Birgit Frederica Lenderink
1961 - 2024
Birgit Frederica Lenderink
1961 - 2024
Obituary
Guest Book
BORN
1961
DIED
2024
Birgit Lenderink Obituary
Birgit led an amazing life. Having studied at Tulane in New Orleans and Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, she was a life-long learner and Buddhist practitioner. Birgit was also a skilled photographer, having apprenticed with Walter Chappel before studying Book Arts at Naropa. A meditation student of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche of the Kagyu Lineage of Tibetan Buddhism, her creativity and inventiveness were ever-present. A truly genuine human being, Birgit always spoke her truth and followed any dream she felt worthwhile. She was unafraid. After her time in Boulder, Birgit spent time in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Barnet Vermont, and Seattle Washington where she pursued a career as a journeyman carpenter. In 2009, Birgit moved to San Jose, Costa Rica, to care for her ailing mother for the next thirteen years, where she spent the remainder of her life. During this time, Birgit started a women's co-op to manufacture a passive cooking device and perform educational outreach. Having contributed to her community, family, and friends in ways that are difficult to fully describe, Birgit's generosity was immeasurable. She was a true humanitarian.
Please share your wonderful stories about Birgit in the Guestbook here. We would love to hear from all of you. No story is too big or too small. Just like Birgit.
To plant trees in memory, please visit the Sympathy Store.
Leah Lee
December 24, 2025
Leah Lee
December 24, 2025
Birgit was wild, powerful, and surprising. Brilliant, fluent in multiple languages, and the best writer that I´ve ever read. She was extremely talented and creative; working on projects that helped others while simultaneously cooking up her next invention. She could be wickedly funny, laugh loudly, and not afraid to be vulnerable. From Curacao, the Netherlands, Novia Scotia, New Orleans, Colorado, Seattle, Peru, and Costa Rica, Birgit lived so many places, with many different people, and experienced more of life than most dare to imagine.
That one human being could have lived so many lives, seen, said, and done so many different things across the globe, and had such a strong impact on those around her, is astonishing. It´s hard for me to imagine a world in which she no longer exists.
Birgit had the rare ability to experience life with all of her senses.
She transformed my perspective on eating. At Jamjuree Thai on 15th, she described the wide noodles as "sexy noodles." At the sushi restaurant on Broadway, she´d laugh as she carefully placed a piece of raw quail egg sushi into her mouth, afterwards describing in precise detail how it broke apart in her mouth. Then there´s the Indonesian restaurant by Group Health in Redmond. All the staff knew her and the table was always covered in food that hadn´t been ordered. I´ve never seen someone so happy eating crab legs. Sitting there, she´d tell me about her grandmother from Indonesia, her father´s nautical life, and about her parents´ lives in Costa Rica. Birgit flew there for a visit in the late nineties, and I asked her for the mailing address. She told me something like, and I´m not joking, "B. Lenderink: The blue house at the end of the gravel road, about 50 feet past and then left of the elementary school." And it was delivered.
Birgit loved to host house parties, filling her house with many people, great food, fun and music. For her 40th birthday, she hired an opera ensemble from the University of Washington. The sound of them singing the Flower Duet from Lakmé floated up, around, and throughout the house. To this day, when I hear it, I think of that night and Birgit.
Birgit also had the ability to appreciate music she wouldn´t ordinarily listen to. I´ll never forget driving, playing Tupac´s diss track "Hit `Em up," and watching her eyes light up and face widen as she listened to the lyrics. She was not offended.
The Escapades of Birgit, many of which are not suitable for public print, could fill an entire book. Here is but a sampling:
Birgit fought - and won - a federal legal case regarding her right to bring a supposedly "one obscene" piece of art into the country, deemed too controversial for the US government. I´ve seen this photograph of a father and child. I was not offended.
She told me a bit about her time living at the Naropa Center in Colorado. After I had attended a women´s Buddhist retreat in the Mojave Desert, called her to complain about how bland the food was, she just laughed and said "There´s a reason for that. And I know about being a cook!"
You never quite knew what to expect at her home on John Street. One day I showed up and found her jumping up and down on a trampoline she´d set up in the yard.
Then there´s that can of Folgers Coffee she kept on top of the fridge in the kitchen. I asked if I could make coffee and she said "sure, it´s over there." I was about to make some when she told me that they didn´t keep it for drinking purposes, but rather for colonics.
One summer night we sat under a tree, staring out over Lake Union, when suddenly two teenaged boys fell - laughing hysterically - from the tree. They´d been sitting up there quietly smoking marijuana.
I remember how excited she was when she booked her trip to the Amazon for ayahuasca. She told me about the shaman. I´m not quite sure what she expected, but she told me the reality of the experience was that people who had travelled from around the world ended up on "messy" ground for hours. Oh, and then she was robbed of all her belongings in the jungle.
Birgit spent time living in Peru. Somehow, she found out about this special local salt, and she decided to ship tons of it, literally tons, from Peru to Seattle. There was a brief battle with obtaining the proper shipping papers, then another trying to get it off the boat, but once she got it, she asked her friends to store it. I used it once on my driveway, when it snowed. Much of this salt still remains across the Seattle area.
In San Jose, Costa Rica, she fought the condo board twice, victorious each time. First, she refused to have her condo repainted the same color as the rest of the complex. She wanted to choose her own color, and so she did. Second, during the height of Covid, tenants were sharing the front gate entry code with too many delivery drivers. The condo board decided to switch from an access code to obtaining and using biometric data from residents for entry. Birgit wasn´t going to share her biometric data with them, and not surprisingly, she ultimately won.
One of her final projects in Costa Rica, after her mother Angela passed, was to convert Angela´s closet into a working bakery!
Birgit taught me many things about life, but there are two that stand out, one for its wisdom and the other because it´s odd.
After listening to me complain about someone being untrustworthy, she said "It´s not if you can trust someone, it´s knowing what you can trust about them." Then I learned that "in Buddhism it is forbidden for women to throw feces over walls." I had just thrown my dog´s poop over the fence. This invariably led to a discussion about how there are more rules for women in Buddhism than there are for men (not surprising), and then she explained how it probably had something to do with women throwing buckets over walls in densely populated ancient cities.
Birgit also taught me about Dakinis. She recognized and admired the Dakini in others. I believe Birgit was the true embodiment of a Dakini. The internet contains many different descriptions of what a Dakini is, but based upon her practice with Tibetan Buddhism, I find this definition and focus on the positive aspects to be most fitting: "The Dakini Goddess is revered for her wisdom, her power to liberate and transform, and her ability to cut through ignorance and illusion. She is also associated with the movement and flow of energies, serving as a guide for spiritual practice and development. In many traditions, Dakinis are considered to be the guardians of the teachings of the Buddha and are said to lead practitioners on their spiritual journeys."
Creating a long list of complimentary adjectives to describe a loved one who has died is the polite and customary thing to do. In my opinion that´s boring, ordinary. Birgit wasn´t ordinary; she was extraordinary. She lived life in Technicolor.
Jena Kathleen Evans
November 2, 2025
I never met Birgit. I've never met anyone who knew her either. I have a respectful interest in reading the obituaries in the Sunday paper. People tell me it's weird but I find it very inspiring. Throughout my time of reading short snippets of the lives of people written by their closest loved ones, there have only been a handful of which I have come online to read more about. Out of those I have only left words for one other, and that was for a very different reason.
Reading about Birgit has come to move me in a way that not much seems to be able to these days. The mischievousness, compassion, the boldness, the sense of justice, all of those are things that I feel are very valuable, at least in the way that I measure value. Reading about her has reminded me of aspects of myself that have become buried. Sometimes we tell ourselves that when we get the strength we will start to dig out, but without those pieces it makes it even harder and eventually we can forget.
I hope this doesn't offend anybody. But I'm grateful to have known of her. Being reminded that those pieces are there makes me remember the smell of determination, the physical sensation of it. Today is my birthday. I feel that reading about her on this of all days has made a significant impact. I wish all of you incredible love. Thank you for loving her.
Brian Hertzog
August 22, 2025
Ho Rain Forest with Birgit in the 1990´s
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Kathy Sutton Gritz
August 21, 2025
I now remember Birgit from Karme Choling but since that was over 40 years ago all that surfaces in my mind is her bravado, her intelligence & even her voice. Wish I'd known she was in Boulder so that we could reconnect. What a good life she led. I'm so glad that this legacy obit appeared so I could remember her. With love to her family & friends.
annabelle lenderink
August 16, 2025
I am posting this for our sister Cherry:
Birgit was my youngest sister, and arrived in our family when I was 16 and studying in the UK. So I could, technically, have been her mother. To have been able to be Annabelle´s mother (just 18 months older than Birgit) as well would have meant having a baby at the age of 14! Not impossible ... there was almost a generation between the two sets of children in our family. So, my parents had two bonus children while the two oldest `weren´t looking´ (away at boarding school), which was quite shocking for my (Victorian) grandmother and aunt! "Close your eyes and think of England" was how they dealt with the rather distasteful reproduction process!
I was not at home when Birgit set foot on this earth, but I would gradually get to know her during my summer vacations. She was cheeky, a bit of a tomboy and more interested in tools than dolls. She was mischievous, but somehow always got away with it! As she got older, she showed herself to be a determined little soul, never prepared to take NO for an answer! Injustices had to be dealt with, one example being the shocking underpayment of the guard at her condo. She could be stubborn, for all the right reasons; and in the end won her battle against the condo who were demanding her fingerprint be taken on entering, thus setting a precedent. She was daring and brave, and had a good sense of humour; hearing her boisterous laugh at something I had just said was the greatest reward. Oh, how I hate having to use the past tense.
In our family, with sibling age differences and living on an island (Curaçao) while being educated in Europe, we four sisters never lived together for any length of time. Summer holidays were the time to catch up, until the two older sisters left school.Of the flour sisters, Birgit was the most spiritual; I think this came through our paternal grandmother who, born in Indonesia, was also a buddhist. She was wise, too, and often talked me through situations that needed to be solved, but first I wanted her take on them. I remember the day I told her my husband and I were getting divorced. She had been very fond of him, too. This was in 1979, when Birgit was in England and I was in the Netherlands. Without my knowing she immediately booked the ferry from Harwich, UK and arrived in Holland the next day. She had brought along some pot (I think that´s what it was). We puffed at it a bit. I had never been exposed to anything of that nature before, still being a beginner at smoking ordinary cigarettes without inhaling, but I remember we both fell asleep laughing and joking about my soon-to-be ex-husband.
Birgit looked after our mother brilliantly, and the last four years until she died at 102 can´t have been easy and will have taken its toll on her. We used to speak on skype every Sunday, and she was always the one to initiate the call. I´m more of a letter writer and often avoid phones when I can, but I came to love our catch-ups and discussions. Our last call was on a Saturday, which turned out to be only a few hours before she died. She never rang on a Saturday ... I pointed that out, but it was to tell me she had had a pain in her right shoulder and arm, had been seen by a paramedic and told it was muscular and not to worry. Had I known then what I later found out - that women experience heart attacks in a very different way from the way men do - I would have insisted she return to the hospital, which was close by the condo. If only ... I had ... known that.
Annabelle Lenderink
August 11, 2025
Birgit was really a lifelong learner as I found out when trying to sort through her papers a few months ago.
Not only did she complete an apprenticeship with Walter Chappell, the photographer, before her Book Arts degree from Naropa, she also did her apprenticeship as a carpenter and became a fully accredited union member working in that profession. She studied medieval carpentry on Vashon Island and then went on to get her surveying license.
She spent many years living in Buddhist communities in Vermont and Nova Scotia.
In 2009 she moved to San Jose, Costa Rica to take care of our mother who had had a cerebral accident, as it was termed, at age 89.
For the next 13 years Birgit looked after Angela.
The last 3 or 4 years were very hard indeed as Angela became a quadriplegic and had to have a feeding tube.
All the while, B was still studying, becoming interested in sustainable living and growing practices. She got a food safety certificate and started a women´s co-op to manufacture a passive cooking device as well as do educational outreach.
As well as doing a lot of work on the house in which she and Angela lived, putting in a fully accessible bathroom once Angela was no longer mobile.
She also replaced the ceilings which had termite damage and roof joists, redid the kitchen, put in an elevator and converted the upstairs master bedroom into a production kitchen with dumbwaiter. You cannot look anywhere in that house and not see B´s hand at work!
She was my closest sister, only a year and a half younger.
We saw the world differently for the most part but shared our early years in Curacao and boarding school in the Netherlands and were bonded for life.
No matter our differences.
I am forever grateful for the amazing care and dedication Birgit gave to our mother, giving up her life in Seattle to do so.
They had 13 great years together and Mummy´s life was so much the better for it.
Birgit knew how to improve her wellbeing, spirits, quality of life even at the end. When Mummy could hardly even utter a syllable they would sing together and there would be a smile on her face.
Birgit is terribly missed!
Brian Hertzog
July 30, 2025
With Birgit it always felt like anything was possible. Having met Brigit in the 1980s while she was taking book arts classes at Naropa Institute, she immediately believed in me as a person and an artist. Barely knowing me, she took it upon herself to sign me up for one of her bookmaking classes, and it truly changed my life. In fact, Birgit was life-changing in so many ways. Having studied photography with Walter Chappelle before I met her, she taught me everything she knew about the art form and even years later when I moved to San Francisco, visited me and set up an entire dark room for me in my walk-in closet. Birgit introduced me to Buddhism while we were in Boulder and that too was life-changing. Her generosity was far reaching...in more ways than I can count. Birgit knew how to laugh and I will carry that sound with me always.
Leah Lee
July 30, 2025
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