My sister Peny and the Challenger, two fine lives lost

Peny Jil Cosgriffe Hayes was a beautiful and talented sister who died 27 years ago this week. 

REMEMBERING A LIFE WELL-LIVED:BLITHE, BEAUTIFUL SPIRIT PENY

Editor's Note: This essay, by Christene Meyers, was published in 2013 and has appeared in various versions in newspapers and magazines. It was reviewed in 2026 and is reprinted by request, to honor Peny's Oct. 15 birthday

TWENTY-SEVEN years ago, the world was mourning the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster.

Our family was saying good-bye to our beloved Peny Jil, my sister, who was enduring the last few days of a nine-month battle with leukemia.

Space shuttle Challenger explodes in a fiery cloud against a dark sky, leaving white smoke trails and horrified witnesses watching below.

I was on my way from Montana to University of California Medical Center in San Francisco, on one of 25 flights to see sis since her diagnosis on a dark dawn, April 5, 1985. It was the morning of Jan. 28, 1986, and I’d raced into an airport lounge in Salt Lake City to watch the Challenger launch. Waiting for my connection, I grabbed a cup of coffee and headed for the TV. I watched in disbelief as the shuttle broke apart 73 seconds into flight. Soon, everyone knew that all seven crew members had perished. I’ll never forget the anguished faces of Christa McAuliffe’s parents, Ed and Grace, as their joy turned to horror.

"Evita" was the last pay the sisters saw together. Theater was a tradition.

FOR MY family, it was sorrow upon sorrow.

Losing My Sister Peny and Christa is Still Traumatic for the Families

My father and mother, Richard and Ellen, were experiencing their own grief as the doctors in San Francisco told them that morning that Peny would not survive. The ardors of chemotherapy, radiation and failed bone marrow transplant had weakened her beyond recovery. We had been so hopeful  – battling the odds – conferring with doctors, reading everything, hoping for a miracle. She slipped into a coma the night before and although I had just left San Francisco, hope in my heart, I headed back to say good-bye.

Christa McAuliffe left the planet the same weekend as did Peny, 27  years ago during space shuttle Challenger's launch.

PENY WAS BORN in 1949. Christa was born in 1948. They would have been friends. Both were gregarious, over-achieving, loving, fine teachers, intrepid adventurers, with daring, charisma and humor. Christa became famous as the first teacher to train for a space flight. Peny was a ground-breaker, too.

She left Montana to live in a commune in northern California. There she met Jim Hayes, a New Yorker who left a successful law firm for a simpler life. They established a porcelain pottery studio and had two delightful children, Amarylla and James. Peny taught aerobics, grew vegetables, was an accomplished cook, singer and seamstress and made black berry pies instead of birthday cakes. She was a fine swimmer, sly prankster and never missed an opportunity to hear a jazz concert or take in a play.

Peny, on mother Ellen Cosgriffe's lap, and Cookie, 1952, right. The sisters performed and dressed alike until their late teens.

As children, she and I were known as Cookie and Peny and we toured a song-and-dance act to Montana towns, performing for many functions, including a gubernatorial inaugural. Our musical mother dressed us like twins until we were in our teens. In our last years together, we began a tradition of sister weekends in San Francisco, seeing plays, going to clubs, ordering room service at midnight. The Hayes family visited Montana and we met in Hawaii when the kids were young. Our last play together was “Evita” and I think of Peny every time I hear “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina.” I wonder if Christa’s sister, Betsy, thinks of  Christa every day. Even after 27 years, I’ll bet she does.

Cookie, left, baby Amarylla and Peny sunbathing on Kaanapali Beach, Maui, in spring of 1974. 

PENY JIL Cosgriffe Hayes had gorgeous red hair and a lilting soprano voice. She learned to play the viola in two days. She loved to  dance and stopped the show with her passionate movements. She also mastered piano, guitar, trombone and flute. In her last weeks, she played her flute in the cancer ward, greeting other patients, her instrument in one hand and her portable IV in the other. She was also an accomplished artist and was building a successful porcelain business with her husband Jim when disease struck.

Both Peny and Christa were married happily and had small children. Christa’s children, Scott and Caroline, were nine and six when they lost their mother. Peny’s children, Amarylla and James, were twelve and nine. I am devoted to my niece and nephew and follow their lives with pride. I wonder how Christa’s kids are, how their lives have gone, what they’ve become.

From left, sisters Cookie, Olivia and Misha, with their niece Amarylla, Peny's only daughter, of whom she was proud.  

I KNOW Christa would be proud and I’m certain Peny would be pleased that her children have full, happy lives. She loved both town and country and her kids have many of her wonderful traits – one each living in the two worlds she loved. James is the country boy, settled in rural northern California where he grows and markets organic vegetables and eye-popping flowers. Amarylla lives in the Bay Area where she is taking time off from her marketing and catering career to be a busy mom. Both have loving partners. I gave each couple a holiday gift of a video my partner put on a DVD. In it, their mother sings a leading part in a Christmas cantata in 1984.

That long-ago rehearsal is one of the few remnants we have of Peny in action, along with a funny tennis match with her husband Jim, filmed at Flathead Lake in Montana during the summer of 1983. My late husband, Bruce, provides a hilarious commentary for the match, the youngsters’ antics in the lake and the picnic we shared later in the day.

Peny, left, and Cookie, sing a holiday song.

ONE OF MY late mother’s favorite Cookie-Peny stories was of a holiday performance Peny and I gave in the Congregational Church in Columbus, Montana, in the early 1950s. We were singing “The Lord’s Prayer,” with our grandmother Olive accompanying us on the organ. I was four; Peny was three, “Irish twins,” as we were known. When Peny began fidgeting with the brass rings on the velvet curtain framing the altar, I slapped her hand. She slapped me back. The fight continued, all without our missing a note and offering a teeth-clenching “amen.” The congregation was in hysterics and the minister was laughing so hard he had to remove his glasses.

I CELEBRATE my sister’s rich but brief life and her robust 36 years on the planet. Christa had only a year longer. How much more could these two wonders have accomplished had they lived? How I wish Peny were here with me now, for I’ve recently settled in California. We would see even more of one another, enjoy nightlife, museums, jazz and plays. She would cherish her grown children, and her adorable grandson. We’d meet again at the Fairmont or St. Francis to toast with a crisp Sauvignon Blanc and order clam chowder at midnight.

WHAT I KNOW about loss is that it becomes a permanent part of our lives. Each fallen loved one holds a sacred place in our heart and history. Our affection never changes. Our sadness in their leaving never abates. But slowly, miraculously, the debilitating sorrow gives way to wistful thanks. Thanks for their having been here. For since their existence has altered ours, they are forever with us.