courtis grew up in an old New England family in Marblehead, Mass., earned a teaching degree and then moved to Claremont to teach home economics. In the vein of a 1940s Hollywood movie, family lore is that she met her future husband in a Claremont soda shop, where he worked.

Corwin grew up with her younger siblings, Pat and Peter, in the Etna house. A younger cousin Dusti Becker recalls that occasionally Corwin was her babysitter. An outdoors kid, Becker didn’t like the idea of playing house or with dolls. Corwin, Becker said, “figured out my psychology. If you sit me down and you get me creating something that I’m into, like animals, I can be really focused and do it.” 

Alexandra Corwin and her husband Jerry Hickson Jr. cut their wedding cake in 1966. (Family photograph)

Which led to Corwin suggesting that her cousin create an alphabet book, starting with Aardvark. Becker, now a conservation ecologist living in Florida, made it to Horse before abandoning the effort. But, she said, “my main memory is just how super kind she was to me. I feel like she enriched my life, and helped me appreciate the art world more than I would have, had I not been taken under her wing as a young kid.”

When Corwin was at RISD, she met Philip Magaldi, who was also in the textile program. They became stalwart, lifelong friends. “Once or twice a week, some weeks not, there were emails back and forth across all those years,” said Magaldi, who lives in Pennsylvania. 

“How many people do you know like that — maybe a couple people from high school and college? But you don’t have dozens of friends like that. Interests change and people move and you may be friends for eight-10-12 years but you may go in different directions. But we kept up with each other,” Magaldi said. 

Corwin kept index cards for almost everyone she ever knew, with their addresses, phone numbers and emails, along with logs of when she had last corresponded with them, said her daughter-in-law Kat Hickson. Elementary school friends, high school and college friends and boyfriends, work colleagues: they were all there.

“I would liken it to the Will Rogers, I-never-met-a man-I didn’t-like kind of thing,” said Ben Hickson.

After Corwin married her first husband Jerry Hickson, they moved to Burlington, Vt., where he worked at IBM and she taught art in elementary schools: pottery, drawing and painting. Their two children were born in the city. Eventually, her husband relocated to Manassas, Virginia, for another IBM job. Their marriage ended in 1978, although they remained good friends. A second marriage, during which time she and her children lived in rural Maryland, also ended in divorce in 1989. 

Alexandra Corwin at her home in Etna, N.H., in 2022. (Family photograph)

During those years, Corwin first worked as a licensed practical nurse in a nursing home in Maryland, and after her second divorce made her way back to New Hampshire. First, Concord, where she became a registered nurse; and then, the old homestead, where she cared for her aging father. (Her mother predeceased him.) She had missed that “wonderful, small town closeness that she had in Etna,” Dorothy Hickson said.

Corwin had been drawn initially to nursing the dying because she wanted to “make it more comfortable for people,” Dorothy Hickson said. But she ended up becoming a psychiatric nurse.

“I think she was always really interested in psychology, and how the brain works, how the body works,” Dorothy said.

Corwin also had a lifelong, and perhaps allied, interest in spirituality and religion. “I think she identified as Christian, but in a very ecumenical way,” Dorothy said.

She was curious about other faiths, studying their theology and drawing their iconography, Ben and Kat Hickson said. As a young woman in the 1970s, she was part of the era’s predilection for astrology, aliens, star signs, and astral projections, they said. She loved Star Trek and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. She made it a point to travel to Egypt, Greece, Peru, Mexico and India, fonts of different civilizations. 

“She was really one of the original earth mothers and way ahead of any of us on things like the environment,” Magaldi said. 

To enter the kitchen of the Etna house, which was essentially the family room, said Becker, was to be bathed in blue. Blue glass, blue walls, blue objects. Corwin favored blue clothing. “It just felt wonderful to come into that space,” Becker said. It had an aura and aesthetic that was Corwin’s. 

An example of Alexandra Corwin’s calligraphy. (Family photograph)

As a mother, Corwin encouraged her daughter to pursue whatever vocation she wanted. “For me, she was a wonderful feminist when I was growing up. We used to get Ms. Magazine at the house, and she bought that record, ‘Free to Be You and Me.’ She never made it seem like I needed to go the traditional route if I didn’t want to,” Dorothy said. 

Corwin had bipolar disorder, her children said. When it began, they aren’t sure but it was diagnosed after she retired around 2013-2014 and exhibited itself more as she aged. Corwin had periods of depression, followed by periods of mania. When she took her medication, she functioned more or less normally.  

“I feel like it’s nice for people to hear that other people were living with it,” Dorothy said. “As long as she stayed on her meds, she was fine.”

When it came to her friends and community, Corwin was loyal, energetic and exuberant. She went on a walking loop through Etna and “took it upon herself to get as many email addresses as she could,” said her friend and neighbor Becky LaHaye. Once accomplished that led to invitations to Saturday night potlucks in Etna’s Trumbull Hall. 

She would hire Magaldi to DJ some of her birthday parties, where he would spin tunes from the 1950s through the 1970s, including the Beatles, Sly and the Family Stone and her favorite, the musician and songwriter Leon Russell. 

Later in life, Corwin would mark significant birthdays by inviting her friends to a party at, for instance, the Etna ball field, and encourage them to take a ride in a hot air balloon she’d hired. The balloon was tethered so it was a short trip up and down, but it still afforded riders a good view of the earth below. She signed up for hot air balloon rides at the annual Quechee balloon festival, floating over rivers, fields and hills.

“What an art God created when you get to see it overhead,” LaHaye said.

Because Corwin had given thought to what it means to die and how she wanted it to happen, she had completed advanced care and end-of-life directives, including a Do Not Resuscitate order. Unlike most people, however, Corwin had written them out calligraphically. 

“It looked like a proclamation,” said Kat Hickson. Several of the doctors and staff at the Byrne Center said they’d never seen anything like it. 

Corwin wanted to die at home. That was not possible, but hospice was the next best alternative, said Ben and Kat Hickson. Before Christmas, 2025, Kat tried to rouse Corwin in hospice by bringing over materials to make the holiday cards that marked her friendships with people over the decades. 

But, for the first time in her life, she could no longer write them, and she died a few weeks later.