Helena Margaret Orkiszewski

Cary, North Carolina – Helena Margaret Orkiszewski, 95, of Cary, North Carolina died peacefully at Transitions LifeCare in Raleigh on July 24, 2025, shortly after being hospitalized for a series of strokes.

Helena was born on August 10, 1929, at the farmstead owned by her parents, Daniel and Catherine Ryan, near the village of Hemmingford in southwestern Quebec, Canada. Although of Irish/Scot descent, with English spoken at home, Helena became fluent in the French spoken in Quebec. She attended Ryan Road elementary school, a one-room Catholic schoolhouse across the road from the Ryan farmstead.

Illness in her early years would not have predicted her living almost 96 years. When she was eight years old Helena was bedridden for a month with pneumonia at a time when antibiotics were not yet available. Two years later she was bedridden with rheumatic fever for six months.

She survived her illnesses, completed high school in Hemmingford, and promptly went to work as a teller at the local bank. She soon moved to a customer service job with Bell Canada in Montreal, but returned to her former job in Hemmingford after her future husband, Joseph Orkiszewski, a GI Bill student at Champlain College in nearby Plattsburgh, New York, was recalled to active duty with the Marine Corps during the Korean War.

Less than six weeks after Joe’s release from the Marines, he and Helena were engaged to be married when he visited Hemmingford over Christmas in 1951 prior to re-entering school at Tulsa University in Oklahoma. They were married a little more than a year and a half later, on August 29, 1953, in Hemmingford, after which they drove to Tulsa in a borrowed De Soto to start their lives together with essentially no possessions and barely enough money to pay the rent.

Within five days of setting up house, Helena was working as a customer service representative for a bank in Tulsa while Joe earned his Bachelor of Science degree in Petroleum Engineering (class of 1954). One year and a newborn (their daughter Maureen) later, Joe had his Master’s degree and the family moved to Baltimore, Maryland, the initial step in a career with Esso (later Exxon).

If there ever was a life suited to someone who was neither fond of farming or cold weather, Helena had found the right path.

Joe’s work took the family from Baltimore, back to Tulsa, followed by a move to Houston, Texas…getting warmer with each new assignment. During that time Helena gave birth to four sons: Michael, Charles, Ralph and Paul. She also was naturalized as a citizen of the United States in Houston, but only after first being naturalized as a Texan.

Less than a year after Helena’s naturalization, the family left the United States to begin residency abroad as part of Joe’s work. Their first stop was Talara, Peru, which did not immediately thrill Helena upon landing there with its tiny airport and remote desert locale, but she soon grew into her role as an oil camp senora and housewife. Unfortunately, a military coup in late 1968 resulted in an expropriation of the oil refinery and required the family to leave Peru.

To the joy of her children (who had never experienced a true winter of ice and snow), the family moved in with Helena’s mother in Hemmingford while Joe worked on getting a new assignment. The small house provided very close quarters, and Helena had to drive the children back and forth to school in Champlain, New York. She discovered that some days the school would be closed due to winter weather conditions after she successfully made the trip, while on the one day that her rented car spun off the road in icy conditions it was open.

In February of 1969 the family moved to Australia, with an initial assignment in Melbourne for two and a half years, followed by a second assignment in Sydney until July 1978. Helena ran the household of seven during that time, all but single-handed, while Joe worked to support it. In 1977 both Helena and her husband suffered significant health issues that required hospitalizations, eventually leading to their return to Houston.

Helena enjoyed her subsequent years in Houston, getting together with friends she and Joe had made on the overseas circuit, enjoying the arts, playing bridge, and basking in the year-round warmth of the climate. She went back to work in banks as her husband’s career ended and the youngest children finished school. She looked after Joe through a lengthy convalescence following his heart bypass surgery. In later years, and after Joe died in 1994, she worked as a hospital volunteer.

When the last of her children left Texas, she relocated to Cary, North Carolina, to be nearer family. She maintained her independence there, living in her own apartment, making new friends, playing bridge, and driving herself to do her shopping until she was 94 (at which time her eyesight made driving difficult).

Helena was preceded in death by her parents, Daniel and Catherine Ryan, her sister, Mae Lambert, and her husband, Joseph Orkiszewski.

She is survived by her daughter, Maureen Orkiszewski, her son Michael Orkiszewski and his wife Deborah, her son Charles Orkiszewski and his wife Teresa, and her sons Ralph Orkiszewski and Paul Orkiszewski. She is also survived by her grandchildren: Tim (and wife Vanessa), Scott, Benjamin (and wife Heather), Peter, Kazia and Tasman, as well as eight great-grandchildren and two great-great-grandchildren.

A visitation for Helena will be held Wednesday, July 30, 2025 from 6 - 8 PM at Brown-Wynne Funeral Home, 200 Southeast Maynard Road, Cary, NC 27511. A funeral mass will occur Thursday, July 31, 2025 from 11:00 AM at St. Michael the Archangel Roman Catholic Church, 804 High House Rd, Cary, NC 27513. In lieu of flowers, memorial donations may be made to the American Heart Association or Transition LifeCare, 250 Hospice Circ., Raleigh, NC 27607